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He claps his hands together, a dramatic flourish that makes exactly no sense, and then his expression shifts. The mischief fades. A rare flicker of focus cuts through him like a blade. Magic pulses sharp from his chest, spreading outward in a shimmer of fractured light.

Two copies of him blink into existence. Almost identical. A little too fluid in the joints, a little too smooth in the movement. The real Silas winces like looking at himself too long gives him secondhand embarrassment.

“There,” he mutters. “Two of me. But don’t look at them too long. They start getting… ideas.”

Elias peers at one of the clones like it might bite. “They ever try to hook up with each other?”

“Once,” Silas mutters. “It was weird. And beautiful. And—honestly, I don’t want to talk about it.”

Luna’s strangled cough tells me she’s trying very hard not to picture that. Which means she already did.

Even more interesting.

Orin’s watching the whole exchange with that quiet, deliberate stillness that always means he’s thinking seven steps ahead. Probably debating whether this is the stupidest plan we’ve ever had—or just the most inevitable.

He glances toward the gate, the keep looming like a corpse dressed in regalia.

“If they trigger anything,” Orin says calmly, “we’ll know the place is still alive.”

The clones start walking. Perfect gait. Perfect posture. The smile’s too smooth, though. Too symmetrical.

Not real. Not like him.

The trees shift. The path to the gate yawns open just enough to swallow them whole. They vanish into the dark like they were made for it.

We wait. Then, faint and distant—A scream. One of the clones. Then another. Wet. Muffled. The sound of flesh folding wrong. And then—nothing.

Silas tilts his head. “Well. That’s… not promising.”

Elias clears his throat. “On a scale from ‘mildly ominous’ to ‘guaranteed death,’ where would you rank that?”

Lucien doesn’t answer. He’s already drawing his blade.

But Luna shifts. Not afraid. Not retreating. She steps forward. Not reckless.Willing.And that changes everything. Because I know what that look means. Not defiance.

Sacrifice.

I move beside her before I can think better of it. She doesn’t flinch when I speak low at her side, the words sharp enough to cut between the rest of them.

“You planning on walking in first, darling?”

Her eyes flick toward mine. Steady. Dark.

“I’m not planning anything,” she says.

Which is exactly the problem.

“You do realize,” I murmur, “that sending clones in first was thesanepart of the plan, yes?”

“Then it was doomed from the start,” she replies, and there's something dry in it. Bone-deep.

I almost smile.

“You should wait until the rest of us go in,” I say instead. “Let one of us die first.”

Her mouth curves. It isn’t a smile either. Just a wound that looks like one.

“No,” she says softly. “You’d survive it. And you’d never let me forget that you did.”