I'd been facing impossible things my whole life.
What was one more?
"What does it cost? What is the sacrifice?"
Davoren's voice cut through the silence like a blade through silk. He'd stepped forward without me noticing, his bronze form seeming to radiate heat even in human shape. His ember-eyes burned brighter than I'd seen them—not with anger, I realized, but with fear poorly disguised as fury.
"Nothing comes free, Shadow Walker." The old title dripped from his tongue like a challenge. "Especially not pulling souls from beyond the veil. What are you not telling us?"
Morgrith didn't flinch. Didn't move. The shadows gathered closer around him, as if protecting their master from what came next.
"A Dragon Lord must sacrifice their dragon-essence to power the ritual."
The words hung in the air. Simple words. Devastating words.
"Specifically," Morgrith continued, his voice impossibly calm, "the shadow torn from the Shadow Dragon. It's the only thing that can pierce the boundary between life and death. The only thing with enough power to call a soul back across ten thousand years."
The chamber erupted.
Sereis moved first—ice crackling in his wake, spreading across the stone floor in jagged patterns that climbed toward the altar. His pale face had gone even paler, his glacier-eyes blazing with something I'd never seen in someone so controlled.
"You're talking about destroying yourself." His voice was sharp as breaking icicles. "The dragon-essence isn't separate from you, Morgrith. It is you. What you're describing is death dressed in ritual language."
"There must be another way." Garruk's rumble shook the floor. He hadn't moved—the mountain lord never moved quickly—but his presence seemed to fill the chamber, solid and immovable as the stone he ruled. "We have resources. Time. Other options we haven't explored."
"We don't have time." Morgrith's response was quiet, but it silenced Garruk's protest like a door closing. "Valdris is already stirring. I've felt him in the shadows for months now—growing stronger, testing the boundaries of his prison. The equinoxapproaches, and when it arrives, the barriers will thin enough for him to break through. We have weeks, not years."
Zephyron's form flickered. Lightning arced between his fingers, jumping to his shoulders, crackling down his spine in agitated bursts. "We need you for the battle to come. You can't face the Unnamed as a—as a hollow shell. Without your dragon-nature, you're barely more than human."
The words stung. I felt them land like a slap, though they weren't aimed at me.
Barely more than human.
Is that what I was to them? What all of us were—the unclaimed, the unmagical, the merely mortal?
Even Caelus showed alarm, and watching him lose his composure was like watching stone crack. "The ritual could kill you outright. And even if it doesn't—"
"I know what I'm sacrificing."
Morgrith's voice cut through the chaos. Not louder than the others, but somehow more present. More final. The kind of voice that ended arguments not through volume but through absolute certainty.
"I am the only one who can walk between worlds." He looked at each of them in turn—his brothers, his fellow lords, the beings he'd known for millennia. Beings who cared about him, I realized. Who were fighting not because they disagreed with his logic, but because they couldn't bear to lose him.
"I was made for this," he said. Quietly. Simply. As if stating a fact no more remarkable than the color of the sky. "If we fail here—if Valdris breaks free and we have no way to reach him—there will be no world left to protect."
He paused. Let the silence stretch.
"No mates," he said. "No bonds. Nothing."
I watched the mates react before I understood why.
They'd gathered together without my noticing—drawn to each other the way water seeks its own level. Kara's hand was pressed to her mouth, her fire-marks dimmed to something closer to dying embers. Mira's frost-patterns had spread up her neck, climbing toward her jaw, her face pale as winter. Thalia's lightning had gone still, trapped beneath her skin, no longer crackling but coiled tight like a spring about to snap.
They understood, perhaps better than the Dragon Lords themselves, what it meant to give up the bond that made you whole.
They'd felt it. That connection. That belonging. The certainty of being claimed by something vast and eternal, of never being alone again.
And they were watching a Dragon Lord choose to surrender it.