Chapter 3: The Brotherhood's Weapon

Claire

Having followed more clues to the only Brotherhood sanctuary left, they entered the heart of the fortress through a door disguised as a janitor’s closet, so obvious it was invisible, which was the Brotherhood’s preferred idiom. The code to open it was a rhyme that made Elira scowl each time she recited it, and the handle, when twisted in the right sequence, sucked all the moisture from Claire’s palm, leaving her skin tingling as if dusted with ground glass.

The hallway beyond was nothing like the ornate sanctuaries Claire had expected. It was too narrow, barely wide enough for two to walk abreast, the air inside so tightly wound with sigil-wards that Claire’s first step almost buckled her at the knees. The walls themselves breathed, coated with a layer of gray-white residue that pulsed in synchrony with some deep, hidden engine. Each pulse sent a sour tang through the back of her mouth, ozone, scorched insulation, and something animal, as if the world here had been built on a lattice of burned teeth.

“Shortcut,” Archer said, barely audible. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling, which crawled with a network of copper cabling, each cable inscribed with the same repeating glyph: a spiral inside a closed fist. “These magic wards are recent.”

Elira led the way, one hand moving in restless notation across the seams where the wall met floor, tracing out patterns only she seemed to see. “They’re panicking,” she said, voice clipped. “Too many patches, not enough time. If we push, the outer shell will collapse. But whatever’s at the core, they’ve invested real work in it.”

They rounded a corner and the passage opened into a mezzanine overlooking an atrium: two floors of concrete platforms, each ringed with more of the copper-sigiled cabling, every inch of surface covered in the Brotherhood’s compulsive script. The air was thick with a metallic reek, so sharp it made Claire’s eyes water and her tongue go numb.

“Are you sure about this?” Archer’s hand hovered over the sword at his belt, but Claire knew better than to think it was nerves; he simply hated entering any place that made him feel smaller than his own shadow. She nodded. “The Hollow trace is strongest here. He’s close. I can feel it.” The words surprised her, but they were true, under all the sensory noise, she could sense the resonance of Theron’s signature, battered but intact, like the static ring left after lightning vaporized a metal fence.

They moved in formation: Archer a step ahead and to the left, Elira already consulting her lens, Claire moving dead center and keeping her hands wrapped around her amulet until the cold metal left marks on her skin, Zephyr holding fast at the end of their line.

The stairs to the lower level were a straight shot, but each step induced a fresh jolt of static, enough that by the second landing, Claire’s legs had gone to rubber and her vision fuzzed out at the periphery. She didn’t have to look around to know the others were faring a little better. The Brotherhood had tuned these defenses to an audience like them: resistant to the old tricks, but still subject to the body’s failure modes.

The trail led them through a blank concrete corridor to an unnumbered door at the far end, unadorned but for a single sigil burned so deep into the surface that the wood had charred down to the core. The design was unfamiliar, even to Elira; instead of spirals or chevrons, it was a tangled mesh of intersecting arcs, the curves so perfectly proportioned they hurt to look at directly.

Elira set down her kit and got to work, pulling a sheaf of copper filaments from her jacket. She unraveled them into a spiderweb and fitted it flush against the warded door, then lifted her quartz lens to one eye and began to hum, low and off-key.

“What’s it doing?” Claire asked, voice hardly more than a scrape of breath. Elira’s lips barely moved. “It’s not a magic ward. It’s a pulse gate, set to collapse if anyone with the wrong signature approaches. I’m weaving a temporary overlay. Like reaching between covers of books on a shelf, if you want a metaphor.”

Archer did not want a metaphor. “Is it going to hold?” Elira shrugged. “One way to find out.” She looked through the lens, frowned, then barked a word that had the effect of plunging the room into a deep, vibrating silence. The door dissolved. Not with a bang, not even with a sizzle, it simply failed to exist for as long as it took them to pass through, after which it reconstituted behind them, whole and unmarred.

