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She’s looking at Ambrose, because Ambrose has always been the one who never bent, never gave her the reaction she wanted. And it’s killing her now, because even here, facing her, Ambrose looks amused.

"You keep saying you’re already dead," Ambrose says, voice quiet but lethal. "But you’re still here."

He takes a step closer, smile shifting—less cruel now, more surgical.

"And that’s your mistake. Dead things don’t bleed."

Branwen's eyes narrow, the faintest twitch at the corner of her mouth.

"If we drag Lucien and Orin out of here, you’ll still come?" Ambrose asks, tone almost conversational.

Her smile returns, sharp and hollow. "Wherever you run, I’ll follow."

Ambrose’s voice drops to something cold, something that makes the back of my neck prickle. "Good."

He shifts, hands loose at his sides, like he’s not about to dismantle her with words alone.

"Because when this is done," he says, "you’ll wish you’d stayed dead."

Branwen’s lips curve like she’s about to laugh again—but there’s a fracture in her eyes now. She knows. She knows she’s losing, even if she hasn’t figured out how yet.

And I swear, in that moment, the whole cathedral leans in, waiting to see who is going to start the fire.

The thing is, she can die.

That’s the part no one’s said aloud—but I can feel it sitting heavy in the bones of this place, humming in the walls like a secret begging to be spoken. Branwen's voice, her theatrics, her hollow smile—all of it is meant to distract us from the truth.

Behind her throne, tucked in the shadows like a monument to every fucked-up thing she’s done, stands the pillar. Identical to the one in our world, obsidian marbled with veins of silver light, like something divine and rotten at once. A fracture line through reality. It isn’t just stone. It’s her tether, her anchor, her only way to keep existing here. If we destroy that, she doesn’t crawl out of this place again.

She’ll unravel. Be erased.

She knows it, too.

It’s there in the way her shoulders stiffen every time one of us glances past her throne. She doesn’t want us to look at it too long. Doesn’t want us to remember.

But it’s not that simple.

Lucien and Orin stand at her flanks like sentinels, both of them statuesque, silent, but it’s more than just standing guard. Their veins glow faintly, black threaded with gold, pulsing in rhythm with the pillar. I’ve seen that look before—in the mirror, when I was hers.

Branwen isn’t just feeding off them. She’s using them to hold that thing in place, to keep herself stitched into this dead, hollow realm.

I glance sideways and catch Riven’s jaw tight, his gaze darting between Orin and the pillar like he’s already calculating how hard it’ll be to cut them loose without tearing himself open. Silas is fidgeting, for once not saying a damn word. Elias’ expression is stone-cold but his fingers twitch, ready to slow time if he has to.

My skin crawls. Because I know exactly how deep she’s in them. I know how she layered herself inside their bones. And I know what will happen the second they get too close to Luna.

They’ll snap.

The way I snapped.

The way I broke, until Luna’s magic shoved all of Branwen’s rot out of me.

Branwen’s voice slices back through the heavy silence. "I see you looking, Caspian." Her smile is a knife. "Thinking you’ve finally figured it out. But you’re too late. You’ll never reach it."

Ambrose steps forward again, lazy and lethal. "You’ve never been good at math, Branwen. There are six of us. Three of you."

Her smile widens like he’s offered her the punchline to a joke. "You think numbers matter?" She laughs, and the sound echoes like a curse. "You think they’ll lift their blades against me?"

Her gaze flicks to Lucien, then Orin, softening for just a heartbeat. "They’d tear themselves apart first."