Fissures in the tomb's stone ceiling leak hints of dawn, just enough to paint the dust with ghostlight. One beam catches on Lyra's shackles, where rusted iron has bitten through to raw skin. The air reeks of blood and scorched stone, like the sky after a storm. The air cut going in, sharp and dry.
Somewhere far above, through a thousand tons of stone, the storm's rumble still managed to creep down, a sound more memory than noise. Something stirred low in her gut slow, bitter. Not heat. Not hunger. A readiness sharpening in silence. Her jaw locks. She doesn't let go of the thought, it holds her.
The tomb hums, alive with the stink of old magic. Glyphs stir as Cerys lifts her arms. Light floods the chamber. Grit rains from above, shaken loose by the pulse of necromancy.
Her body shakes, muscles locked and burning. The shackles grind against bone. A sound tries to claw up her throat but she clamps her jaw shut, eyes wide, trembling with the effort to hold it all in.
Her gaze snags on Scriv, twitching beside the iron chest. He stared down, silent. His fingers fidgeted at the seam of his ribs—but he said nothing. Doubt cracks through his posture.
Her eyes narrow, the tension coiling behind her stillness.
Cerys notices. Her bony face tilts, unreadable.
"You wonder why we did it," she said not to Lyra, but to the air, or perhaps the dead. "Why we sacrificed Seresthos. Why we let it fall."
She didn't wait for an answer.
"The city was already dying. Bound to Vaelrix's spine, chained to his slowing pulse. Every storm that kept us aloft drained him. Every prayer we sang was a knife turned inward."
Her voice remained even, but her hand trembled slightly as it traced the rising glyph-light.
"We didn't kill a city. We tried to cut it free. And when it broke loose what choice was left but to bind the power directly?"
She glanced once toward Scriv, then back to Lyra.
"You were all waiting to be saved. I chose not to wait."
"You think I made myself this for power?" Her fingers curled against the blade. "I carved the flesh from my own bones to keep Seresthos from vanishing beneath the sea. To hold what was left."
Her gaze flicked toward the tomb walls, toward the hundreds buried in silence.
"They called me saint. So I became sacrifice. The dead below—they remember their oaths. I keep them marching. And soon, they'll rise."
Her voice softened, almost fond. "Not to serve me. To finish what we started."
"You'll crack like slag before the fire ever takes," she says, voice low and final.
It was never about fire. It was about silence. A clean break. A hollowed soul. That's when the Wyrmheart flows in and obeys.
"You've chosen the kind of spark that burns back," she rasped.
She lifts the blade.
Scriv edged back, hands trembling. His mouth opened, then shut. No words came.
A turbulent storm rages above, its distant thunder rolling through the vault until only suffocating silence remains, then the dragon's voice surges through her mind:
It was never the storm above, it had always been in her blood. Her blood thundered. Tension snapped through her ribs, pushing the fear back into shadow. Her sister's eyes—furious, defiant—flashed behind her ribs like a flare refusing to die. Her name, screamed. Wyrmwatch hands dragging her away. The village erupting behind them.
That memory clings like bone-deep frost: her sister's scream, the village waiting, kids too hungry to cry. The old ones who still thought she'd return with something worth the risk. If she died here, they'd never know why. They'd just keep waiting.
All around, the tomb's living rock walls pulse with lingering necromantic energy. Cerys raises both arms, and the ancient glyphs along the walls flare to blinding life. A shockwave of spectral force ripples through the chamber, rattling stone and iron alike. Dust trickles from the ceiling like ash from a dying fire. The air ripples. Magic grates against her bones, cold and invasive. The runes pulse like a heartbeat she doesn't own.
She grits her teeth. Bones grind. Ribs seized tight. No space. No sound. Fury swells louder than fear.
Her hands twitch at the shackles. Scriv hovered near the chest but said nothing. He pressed a bone hand against his sternum, as if trying to steady something crawling beneath it. Not magic, instinct. A wrongness even the dead could feel. He didn't look at Cerys. Didn't dare.
A flicker passed across Cerys's polished bone. Had she misjudged this vessel? The thought coiled, then died behind her mask.
"Even embers crawl before they burn," she mutters, not looking at Lyra.
Heat licked the inside of Lyra's spine. Not fire, something thinner, quicker. Like glass being shaped mid-air. Her fingertips tingled an edge, a readiness. Not pain. Precision. An instinct coiled in waiting, sharp as drawn wire. How to split flame and steel with a thought. "You will break before you reach flame."
As Cerys raises her blade for the final seal, the glyphs pulsed too fast... erratic, like a dying heart. The magic wasn't steady. It trembled.
And so did she.
Not with fear, but with something darker. Deeper.
What if Cerys was right?
What if she did break?
A whimper curled at the base of her throat. She crushed it with her teeth. Her body shook, wrists torn open in the shackles. Her vision blurred. A whisper in her bones pleaded for it to end.
Her pulse stuttered. Not hers. The rhythm was deeper now, buried. Whatever had coiled inside her, it was waking. Not to help. To feed.
Stillness.
No visions. No voices. Just her and the stone and the ruin of her body. Her chest rose, shaky and slow... less will than reflex. Air moved, slow and cold, like the tomb had lungs. She wasn't sure if her heart had stopped or simply given up keeping time.
She closed her eyes.
And somewhere below the pain, the silence blinked and blinked back.
Cerys faltered mid-gesture. Her fingers twitched, the blade dipping. Her mask didn't move but a shudder ran beneath it, small but unmistakable.
The chamber groaned under the pressure stone trembling like it knew what came next. The glyphs flared white, then seared black. Stone cracked under her spine. One symbol blistered and peeled off the wall like burning skin. The power surged wrong. Lyra felt it twist.
A silence, sharp and deep, cuts through the chamber.
Then the seal breaks, not in triumph, but rupture.
The hatch splits. Lyra falls.
And whatever had woken inside her unfinished, half-formed, fell with her.