They found themselves in a chamber neither vast nor small, but shaped with a precision that implied it was built for a single function. The walls were curved, every inch studded with polished iron nodes, each node radiating a ripple of power that left Claire’s hair standing on end. The floor was not stone, but glass, thick enough to bear their weight, but beneath it something moved: the slow pulse of a liquid so black it seemed to absorb light, shot through with veins of molten orange.

At the center of the room, ringed with more iron nodes, was a slab of what looked like petrified wood. Shackled to the slab was Theron.

Her first thought was that they were too late. His body was nothing but angles and hollows, skin drawn so tight over his frame that every rib was a mountain range, each dip between vertebrae a ravine. His hands were twisted above him, bound at the wrist with iron bands that glowed faintly with shifting runes. Even his ankles were fused to the slab, not with metal, but with something darker, a living shadow that wriggled and gripped and seemed to pulse with each of his ragged breaths.

But the fire was there: under his skin, flickering up from the base of his neck, branding his jawline, pooling in his chest with every exhale. It was Hollow, all right, but the resonance was wrong, less a wildfire, more a nuclear chain reaction at the edge of containment.

Claire stepped to the edge of the node circle and stopped, body refusing to go further. Her knees threatened to buckle again, but she fought it, fixing her eyes on the tangle of burns and scars that now defined her brother.

Elira’s reaction was colder. She fished out a pair of silver calipers and held them up to the nearest iron node. A thread of light leapt from the node to the calipers, sizzling as it traced the device’s edge. She squinted through her quartz lens, then turned to Archer.

“These aren’t prison wards,” she said, voice pitched low and analytical. “They’re induction chains. They’re not just containing the Hollow, they’re harvesting it, cycling it. They’re running him like a generator.” Archer’s jaw clenched, his eyes on the shackles. “Can we break them?”

“Not cleanly,” Elira said, “and not all at once. If we disrupt the cycle, we risk a blowout.” She turned to Claire. “He’ll need to vent. A lot. You said you can anchor him, can you do it under these conditions?” The question was brutal, but so was the situation. Claire flexed her fingers, felt the shiver of anxiety run down to her bones. “I have to. But you need to walk me through the sequence, in case… ” She didn’t finish the sentence. If she failed, it would be the end of her brother, and possibly herself.

Elira nodded, then handed her the calipers and a strip of waxed paper inscribed with a series of numbers and sigils. “Start at the core node and work outward. Every time you disengage a layer, the resonance will spike. Match your breath to the cycle and focus on the anchors I marked.”

Claire moved forward. The resistance at the edge of the node ring was like wading through a swimming pool of syrup and razorblades. Her hands shook as she pressed the calipers to the first node. The jolt knocked her back a step, and she bit her tongue hard enough to taste blood. The calipers sparked, their surface frosting over with a sheen of ice, but she kept them in place and counted down from five. At zero, the node dimmed. A ripple shot through the network, making the glass floor flex and groan.

Theron reacted instantly. His eyes flicked open, the whites gone, replaced by a pearlescent swirl shot through with black. He didn’t speak, didn’t even snarl, but the movement alone was enough to send the next node into a blinding strobe.

Claire caught the resonance, moved to the next, and repeated the process. Each node fought harder than the last, the energy in the room escalating with a logic she couldn’t track, by the third, it was all she could do to keep her teeth from shattering under the tension.

She remembered, distantly, how her brother had taught her to swim: how to stay under just long enough to survive, how to measure the ache in her lungs and know when to push through and when to surface. That’s what this was, only the water was fire, and the clock was a bomb.

Elira called instructions over the roar that was building in the chamber. Archer paced at the perimeter, sword drawn, his eyes never leaving the slab.

At the fifth node, the whole system wrenched. The bands on Theron’s wrists lit up, arcs of energy crawling the length of his arms, burning new sigils into his skin. He jerked, convulsed, and for a moment Claire saw the old Theron in the set of his jaw, the way he bared his teeth against the pain. He looked at her. Even through the Hollow static, she saw recognition, and, worse, a plea.

