I believe that. I release her, allowing the moment to pass without extending it further.
We continue forward, the corridor narrowing as the ruin pulls us deeper within, the air cooling with each step. I feel it now with increasing clarity, the presence of the artifact aligning attention whether I choose it or not.
She feels it as well, evident in the way her movement adjusts, slower now, as though each step is measured against something unseen, and I allow her that positioning without interference, not because I rely on it, but because I understand it.
She is not guiding me. She is preparing. And I am mapping the space as we move, identifying structural weaknesses, alternate routes, points of confinement, constructing multiple approaches rather than committing to a single path, because her information is no longer complete, and reliance without verification would be inefficient.
As we move deeper into the structure, toward something that has already begun to alter the balance between us in ways neither of us has fully acknowledged. I am preparing for the moment when reaching it requires a decision that neither of us has yet been willing to name.
23
AERYN
The moment my foot crosses the fractured threshold of one of the ruin’s structures, something inside me fractures with it, not gradually, not with warning, but with the clean and merciless certainty of something that has been waiting for this exact proximity. The world does not dim or blur the way it sometimes does when a vision begins, it vanishes entirely, replaced by something far more complete, far more invasive, as though I have not stepped into a memory but been forced to live inside it.
I do not breathe. I do not move. I do not exist here.
Stone rises around me, whole and unbroken, towering columns unmarred by time, their surfaces etched with sigils that hum with restrained force.
And at the center of all—him. Vaedros stands before the artifact.
It is not as I imagined it, not some radiant object calling attention to itself, but something quieter, something wrong that resists definition. Its surface shifting between forms that refuse to settle, as though it doesn't belong to a single reality long enough to be understood, and yet everything in the roombends toward it, every presence subtly pulled, subtly altered, like gravity that does not obey natural law.
He reaches for it. There is no hesitation.
The moment his hand closes around it, the world changes. Not outwardly at first, not in any way that would warn those watching, but I feel it, deep and immediate, like a thread pulled too tight through fabric that was never meant to hold it, and something answers him. Something ancient. Something patient.
Hazeran. His father.
That man is not a memory. Not a ghost. A will pressing through the artifact before the gate is fully open, using every weak passage it can find. Blood is one. Vision is another.
The name does not come as thought but as certainty, embedding itself into me with the same force as the vision itself, and suddenly everything aligns, every fragment, every flicker that has haunted me since the beginning, every presence I could never fully name or understand, it has never been random, never been uncontrolled, it has been him, always him, reaching, guiding, shaping through the bloodline that binds them all.
Through Vaedros.
The artifact does not grant power. It opens something—a gateway, not through distance, but through possibility. And he takes it willingly. The shift is immediate. Subtle, but irreversible.
His posture remains unchanged, his expression composed, controlled, but something beneath it warps, something that it’s not him settles behind his eyes. I see it, not as it appears to others, but as it truly is, a fracture masked as strength, a corruption that does not consume all at once but seeps, slow and deliberate, altering choice by choice until there is nothing left untouched.
The vision does not stop there. It never does. Time fractures forward.
The brothers stand together in House Drazharel, but the air between them is different now, sharp with something unspoken, something building, and it does not take long for it to surface. Suspicion turns to accusation, accusation to confrontation, and I watch as loyalty collapses under the weight of something none of them fully understand. Each of them reacting in their own way, each of them convinced they are right, that they are justified, that the others are the problem.
Vaedros stands in it all. Not shouting. Not losing control. Directing.
Every word placed with precision, every reaction accounted for, every fracture widened just enough to ensure it cannot be repaired. I understand then that the artifact does not simply corrupt, it amplifies what is already there, sharpens it, removes restraint where restraint once existed, and what remains is something far more dangerous than madness.
It is clarity without limit. The house does not fall in a single moment. It collapses inward, piece by piece, brother against brother, trust eroded until nothing remains but conflict, and through it all, through every shift, every break, every loss, Hazeran grows stronger. Not because the artifact belongs to him, but because the Deceiver’s gate gives him a way back, and Vaedros’s blood gives him something to hold onto.
Because he is not returning through force. He is returning through them. Through their blood. Through their choices. Through the path Vaedros has already begun to walk.
The final image burns into me with brutal clarity. Vaedros alone. Not victorious. Standing in the aftermath of everything he has destroyed, the artifact still in his grasp, the world around him reshaped by decisions that cannot be undone, and behind his eyes, something else entirely. He is completely lost…his soul.
Then it ends.
The ruin slams back into place around me, broken stone, cold air, the weight of the present crashing in so violently that my body nearly fails to keep up with it. For half a second I am nowhere, suspended between what I saw and what is, my balance gone, my breath locked somewhere between my lungs and my throat.
Warmth spills over my lip. Blood.