Below the tomb, a deeper sanctum awaited, one Cerys had kept sealed until now. Darkness peels back, leaving only flashes light, pain, memory. Blood spilled from her mouth onto the rune-etched slab but she made no sound. Her throat was too raw, her lungs too scorched. Her vision clears. She's bound to a moss-lined dais, ancient runes etched into the stone beneath her. Six skeletal acolytes advance, their claws clicking with grim rhythm.
Heat coiled beneath her ribs. A scream coiled in her chest, ragged and wrong, trying to chew its way free. Her body convulsed. The heat erupted from her chest without consent. Two wraiths turned to ash mid-step. Their disintegrated forms sift across her ankles like cursed snowfall.
The triumph is short-lived. She staggers back—pain flares as her cracked ribs tear anew. The remaining four acolytes close in with predatory grace. Their leader, a hulking skeleton crowned with draconic horns, hisses a cruel taunt:
"Even wyrm-embers turn to ash in the dark," it hissed.
The chamber reels. Her sight narrowed to flickering light. Blood pools behind her teeth. She can't scream only endure. Through bleeding lips, she snarls:
"Not… yet!"
Above, Cerys's voice rings out:
"Behold the Seal of the Seventh Scourge, bane of will!"
A black starburst glyph sears across Lyra's sternum, its dark magic dimming her ember-flame with oppressive weight.
Yet beneath the encroaching abyss, the Wyrmheart surges. Her ember-fire flares, scorching the seals to glowing cracks. The seals sputter, struggling to cage the blaze swelling in her chest.
Scriv backed further into the dark. He didn't whisper this time. He just watched. And shook.
A deafening crack rends the air as the tomb floor splits beneath her. She barely remembered the fall just the crack of stone, the lurch of her body, the darkness. Then: pain. She lay among shattered stone, breathless and wrecked. Dazed, she sees Cerys descend and press her jagged blade flat against Lyra's chest.
Rune-fire flickers along the blade, sizzling where it touches flesh. Cerys's wrist moves with precise cruelty, threading cold magic into Lyra's veins like wire. Her skin blackens where the magic enters, veins pulsing like worms under glass. Her fingers seized. Her lips drew back in a snarl that wasn't hers. The magic crawled—clawing, invasive, wrong.
"You think I'll carry your leash just because I burned," she hissed. Her voice shook but it didn't falter.
She opened her mouth, nothing. Just breath, ragged and voiceless. The scream stayed buried.
But later, when she spoke, the words didn't ride her breath. They rode his.
"By this cut, I claim you," Cerys whispers.
Scriv backed into the shadows, hands lifted like they might ward something off. "This wasn't in the bones," he muttered. "I—I didn't sign on for this. Gods help me, I'm already dead and still quitting."
Cerys's voice followed, cold and clipped. "You wear the dragon's bones now. Let's see if they wear you back."
Her voice carries like a dirge. Lyra's mind fractures visions of her sister: the warmth of her hand after a nightmare, the lilt of her laugh beneath orchard trees, shared secrets by campfires—all shattered by necromantic domination.
But another vision rose beneath it... older, deeper. An instinct cracked open in her blood, not memory, but inheritance. Lyra was no longer herself. She stood as something vast and winged fell through a sundered sky, lightning shackling its limbs, each strike cracking heaven and marrow. On a broken spire, a woman in tattered robes raised a spear of starlight.
"Do you believe you can save them alone, Vaelrix?" the woman shouted, voice trembling with purpose.
The dragon lifted his head, blood pouring from his chest like molten fire.
"Why?" he asked. "You were the last I trusted."
"I chose a power," Cerys answered, bitter. "Someone had to."
The vision shuddered. The dragon's voice bled into hers, into something older. "A dragon's bond coils deeper than death. Fire remembers."
Then the spear struck.
She screamed but it wasn't hers. It came from something older, deep as marrow and burning with betrayal.
As the final lock of the soul-chain snaps shut, Lyra's ember ignites beneath her skin. The chain burned. Not undone, devoured. The Wyrmheart refused the leash.
A force older than her name took hold. Beneath the hollowed bone of her chest, where Cerys carved the opening, new matter stirs—scaled and smoldering. Bone stitched over charred ribs. Claws split from her skin. Smoke filled her lungs, metallic and searing. She wore Lyra's shape, but it no longer fit.
A tremor rippled through her core. She coughed smoke, the taste of burning iron clinging to her teeth. Was she still Lyra? Or just what the Wyrmheart needed her to be?
She breathed the words more than spoke them. "I think I'm still here."
The air went still. Even the glyphs seemed to listen.
A presence stirred low between her ribs... vast, ancient, and waking. It didn't speak at first. It waited.
Then: a voice in her blood.
"You are not broken."
"You bleed like a mortal," the voice rumbled. "But that fire inside you? I've seen it before. You don't know what it is yet. But I do."
"Who are you?" Lyra thought or maybe whispered.
"I am what they tried to kill and failed. I am the storm you now carry."
She tasted blood. "Then help me."
"Stand. That is help."
"Can I… still stand?" she whispers, doubt flickering. The fire behind her ribs answered for her, and the chains trembled.
His voice came again, lower, closer.
"Good. You remember how to roar. When the time comes, remember this pain and burn brighter."
She smiled like someone else's mouth was wearing her face. "Get out of my head, or choke on what you find."
Above her, Cerys watched in silence, her mask unreadable. She had not retreated. Had not flinched. Her blade still burned. Her magic hung in the air, thin as breath before a storm.
But something in her stillness spoke of calculation, not triumph. The Wyrmheart had answered someone else. Not her. And that failure sat like ash behind her teeth.
In her chest, a thought curled tight as steel. She didn't speak the vow aloud. She didn't need to. If it would not obey, she'd carve obedience from its bones.
The chamber groaned, stone shrieking as power surged. Glyphs fractured and flared red-hot. Dust rained from above. The Wyrmheart pulsed once, and the entire complex shuddered like it remembered its own death.
Then: the dragon's voice, not cold now, but steady.
"You are not alone. I am with you. Burn if you must, but never break."
The ground lurched again. The storm was no longer outside her. It rose in her marrow, hers now. And it would not stay caged.