Don’t stop.

She didn’t. By the seventh node, her hands were raw, nails split, and the calipers left bloody crescent moons on her palms each time the shock snapped through her. Elira’s voice had gone hoarse from shouting the sequence; Archer was down on one knee, bracing himself against the wave of magical backlash.

At the last node, the slab itself started to break, fissures propagating out from the core like the pattern of a lightning. The shadow that bound Theron’s ankles hissed and thrashed, spattering droplets of blackness across the glass. Each drop sizzled, then was sucked back down by the force in the pit below.

Claire pressed the calipers to the final node, the force of the feedback almost knocking her unconscious. This time, instead of counting down, she counted up, matching the rising tempo of Theron’s heartbeat, which she could feel now as if it were her own.

At ten, the node exploded. The iron shackles vaporized into dust, and the shadow at his feet contracted, shrieked, and vanished. Theron collapsed, what was left of him, onto the slab, trembling and drenched in his own sweat and blood. The silence that followed was total, like the inside of a church after the last note of the organ dies. Claire sagged to the floor, the calipers falling from her grip, her body spent beyond measure.

Elira crawled over, hands shaking, and checked Theron’s pulse. She nodded once to Archer, who sheathed his weapon with a gesture that was equal parts relief and exhaustion. Claire crawled to her brother, not trusting herself to stand. She touched his face, careful not to brush the worst of the wounds, and whispered, “I’m here. You’re safe.” He didn’t answer, he couldn’t, but he blinked once, slow, and let out a breath that sounded almost human.

The chamber lights flickered, then stabilized. Below them, the glass floor shifted, the black fluid beneath now inert, its orange veins gone cold. They had done it. They’d broken the Brotherhood’s generator. But as Claire looked at the runes still glowing on her brother’s skin, she knew that the real damage was only beginning to make itself known.

Elira sat back, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and laughed. “That’s one for the archives,” she said. Archer grunted. “Let’s get out before the clean-up crew arrives.”

They dragged Theron up between them, his weight almost nothing, and limped out through the ring of nodes, back into the corridor where the door was still whole, still unmarked. On the other side, the world seemed thinner, washed out. But the burden on Claire’s shoulders was lighter, if only by a gram.

She had her brother. And, for the first time since childhood, she let herself believe that maybe, just maybe, she could keep him.

~~**~~

They didn’t get far. The generator room had left them all reeling, Elira’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking, Archer’s eyes watered in the light of the torches and lanterns, and Claire’s knees went jelly with every step, but they pressed on, knowing that to retreat here was just another way of spelling “dead end.”

In the outer corridor, the wards were different. Less intricate, more brutal, as though the Brotherhood had realized elegance was wasted on emergencies. The sigils scrawled across the walls looked raw, stitched in haste and sealed with whatever blood was at hand, in some cases probably their own. The very air hummed, tuned to a note so low it barely registered except as a subtle ache behind the eyes.

Elira paused at the first junction, dragging Theron’s near-weightless body half upright and checking for pulse and consciousness. “He’s stabilizing,” she muttered, more for herself than anyone else. “But the resonance is climbing. If it gets any worse, he’ll fry us all before we’re out of the perimeter.”

Archer took point, weapon again drawn. “Which way?” Claire closed her eyes, tuning out the static, and searched for the Hollow trail. It was brighter now, a thread of wrongness leading not toward the fortress exit, but down, toward what the Brotherhood had probably considered a fail-safe vault.

She pointed. “This way. Fast.” They shuffled on, Elira’s arm looped under Theron’s shoulders, Archer clearing intersections with staccato efficiency, and Claire covering the rear, pulse pounding against her collarbone. They made it past three crossways before the first ripple hit.

It wasn’t a noise so much as a sensation, a gust of metallic air that left a slick on the inside of Claire’s mouth and made the tips of her fingers spark. Elira ducked, pushing Theron against the wall. Archer froze, scanning the corridor with the cold focus of someone who’d already decided where he wanted to die.

