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The thing lashes at me, faster now, as if it’s learning. Adapting back. One claw catches my ribs—I feel the tear—but I spin with it, redirect the motion, and drop low, slashing behind its knee where Caspian’s whip already burned through scale.

“Now!” I shout.

And Luna moves.

Her power floods the vault—not fire, not fury.

Truth.

She burnsreal.

And when her hands rise, the dragonpauses—not because it fears her, but because itknows her.Like she’s part of the pattern. Like she was written into the spell that holds it.

She speaks once—words I don’t understand.

But the vaultlistens.The dragon collapses with a roar that cracks the ceiling. Its body writhes, not dying—butreturning.Becomingsomething else.The hoard sucks inward. The pedestal lights. And a pillar reveals itself—tall, gleaming, carved in old runes. Our way out.

I exhale. Limp to Luna’s side.

“Remind me,” I pant, “next time we fight an ancient cursed dragon… can I take a napfirst?”

She looks at me like she already knows what I said to her during the pause. Which is terrifying. And unfair. And maybe—just maybe—I meant every word.

The silence after a dragon dies is different from the kind that follows war or grief. It’s not quiet—it’scharged. Like something bigger is breathing beneath the bones of this place, waiting for us to remember we haven’t won anything yet.

The floor doesn’t collapse. The ceiling doesn’t rain down stone and dramatic metaphor. Instead, the pedestal in the center of the chamber splits with surgical precision, light spilling from the wound in clean, deliberate lines that form a doorway. Not a passage. Not a tunnel. Areveal.

She moves like the ground won’t dare break under her weight, and the rest of us—me, Riven, Silas, even Ambrose—we follow because that’s what wedo. She burns forward, and we trail after her like smoke.

The corridor beyond the door is narrow, but it breathes. The walls pulse faintly with runes that glow dull gold and sick white, a rhythm that matches something inside my chest I don’t like admitting exists. The air is colder here, not from temperature, but fromexpectation. It presses close. Makes you sweat under your armor. Makes your thoughts louder than they should be.

When we reach the end of the corridor, the room opens, and for the first time since entering this cursed Keep, I’m not sarcastic. I’m not tired. I’m juststopped. It’s enormous—cathedral sized, but nothing religious has ever bled like this. The ceiling rises into pure black, so high it feels like we’re inside the ribcage of something titanic. The walls are ribbed with petrified roots and glowing mineral veins that shimmer faintly with old magic. The air hums with power—not chaotic, not divine.Fated.

But it’s the pillars that paralyze us.

There are hundreds of them. Maybe more. Perfectly spaced, perfectly upright, all pulsing with light that isn’t consistent. Some throb like heartbeats, others flicker like stars, a few ripple like disturbed water. Each one carved from a different material—some natural, some impossible. Obsidian etched with moving veins. Marble that seems to breathe. Crystal laced with gold and something darker beneath the surface that doesn’t reflect light—it absorbs it.

And then they start to glow.

All of them.

Every single pillar responds the second Luna crosses the threshold into the room. They don’t react to us—not to Riven or Lucien or Orin, not even to Silas, who says he once made out with a cursed artifact just to see if he could. No—this reaction is hers. They light forher.

She steps like she knows she’s walking into the center of something no one else was ever meant to see. One pillar flares. Then another. And another. The pattern spreads, and suddenly the room isn’t lit by a single source, but by a hundred different truths. Flickering futures, bleeding histories, reflections of possibilities so sharp they cut just to look at.

I want to say something clever, something biting. Anything to kill the pressure that’s growing in the pit of my spine. But the words stay lodged behind my teeth. Maybe because I know, deep down, this is the part where we stop being her protectors and start being her witnesses.

Still, I step up beside her, just close enough to feel the heat that’s always poured off her skin in waves. I tilt my head toward hers, slow enough not to startle her. The light from the nearest pillar paints her jaw in gold, and I hate how much I want to touch it.

So I do what I always do when I can’t handle the weight of what I feel.

I say something stupid.

Leaning in, I murmur under my breath, just loud enough for her to hear, “You know, if this ends in an ancient trial that demands a sacrifice, Iamwilling to offer myself… as long as I’m allowed to climax dramatically at your feet.”

Her breath catches.

She doesn’t turn to look at me, but I see the corner of her mouth twitch. Not a smile. Not quite. But something alive.