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“Ah,” she breathes, stepping close again. Too close. “But Iam.”
Her palm presses to my chest—not to soothe. To brand. “I didn’t die. Ican’tdie.”
“You should’ve,” I snarl.
She only smiles wider. “Because ofthis.” She turns, sweeping her arm out to the blackened archway behind her.
It’s not just a room. It’s a sanctum. A vault carved into the marrow of this cursed place. And at the center of it—rising from cracked obsidian—is a pillar. The same shape as the one in our world, but wrong. Twisted. The runes carved into its base pulse with sluggish crimson light, like a dying heartbeat that never actually stops.
“The original,” Branwen whispers, reverent now. “The first tether. The one that holds everything together. Your world. Mine. The Hollow. The Veil. The Binder.” She lifts her chin. “Me.”
I step forward, and the bond tightens again, yanking like a collar choking me into stillness.
She doesn’t miss it. “You feel it, don’t you?” Her voice lowers, intimate now. “This pillar containsyou.All of you. The sins you were. The gods you once were. It seals you into your domains. Into your limits. As long as it stands, I remain alive.”
My voice scrapes out of me. “Then I’ll tear it down.”
Branwen’s laugh is a melody of madness. “Oh, Lucien,” she says, leaning in until her lips nearly brush my jaw. “You can’t. No one can. It was made from me. My essence. My power. My blood is in its stone. Iamthe pillar. I am the place. And you are mine.”
The bond coils. My body reacts before my mind can stop it. One knee to the floor, palm braced, jaw locked against the instinct to obey her.
She kneels with me, amusement gleaming like oil in her eyes.
“You’ll go back to them soon,” she whispers. “You’ll smile. You’ll lie. You’ll lead. But you’ll still be mine. And you’ll remember”—her hand presses to my throat, not choking, justclaiming—“you’ll remember every second that you didn’t stop me.”
Then she’s gone.
The bond releases. My body trembles, every muscle still screaming to move, to fight, to destroy.
I don’t stand right away. I stare at the pillar. At the slow, endless pulse beneath the stone. And I realize something colder than hate. She didn’t make that thing just to bind us. She made it tooutlastus.
I haven’t seen Caspian since we got here.
Not since Branwen ripped the map out of our hands, pulled us across planes, and spat us out inside her corrupted little kingdom of rot and whispers. Not since Orin and I let ourselves be dragged into this place like knives sheathed in bone, all for a gamble we haven’t seen a return on.
Ambrose is gone—hopefullygone. She said she let him go, but Branwen’s lips are carved out of lies, and I wouldn’t put it past her to keep him close just to gut me with it later.
But Caspian—
He steps out of the far hall, slow and deliberate, like each footfall has to remember how to land. For a heartbeat I think it isn’t him. The posture’s wrong. The confidence is gutted. Shoulders bowed, skin too pale, like something crawled under it and hollowed him out from the inside. His eyes—those pretty fucking eyes that used to flirt with everyone just to watch them squirm—are flat. Like he’s still not sure if what he’s seeing is real.
He looks like shit.
My heart does something traitorous in my chest.
He blinks at me, then at Orin behind me, and then his gaze drops to the floor. “You made it,” he says, voice rasped like he’s been screaming or swallowing glass.
I close the distance between us in four strides and stop just short of grabbing him.
“Where the fuck have you been?” My voice cuts the air between us.
His laugh isn’t a laugh. It’s just a sound. Bitter. Fractured.
“Where haven’t I been?” he answers.
He lifts a hand, and I see it tremble before he hides it behind his back. There’s blood crusted under his fingernails. Faint bruising around his jaw. And worse, a still-glowing thread of magic snaking along his wrist like a leash that never quite releases.
“Branwen?” I ask, though it’s not a question. It's a diagnosis.