Another crash echoes through the chamber as Velkiron forces push deeper, their presence tightening around us like a closing fist.
Xalith steps back into the shadowed passage.
“For what it’s worth,” he adds, almost as an afterthought, “this was the most interesting you’ve been in years.”
Then he disappears. The passage seals. And he takes the future with him.
I stop. Not because I choose to. Because my body forces it.
The wound is deeper than I initially calculated, blood already soaking through my side, movement compromised in ways that cannot be ignored without consequence.
The chamber is still filled with Velkiron soldiers. The artifact is gone. And for the first time since entering this ruin, I no longer control the outcome.
I shift my stance, try to compensate, but the damage has already settled deeper than I allowed for. Every movement pulls at it now, every step a calculation I can no longer fully solve.
A figure moves toward me through the chaos.
Not a threat.
Aeryn.
She reaches me just as another strike comes in from the side, her timing exact, her hand catching my arm and pulling me just far enough that the blade misses where I stood a moment before.
“Stay with me,” she says.
Her voice cuts through the noise with impossible clarity. I look at her. Really look.
There is blood at the corner of her lip again. Her eyes are too bright, catching the fractured light, it feels wrong for a place like this, as though she does not belong to the ruin any more than the artifact did.
“You chose this,” I say, the words quieter than I intend.
“I chose you,” she answers.
Simple and certain. For a moment, everything else falls away. The noise dulls. The pain recedes.
There is only her, close enough that I can see the strain she is holding together, the control she refuses to let break, andsomething in that steadiness anchors me in a way I do not fully understand.
“You are a problem,” I tell her.
A faint breath of something almost like a smile touches her expression.
“I know.”
Another impact shakes the chamber. Stone cracks above us. Her grip tightens.
“Can you walk?”
“Yes.”
A lie. She accepts it anyway.
The world tilts as I shift my weight, the edges of my vision pulling inward, narrowing toward something darker, something quieter.
I hold her in focus. Just her. Strange, I think, distantly, how the mind chooses its final clarity. Not strategy. Not the artifact.
Her.
There is something almost unreal in the way the light catches her face through the collapsing ruin.