“Good,” I say finally. The word is not praise so much as confirmation. She used it. She moved. She learned the seam has teeth.
Then I add what she needs to hear. “You can move,” I tell her. “But not everything you bring will survive the trip. Be careful what you try to force through a seam.”
She nods, jaw tight. I keep my face unreadable, but inside something coiled and old relaxes: she can step between shadows. She can leave and return. The rest—the carrying of fire through the dark, the threading of holiness—is a lesson for later,for patience and cunning. For now, she can vanish and come home again. That will have to be enough.
We do it together.
Not as a joke. Not as practice. As a single, controlled experiment—one knot of power, braided and steeled. I stand closest to her because I will not be anywhere else. Cassiel places his palm over her sternum; Bastion takes her right wrist with the animal certainty of a predator; I catch her left wrist, my other hand spreading over the base of her throat. None of us speaks. The silence tastes heavy enough to cut.
Three pressures press into her small body. Three rhythms. Cassiel breathes light—slow, precise, the hush of dawn unspooling. Bastion pushes heat and blunt weight, the press of basalt and strike. I fold dark around the edges, a velvet that swallows noise and makes the world stop listening. The threads braid through her: white like a promise, thick like an ax, empty like a waiting mouth. I can feel them in my palm where her skin is warm; I can feel them curl back into each of us like tides.
For five heartbeats she is everything. Bright. Armored. Invisible. I watch power own her the way a tide owns sand. The sound she makes is a single, sharp thing that splits the room—half laugh, half hunger. It should be mine to kill for. It should be mine to guard.
We push more. I push more. Bastion drives raw force into the braid; Cassiel threads clarity through the chaos; I draw the dark taut so the light will not scatter. She is meant to be the conduit, not the dam; she tries to let it pass. For a breath I see what wecan be together. A nexus with teeth, a weapon that could rend rites like cloth.
Then the toll comes. Not gradual. A snapping of a chord. Her limbs quake. Her throat goes dry as paper. The power does not ask permission; it takes, and the taking leaves holes. We yank our hands back as if burned. The channel slaps closed. Her body hollows out where the braid left its mark.
She collapses to the stone. The fortress feels too loud for a moment. The drip of a torch, the press of our own breathing. Cassiel is on her in a blink, forehead pressed to hers, steady and sacred. Bastion’s palm is a bruise against her spine. I rub the base of her skull until the world stops hiccuping, because hands do what courage sometimes cannot: fix what's been broken.
“You touched a chorus,” Cassiel says, quiet and sharp. “That was real. But it was dangerous. You can be the bridge. You cannot be the whole world.”
Dangerous is a word I wear like armor. I tasted it when I felt the braid, when her laugh split the air. I think of Zepharion’s altar. I see the red door she sees in her dreams and the way it promises control.
But the cost is real. Her voice is thin for the rest of the day; spells she sends stumble. I watch her hide the tremor as best she can and feel that old, ugly surge at the base of my throat: a vow that she will not be the only one carrying this risk. We will temper the next attempt. We will teach her to be a bridge and not a pyre.
For now I stay where I am and promise, again, in the only way I know how: I will burn anything that tries to take her from us.
FIFTY-EIGHT
The fortress exhales around me, a low, settling sound that pretends at ordinary.
When I push the chamber door, Deimos is already there, half-seated on the edge of the bed, one boot off, the other dangling, watching the room as if the shadows were a map he can read. He does not look surprised. He simply lets me step inside and closes the small, careful distance his posture kept.
My hands still carry the residue of the day, phantom heat where Bastion pressed too hard, the tingling aftershock of Cassiel’s light in my fingertips. I move to the bed like someone walking a line she has practiced until the rope is second nature.
Deimos watches long enough to make me feel both seen and small. He studies me the way a man studies the face of something he plans to keep, slow, memorizing. “You’ve been distant,” he says. There is no anger in it, only a softness that feels worse; it is worry folded into a question.
I simply smile, small and crooked. “Just tired,” I say. It is not the worst of lies.
The bed dips as he moves to lie beside me. For a beat I forget to breathe. His hand finds mine, not flailing, not tentative, practiced. He twines his fingers through mine like someonebinding a promise. The tether hums low and real beneath my skin.
“You can’t lie to me,” he says. “I see your dreams.”
“I know,” I answer. He presses his thumb in that small, habitual circle he makes when he is steadying himself. The motion steadies me in turn.
He is taut tonight, like a bow drawn and held. I feel the strain as a thread through the bond, a tight wire at the base of my skull. He does not trust the silence. He does not yet trust the choice I have not voiced. He hides the fear under a calm that says I will wait.
I crawl under the blanket. The mattress creaks, the hearth outside sighs its last. Bastion and Cassiel breathe even from the next chamber, two soft anchors that make the world less likely to snap.
I kiss him because it is the truest thing I can offer without words. I do not want him to remember anything but warmth. He answers slow, almost without struggle, because he knows the currency of what I give. When we part his jaw is set, the trust in his eyes tremulous and fierce.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” he says. “Please.”
I do not have the heart to respond. Or to lie to him again.
The kiss is slow at first, careful—the way two people who have survived too many battles learn to be gentle when gentleness is rare. His mouth answers mine with all the things he will not say: anger, fear, and the fierce, quiet claim of belonging. Heat blooms beneath my ribs and spreads—not only from him but from all four of us, tethered in this fortress. The bond hums under my skin, a wire of silver and iron and something older. I slip my hand from his and press my palm to my sternum, to the place where their threads live.
I do not plan the next move. I do not think it through. I only know that I need them, all of them—the reminder that I am morethan a single, brittle flame. I pull. Not hard, not desperate. An invitation, gentle but sure. Bastion and Cassiel answer like tides pulled home by the moon.