Claire felt it a fraction before it appeared: the sudden chill, the drop in pressure, the momentary suspension of all other movement.

A body, female in stature, stepped from the gloom with the easy precision of a machine built for one task. Her hair was short, matted with something that looked like frost, but her eyes filled with murderous clarity. In one hand, she held a blade crusted with old sigil-burns and banded with copper wire. Her other hand was empty, loose at her side.

“Move,” she said, voice flat as a dropped coin. No one moved.

The female’s gaze flicked over Archer, dismissing him as a non-threat. It settled on Claire, and for an instant the facade wavered; some flicker of memory, or maybe just the statistical error that crept into even the best-run calculations. Then it reset. “You’re not taking that thing out of here,” Riven said, nodding at Theron. “He’s a walking event horizon. The perimeter alarms have already pinged him as a vector-class outbreak.”

Claire stepped forward, teeth bared. “He’s my brother.” The female almost smiled. “Not anymore.” Archer steadied his stance, shifting just enough to draw her attention. “We’re leaving. You want to stop us, you’ll have to go through all three.”

“Four,” Elira corrected, never looking up from Theron. She had one hand deep in her jacket, fishing for something, the other pressed to his chest, reading the pulse of energy that thudded there. “I suggest you think very carefully about what happens if you breach containment in this close a space.”

For the first time, the female’s blade wavered. She weighed the odds, running scenarios behind wolf-like eyes. “You don’t know what they did to him,” she said. “You think you’re saving a person, but it’s just tissue now. All the rest is gone.”

Elira grunted, pulling out a wicked-looking ampoule and jamming it into Theron’s upper arm. “You’d be surprised what comes back, given time and the right chemistry. You, of all people, should understand that.”

The female’s mouth tightened. “That’s why I’m the one sent to do this. I know exactly what happens if you let an unstable hybrid loose. I know what it costs.” Her gaze flicked to Claire again, then to Theron, and for an instant, something softer slipped through, a glimmer of empathy, a crack in the manufactured logic.

Claire seized on it. “He can fight it. He already is.” She took a moment longer to look at the stranger before asking, “Who are you?” The female shook her head. “My name is Riven, and you’ve never seen a real failure mode, have you?” She inched closer, blade rising, every muscle in her body at max tension. “Don’t make me do this the hard way.”

Archer stepped sideways, putting his body between Riven and Elira. “You want him, you’ll have to kill us all. Even then, you’ll need the time to finish the job before the Brotherhood’s own tripwires pop.” Riven’s mouth twisted. “The perimeter’s already sealed. You’re boxed in. The only variable now is how much collateral damage you want to take on.”

At that, Elira finally looked up, her face gone pale with exhaustion but her eyes full of sharp, angry light. “We have no intention of dying here,” she said. “You can help us, or you can get in the way. But if you try to neutralize him, you’re going to blow out this entire level.”

Riven blinked, recalibrating. “So what’s the plan? Escape and let the first flare-up level a few acres at a time?” She said it as if it was a challenge, but there was a current of dread under the surface, as if the worst-case scenario was the one she’d most like to avoid.

Claire looked at her brother, slumped against Elira, Hollow energy leaking out of him like the hiss of a punctured canister. She thought about the dreams, about the howls and the corridors and the promise that he’d made in every silent, suffering look. “He’s not a bomb,” Claire said. “He’s a person. I won’t let you treat him like a weapon.”

“That’s exactly what the Brotherhood said,” Riven spat, closing the distance. “And look how that ended.” A split second before the first move, Archer caught Riven’s eye. “Don’t do this,” he said, low and even. “You don’t have to.” Riven’s response was almost inaudible. “I actually do.”

The tension snapped: Riven lunged, and Archer met her halfway, steel shrieking against steel. Elira ducked low, dragging Theron back and rolling him behind an overturned crate. Claire barely had time to raise her hands before the air ignited, every sigil in the corridor flaring blue-white in response to Riven’s attack.

