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She's right.

I would. I always do.

Elias is staring at the clone guts smeared on the threshold, muttering, “At least they died pretty.”

Silas is humming the funeral dirge he wrote for himself three years ago, off-key.

And Luna steps forward again.

I follow.

Because none of us can help it now.

The Warden’s Keep waits. And it doesn’t care how many of us are real. The Keep opens like a throat. Wide. Gaping. Lined in polished obsidian that’s too smooth to be stone and too dark to reflect anything but the wrong pieces of us.

It doesn’tlooklike a ruin. Not anymore. Not the way I remember it—half-collapsed under the weight of the war, vines strangling its spires, rot seeping through the brick like the whole place had bled out centuries before we arrived. No. This one’s been rebuilt. Rewritten.

Branwen’s version is too perfect.

The walls shimmer faintly, not with light, but with memory—half-there illusions that flutter along the stone like dying moths. I watch one flicker just above Luna’s shoulder. A boy, maybetwelve, stitched together from shadow and pale light, running down a spiral staircase that no longer exists.

I blink.

He’s gone.

Orin steps ahead of us, deliberate. Silent. Not leading. Just…reading.This place is speaking, and he’s the only one fluent enough to keep up.

The corridor narrows as we move forward, walls curving in unnatural symmetry. Every inch of it is etched with patterns too intricate to be decorative. Spells. Old ones. The kind that don’t trigger with proximity—but withemotion.I recognize the structure, the slant of the glyphs along the seams of the floor.

Riven does too. He angles closer to the wall, fingers tracing the edges without touching.

“This isn’t containment,” he murmurs. “It’s ritual.”

I nod once, slowly. “A recall loop. She rebuilt the Keep as a memory anchor.”

Orin’s voice cuts in, calm and even. “Not just memory. Binding. She didn’t recreate the Keep to preserve it. She remade it totrapit.”

“Trapwhat?” Elias asks, too loudly.

The answer is obvious.

Herself.

Her power.

Her guilt.

I glance at Luna. She’s watching the path ahead with that stillness she gets when she’s calculating risk, cataloguing every detail so she can shoulder the burden before anyone else can. Her expression is quiet, but her magic brushes mine like static—unsteady, volatile, alive.

She steps over the next seam in the floor, and the corridor changes.

Subtle.

The walls stretch. The airshifts.The illusion of space is clever. It makes you believe you’re walking straight, but the ground curves. We’re already descending. I can feel it in my calves, the subtle pull of gravity down, down,down.

The torches flicker—but not with fire. They burn with something cold. A silver flame that doesn’t warm or glow, butconsumes.As we pass them, they vanish one by one, snuffed out by our presence.

Or welcomed.