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Luna’s hand lifts again—not in surrender, not in magic. It’s the kind of movement you make when you’re calming a horse you know can kill you, but you still need it to carry you through the fire.

“We’re only here to find the pillar,” she says again, her voice dipping low now. Something intimate in the way she speaks to him, like the words are just for the dragon, just for the room. “Take your gold. Take your hoard. We don’t need it. We just need to get out.”

For a beat, the vault stills. The gold settles. Even the dragon seems to breathe slower.

Then it tilts its head, eyes narrowing, and murmurs, almost tender—

“Then die empty.”

The floor erupts. Coins explode upward like geysers, a shriek of metal and rune-etched flame slicing across the chamber. The entire vault convulses with raw magic as the dragon lifts from the mound, wings slicing the air in a hurricane of treasure and dust.

A talon crashes down where Luna stood a heartbeat ago—and she’s already moved, magic spiraling around her in a surge of bladed light. Ambrose is already at her back, murmuring something I can’t hear, but whatever it is makes the gold around her hiss like it’s been burned.

Riven throws a dagger that ricochets off the dragon’s flank with a flare of sparks, and Lucien’s charging straight toward its jaw like he wants to carve out a tooth and wear it as a trophy.

throws a handful of coins at the thing and shouts, “I REGRET NOTHING!”

I duck behind a collapsed statue of some long-dead queen, draw two blades from my sleeves, and laugh under my breath.

Gods, I love this family. Even if they get us all killed. It’s never subtle when everything goes to shit. No, it’s always loud. Always theatrical. Always catastrophic enough to make the ground split and the ceiling quake and my instincts yell get down while my pride mutters but make it look good.

And right now?

Right now it’s a full-blown chaos opera—screaming gold, blinding light, fire spiraling off the dragon’s wings in molten sheets—and for the first time since Branwen’s little hell-realm tried to chew us up, it feels like us.

The Sins.

At war.

Riven moves. There’s nothing subtle about Wrath when it wakes. He’s all speed and blood. His blade sings through the air, trailing fire, and when it connects with the dragon’s claw, it explodes into sparks that rain down like dying stars. The beast snarls, but Riven doesn't falter. He leans in, twisting the blade deeper, eyes lit with that furious, righteous heat that makes him impossible to stop and even harder to look away from.

Caspian’s next. He just moves—his whips lashing out in slick, violent arcs of violet light. They don’t just strike; they bind. Lust made flesh, pulling power with every snap of his wrist. One wraps around the dragon’s hind leg, the other curls around its throat, and for a moment, just a breath, the thing falters. Held.

Pride doesn’t charge—it commands. Lucien walks through the debris like it parts for him, sword glowing with darklight, cloak snapping around his legs like shadow obeys him. When he swings, it isn’t with desperation—it’s precision, control, the impossible weight of someone who has never lost. He aims for the eyes. For the ego. The blade slices across the beast’s cheek in a clean line that doesn’t bleed—but it hurts.

The dragon roars, the sound splitting the air down to the stone.

That’s when Orin shifts.

He doesn’t draw a blade. He devours. Magic ripples outward from his chest like a silent shockwave, the ground cracking beneath him in a hungry spiral. Gluttony isn’t about indulgence—it’s need, it’s consumption, it’s everything you’ve ever wanted and couldn’t have and finally take in one breathless mouthful. The dragon’s fire curves toward him, tries to consume him whole—and then vanishes into his palm like it was always meant to.

He exhales.

The vault shudders.

laughs. He’s not fighting. Not like the others. He’s watching. His fingers twitch, mouth stretched into something between joy and hunger. Envy doesn’t lash out—it reflects. The gold around him warps, mirroring the dragon’s hoard back at it in glittering illusions. One. Two. Five. Ten. Until there are too many, until the beast’s hoard isn’t its own anymore.

And that’s what breaks it. It screams, furious, wings unfurling in a blaze of destruction.

And I’m still standing. Still watching. Still not moving.

Lazy, they say.

Sloth.

And maybe that’s what they see—me leaning against a collapsed column, daggers loose in my grip, half-smirking like I’m detached from it all. But I’m watching. I’m timing. Because that’s the trick, isn’t it?

My sin isn’t sleep.

It’s patience.

And when the moment opens—When Luna shouts my name and the dragon rears back, about to slam its tail through Caspian’s ribs and crush beneath a wall of coins—

I breathe in.

And stop time.

The vault freezes in motion. Gold caught midair like glittering ash. Fire suspended in spiraling arcs. Riven’s blade frozen a breath from the dragon’s eye. Luna’s hair curled in wind that doesn’t move. She’s still. Perfect. Beautiful.

I step through it all. Calm. Smooth. Unbothered.

I touch ’s shoulder and shove him sideways. I tilt Caspian’s foot just enough to shift his stance. I whisper something in Luna’s ear I’ll pretend later I didn’t say. Then I draw both blades, press them to the dragon’s exposed throat, and smile.

Then I let go.

Time snaps back like a whip.

crashes down behind a pillar with a gasp. Caspian pivots, landing clean and sliding under the tail’s path. Luna exhales like I pulled air from her lungs and gave it back.

And my blades slice deep. The dragon screams. Not in pain.

In recognition.

“Time-bent,” it growls, recoiling. “You cheat.”