Archer’s defense was surgical, each parry calculated to waste the least amount of energy, to hold the line long enough for the others to escape. Riven fought like a thing possessed, her blade a blur, her left hand weaving sign-counters to blunt Archer’s wards. It was a master class in violence, and in another life Claire might have watched in awe. Here, there was only the sick certainty that if Riven got past Archer, she would kill her brother without hesitation.

Elira fumbled at her belt, yanked a fistful of copper wire free, and began wrapping it around Theron’s arms, his chest, his head. “Claire,” she snapped, “I need a circuit anchor. Now.” Claire scrambled, ducked under a flying elbow, and skidded to where Elira had half-bundled Theron in copper mesh. She tore open her palm on the sharp edge and pressed the wound to the center of his sternum, ignoring the fresh agony as the wire bit into both their skin. Instantly, the Hollow charge flooded her nervous system, ice in the veins, fire in the bones, every heartbeat a shot of pure, unspeakable power. The overload nearly shut her down, but Claire rode the wave, gritting her teeth and staring at her brother’s face. “Stay with me,” she hissed. “I’m not letting you go.”

Across the hall, Riven landed a lucky shot, scoring Archer’s arm, and kicked him back a step. She pivoted, blade aimed directly at the tangle of bodies where Claire, Elira, and Theron were bound by their jury-rigged circuit. Riven’s expression was raw, not anger but a kind of desperate determination. “He’s going to detonate!” she yelled. “You have no idea what’s coming!”

“Neither do you,” Claire snapped, and bared her teeth in a feral grin. She twisted the wire tighter, felt the energy rise and rise, and this time, she let it. The sigils along the corridor all flared at once, not blue but a strange, inverted color that tasted of honey and ozone and the deep, iron tang of the forge.

The overload hit like a tidal wave. Claire screamed, not in pain, but in defiance, and in the next breath she felt Theron’s heartbeat sync to her own, a stutter, then a boom, then a steady, thundering rhythm. For the first time since they’d found him, his body moved under its own power, one hand rising, fingers flexing, palm outstretched to shield Claire from the oncoming blade.

The world froze. Riven stopped mid-stride, the tip of her sword inches from Theron’s face. Her eyes went wide, and for the first time, fear crowded out everything else. “Impossible,” she whispered. But there he was, Theron, battered and monstrous and alive, staring back at his would-be executioner with eyes full of raw, unfiltered self.

Archer slid between them, blood dripping down his arm but posture unbroken. “You want to kill him,” he said, “you’ll have to get past me again. And this time, I don’t think you will.”

Riven hesitated, jaw clenched so tight her teeth must have screamed. Then, with a single, furious motion, she drew a sigil in the air and plunged her blade into the floor. The wards along the corridor all shorted at once, sparks flying, the metal rails glowing white-hot. The shockwave knocked everyone sideways, Claire and Elira collapsing atop Theron, Archer rolling to absorb the blow.

When the smoke cleared, Riven was gone, vanished into the corridor beyond, leaving only the echo of her last wordless scream. Theron groaned, eyelids fluttering, then locked eyes with Claire. His mouth moved, searching for a word, any word, and in the end all he could muster was her name.

“Claire,” he rasped. She sobbed, once, raw and unguarded. “I’m here.”

Elira rolled off them both, clutching her chest, face split in a manic smile. “If that didn’t fry us, I think we’re in the clear. For now.” Archer sat up, checked his wound, and gave a half-shrug. “She’ll be back. Or worse will.” Claire nodded, already hauling Theron to his feet, the raw power in his veins leaking through into her own and for the first time, she didn’t mind. They staggered forward, battered and half-blind, ready for whatever came next. 

And what came next was immediate and unrelenting as the next ten seconds blurred into an apocalypse of teeth and fire.

