“Stay close,” she said without looking at him.
“Not going anywhere, Princess.”
The inside was worse.
Cold. Dry. Stale with dust and blood-magic.
The moment they stepped past the threshold, the ground shifted. The walls flickered with broken glyphs. Lira and Brann took flanking positions, but even they looked uneasy. Alek disappeared into the shadows ahead, too silent for Cassian’s liking.
Seraphine led them through a narrow hall that descended like a throat.
At the bottom was a chamber pulsing with violet light.
There, in a bed of carved obsidian, lay the first shard of the Heartblade—crimson crystal, fractured with light like lightning caught in glass.
They barely had time to breathe.
The guardians rose from the walls.
Hollow-forged constructs—part metal, part magic, all wrong. Their eyes lit with the same violet burn that had haunted his dreams since they entered the Veil. They moved with the precision of nightmares—too fast, too clean.
“Circle up!” Seraphine shouted.
Cassian was already moving.
He met the first with a full arc of Stormfire. His blade catching the edge of the thing’s armor and sparking like a thunderclap. It shrieked—a high, mechanical wail—and slashed at him with a blade-arm thick as a man’s torso.
He ducked, rolled, came up behind it and drove his sword deep.
Another lunged at Brann. Lira intercepted it with a roar, smashing her shield into its face and slamming it into a column.
Cassian turned to check Seraphine and saw her stagger.
She’d taken down two already, her glaive a blur of whitefire. But her limbs moved slower now, her face pale, and when the third construct lunged— She didn’t dodge.
“Seraphine!”
He got there too late to stop the blow.
It caught her across the shoulder, sent her crashing to the floor with a sound that broke something in him.
“Shit—no, no?—”
He surged forward, blade blazing, andunleashed.
Stormfire erupted from his body in a shockwave, throwing two constructs into the far wall. His blade found another’s throat—if it had one—and cleaved it through with brute force.
The world blurred.
Cassian fought like a storm possessed, not thinking, justmoving, until the last Hollow-forged shrieked its death in sparks and smoke.
Then he dropped to his knees beside her.
Her breath was shallow. Eyes glassy. Too pale.
He lifted her gently. She didn’t stir.
“Damn you, Princess,” he whispered, voice hoarse. “You don’t get to die here.”