I shrug. “I adapt.”

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 burns real.

And when her hands rise, the dragon pauses—not because it fears her, but because it knows 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 vault listens. The dragon collapses with a roar that cracks the ceiling. Its body writhes, not dying—but returning. Becoming something 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 nap first?”

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’s charged. 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. A reveal.

She moves like the ground won’t dare break under her weight, and the rest of us—me, Riven, , even Ambrose—we follow because that’s what we do. 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 from expectation. 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 just stopped. 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 , who says he once made out with a cursed artifact just to see if he could. No—this reaction is hers. They light for her.

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, I am willing 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.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she murmurs.

“I’m very good on altars,” I add helpfully. “Flexible. Moody. Available in several flattering shades of desperation.”

Now she looks at me—just a glance, just a flick of her eyes—and it hits me harder than I’m prepared for. Because this isn’t the same Luna I used to tease in the corridors of the Academy. This isn’t the girl who glared at me when I stole her spell notes. This is someone forged by fire and bound to a fate none of us understand yet—and I still want her.

More now than I ever have. And that’s dangerous. Because the pillars are still glowing.

All of them.

Not one.

Not a chosen path.

A hundred doors, each screaming her name, each one pretending it’s the right one, the final one, the exit. But I know magic. I know lies that wear truth like perfume.

None of them are passive. They’re watching her back.

Orin finally speaks, his voice low and sure. “They aren’t supposed to light like this. Not all of them.”

“Then what the fuck does it mean?” Lucien asks, stepping in close, jaw tight.

“It means this isn’t a test,” Orin says. “It’s an invitation.”

Luna lifts her chin.

And I watch the light ripple across her throat like a promise. She’s not choosing one yet. But the room already knows she’s the one who must.

And gods help all of us if she chooses wrong.

Caspian

The hum of magic laced through the stone is too constant, too alive to ignore. The pillars don’t speak They burn with implication, each one casting a different kind of light, shadows bent in impossible directions. This room isn’t just watching her. It’s wanting her. I know what that feels like.

And it makes my skin itch.

I stand behind her, just out of reach, but every part of me is drawn forward. Not just to the magic. To Luna. She hasn’t said a word since they lit up. All of them. Every pillar in this cavernous, cathedral-sized tomb of possibility answered her blood, her presence, her power.

She hasn’t touched a single one. And it’s still too much. She looks like fate wrapped in soft skin, like the gods got greedy and made something they couldn’t contain, and now the room has caught on to the same terrible truth the rest of us already knew.

She’s not meant to survive this place. She’s meant to end it. And I can’t let that happen.

Not again.

Not after Branwen.

Not after what I did to stop her.

Luna said she forgave me. She touches me like she means it. Kisses me like she’s never flinched from the things I’ve done. But none of that changes the fact that I walked out of the cathedral where I killed the woman who made me a weapon, and I’m still not free. Not really. Branwen’s memory clings to the marrow of this place, and every step deeper into the Keep feels like she’s dragging her fingernails down my spine.

This realm is a graveyard for monsters, not saints. A mausoleum of sin binders who were never meant to last, their names forgotten, their power buried beneath stone and guilt and want. Not one of them is whole. They died young, most of them. Betrayed. Cursed. Chosen. Chewed up by gods or lovers or something worse.

And it terrifies me that Luna will end up here too. If she dies, if this place takes her from us—I don’t know what I’ll become. But I do know one thing. I’d follow her. Here. Into this dead, cursed, hell-ridden, godforsaken realm full of echoes and ruins and sanctified rot. I wouldn’t even hesitate. Because what the fuck is a life outside of this place if she’s not in it?

None of us talk about that. About what we’d do if it came to that.

But we’re thinking it.

I can see it in Riven’s posture—how close he’s standing, how his hand is never far from hers. In Ambrose’s silence, his calculations. Even Elias, snarky bastard that he is, hasn’t cracked a joke in three minutes, and that’s basically grief for him.

And the problem—the real problem—isn’t that we might lose her.

It’s that we might choose the wrong way out. Because these pillars? They aren’t doors. They’re keys. And if we pick the wrong one, we don’t walk out of here. We get dropped somewhere else. Some other realm. Some other curse. Somewhere that rips her farther from us than death ever could.

And there’s no way to know.

I move to her side finally, because I can’t stay behind her anymore. I don’t say her name. I don’t have to. She feels me. Her shoulder brushes mine.

“You know,” I murmur, just under the pulse of magic, “we don’t talk about what happens if we guess wrong.”

Her eyes flick toward me. Sharp. Curious. Scared—but not for herself.

“What happens if we step through the wrong portal,” I continue, voice low, steady, too intimate for this kind of cathedral. “Do we just… keep walking? Get scattered into some other corner of the gods’ graveyard?”

“Or worse,” she answers. “Get separated.”

My throat tightens. I didn’t expect her to say it out loud.

“That’s what scares me,” she admits. “Not dying. Not staying. Leaving one of you behind.”

“You won’t,” I say. And I mean it. Even if she does. Even if she’s gone in one step, we’d burn our way through this realm to follow.

I tilt my head, letting the dark curl of amusement slip back into my voice, brushing against the part of her that still aches for distraction, for intimacy, for a reminder that she’s not just magic—she’s wanted.