Riven had not retreated. She simply changed her angle of attack. As the corridor overloaded with sigil-flares and raw Hollow discharge, she came in low, using the blackout as cover. Archer anticipated her, intercepting with a brute-force ward that caught the edge of her blade and threw up a fountain of sparks. But Riven had half expected it and was prepared with counters. She twisted at the last instant, let his ward slide past, and drove her knee into his chest hard enough to stagger him.

Claire barely registered the blow before Riven was on her, blade slashing at her head. The only reason she survived the first strike was that Riven wasn’t aiming to kill, she wanted the shield dropped, wanted access to the limp, Hollow-soaked mass of Theron behind her. She got neither.

Claire had never been a fighter. She was a planner, a fixer, someone who did her best work in the gaps between disasters. But today she met the attack without hesitation, raised her forearm, and took the cut right across the bracer. The blade bit deep, she felt the flex of steel, the gnash against the sigil inlaid below her wrist, but it held. She slammed her amulet into Riven’s jaw, a lucky punch more than a technique, and for a millisecond the world held still.

Riven spat blood, unfazed. “You can’t hold this line. Let go.” Claire only pressed forward, half-aware of the tears streaming down her face, blurring the world to a smear of blue and fire. “I won’t let you kill him.”

Behind her, Elira was a whirlwind of motion, having apparently found new energy from a secret reservoir within, weaving fresh bands of copper around Theron’s limbs, overlaying them with what looked like salt and glitter, but which Claire knew from experience to be far less poetic, a proprietary compound for conducting magical surges and, in a pinch, jump-starting a stopped heart.

Archer had recovered, and this time he didn’t play defense. He threw himself at Riven, tackling her to the floor in a clatter of weapons and flesh. They rolled, Archer using his size, Riven her speed, and for a while it was too close to call. But even the Brotherhood’s best-trained assets couldn’t fight entropy; for every move Riven made, Archer found a way to slow her, to sap her momentum. And with every breath, the background charge of Hollow energy grew brighter, sharper, as if the whole room was bent on going nova.

Riven broke free, flinging Archer into the wall, and took a half-step toward Theron. Elira stepped between them, arms raised, palms out. “He’s coming back,” Elira said, voice high and thin but sure. “If you want to stop the meltdown, you will let me finish.” Riven sneered. “I know what comes next. You’ll stabilize the body, then lose the mind. In five minutes, that thing will eat through the floor and level the entire complex.”

She raised her blade, ready to end it, but Claire was faster. She threw herself at Riven, locking her arms around the woman’s torso in a full-body tackle that surprised both of them. For a second, Riven thrashed, but Claire held on, digging her fingers in, all teeth and nails and the desperate faith that maybe, just maybe, love was enough.

Riven hissed in her ear, “You’re going to die for him?” Claire nodded, already feeling the magical charge climbing up her spine, needles and ice and then a heat so intense she thought she’d combust on the spot. “Better than living without him a moment longer.”

It broke something in Riven. She slammed Claire back against the wall, hard enough to crack plaster, but when she stepped away, her blade dropped a fraction, her eyes haunted. The standoff lasted all of three heartbeats. Behind them, Theron began to move, and he didn’t wake gently.

There was no gasp of breath, no slow stirring. Instead, his body jerked upright, every muscle strung tight, arms flaring as if he meant to break the shackles through pure rage. His eyes snapped open, and the light behind them was not human, not even animal, a cold, burning clarity that seared through all memory and all mercy.

He looked around, blinked, and bared his teeth.

The sound he made was not a voice, not a scream. It was a negative space, the kind of noise that erases other sounds, a wound in the air. The glass wall of the chamber behind them spider-webbed with fractures. Every sigil on the walls sizzled and, one by one, began to melt, the wardings unable to contain what they’d built.

Riven reacted first. She rushed at Elira, blade glinting. Elira caught it on a wrist-wrapped copper coil and redirected the force, the blade scoring her palm but missing its target. Archer fired two bolts from his crossbow, one at Riven, one at the iron node beside her. The first hit her thigh, the second sparked the node in a burst of red light, turning the hallway into a blast furnace.

The violence only woke Theron further.

He broke the last of the shadow-bonds still on his ankles and staggered to his feet, swaying. He was more than six feet of weaponized agony, copper wire still wrapped around most of his body, bones visible under the skin, runes crawling up his chest, and eyes lit from within by the Hollow’s singular fire. His mouth hung open, tongue lolling, but he did not speak.

Instead, he reached for Claire.

She barely managed to brace as he crashed into her, arms locking around her back, his body ice-cold, his breath singeing the hair off her scalp. She could feel the magic inside him, a cauldron ready to boil over, and she could feel, deep down, the tremor of fear that he might snap her in half and not even know it. But he didn’t. His grip loosened. The heat lessened. He buried his face in her hair and shuddered once, hard.

Behind them, Riven scrambled to her feet, favoring her leg. She took aim, blade steady, and for a second Claire thought this was the end. But Archer put himself between Riven and the siblings, weapon out, his own body a last, desperate dam. “He’s in control,” Archer said, breath ragged. “Back off.” Riven shook her head, fury and horror wrestling behind her eyes. “It’s not real control. You’ll see.”

Theron raised his head. He stared at Riven, and his mouth opened. Words spilled out, choked, broken, but undeniably his own. “Please,” he said, the voice a ruin but unmistakable. “Let us go.”

It was not a command, but a request, a thing that didn’t belong in the arsenal of a weapon. Riven hesitated. The hallway trembled with the force of Theron’s will, the glass floor buckling. In the space between one heartbeat and the next, Riven blinked, then lowered her blade.

“That’s not possible,” she whispered. Theron collapsed, body spasming. The Hollow fire surged, then sputtered. Elira rushed in, slapping a patch over the worst of his burns, wiring more copper mesh tight around his wrist. Claire caught her brother’s face, made him look at her. “Theron. Stay with me, not with them.” He blinked, focused. For a second, he almost smiled. “You came. You kept your promise,” he said, and slumped unconscious into her arms.

A series of thunderous pops shook the corridor; the Brotherhood’s final line of defense was activating, the collapse sequence chewing through every last spell and wall in the system. The sigils on the walls flared, then winked out one by one, leaving the space to echo with the panicked, guttural alarms of a dying machine.

Archer helped Elira haul Theron up between them. Riven watched, weapon down, stunned to silence. Claire turned to her. “Come with us.” For a moment, Riven looked tempted. But the training was too deep, the doubts too old. “I can’t,” she said. “I’m not built for afters.”

“You could be,” Claire said, not out of hope, but because it was true. Riven shook her head, then drew a spiral in the air, a farewell, not a threat, and vanished down the corridor. They moved fast, not looking back.

The fortress fell apart as they ran. Stairways buckled, walls bled black resin, and the air was so thick with energy that even breathing became an act of will. Archer shouldered through, clearing a path with blind faith and crossbow bolts; Elira navigated the growing chaos by intuition and curses; Claire dragged Theron’s body with everything left in her.

They reached daylight battered and burned, hands raw, lungs shot. They kept moving, not daring to stop until the Brotherhood’s fortress was a smear of smoke on the horizon and the only thing left was the echo of what they’d survived.

It took hours for Theron to wake.

When he did, it was slow, gradual, a reverse detonation that stitched him back together cell by cell. He blinked, shivered, and drew his first clean breath in decades. Claire hugged him, careful not to break anything. “You’re safe,” she said. Theron nodded, then met her eyes, Hollow glow gone, replaced by a deeper, stranger brightness.

“I’m not,” he said. “But I’m me.”

They set out for home, uncertain but unbroken. Somewhere behind them, Riven watched their retreat, a silhouette sharp as grief against the broken sky. She would not follow today. But tomorrow was unwritten, and for the first time, it felt like a thing worth living to see.