The garden wore its ruin like a half-remembered dream. Moonlight pooled in the broken bowl of a fountain, trickling along cracks as if trying to stitch the marble back together. The hedges were torn, roses half-burned, half-frozen, their petals curled like the mouths of sleepers on the edge of a scream. Steam from earlier clashes drifted through the shrubs in soft ribbons, catching the twin moons and smearing their light into pale, wavering halos.
Andy felt the grit of pulverized stone under his boots and the raw sting of smoke in his throat. Heat flickered along his spine, the dragonblood restless and thrumming, ready to surge at the faintest pull. He flexed his fingers around his blades. Each hilt felt heavier than before, as if the garden itself had climbed into the metal and refused to be shaken free.
Nia's staff hummed beside him, a steady, silver pulse that matched the beat of his heart. Her hair clung to her jaw in damp threads; her eyes—the clear, defiant silver of a winter river—never left the woman who floated over the fountain's lip as calmly as a swan.
Kayla's gown was the color of tame sunlight, the kind that warmed kitchens and window sills. But the light that seeped from the hairline fracture cutting across her cheekbone was the light of noon burned too hot: a molten gold that made the air ripple and the pupils narrow. It slid through the garden and pooled in the cracks, filled the ruined roses until their charred petals gleamed like coins dredged from a fire.
"You've survived more than most," Kayla said, that sweet chorus of a voice layering gently over itself—human and not. "But survival is not proof. Oaths are not proof. Love is not proof."
Her hand opened.
The ground answered.
Gold burst from the soil. Not threads this time, but bands—fluent as silk, cruel as wire—curling up the ruins and the air itself. The first coil came for Andy's right wrist; his reflex sliced it cleanly with a bright, wet hiss. Two more arrowed for Nia's waist and throat. She spun, staff describing a ring of light that shattered both, silver shards bell-chiming across the flagstones. But where the broken links landed, they bled into the stone and birthed twins, gliding away like snakes into the dark.
"Stay with me," Nia breathed.
"Always," Andy said, and the promise steadied something skittering in his chest.
Then the bands came in earnest.
He dropped into Dragon Warrior Form—Tier 2, wings of heat unfurling in a crimson flare that turned shadows to leaping, long-limbed giants. Twin Surge. Flame bit and water sliced, their collision birthing hissing steam that slapped chains aside and made the air hum with pressure. In the moving veil, his eyes learned to read the gleam of Kayla's metal. He moved without thinking—slash, pivot, drag the left blade to freeze a loop and shatter it with the right.
Nia was a white star to his storm. Arcane Detection unfurled in a shimmering web, pinpricks of sickly gold brightening wherever Kayla's corruption knotted the garden. She swept her staff; Arcane Amplification turned the sweep into an arc of silver that flensed tumors from rose canes and left them sighing into ash. Her Light Barrier bloomed wherever a band got through Andy's cutting radius, each dome singing once—tang—as if struck from the outside by an invisible knuckle.
The bands learned them.
They split, braided, changed angles. They avoided blades and sought hollows, loved the thin space under the arm, the gentle slope under a lifted chin. Andy slashed and stamped and swung; Nia turned, slid, shouldered barriers like shields. And still the gold insinuated. He felt it kiss the underside of his wrist; even as he cut it, its heat left a scorch that pulsed with a sick, sweet ache.
"Left!" Nia snapped.
He didn't look. His body listened. He threw the blade across his back to meet the band described by her warning, felt the vibration sing into his shoulder. He slid into that song. Two more notes—her breath and the hummed throb of her staff—told him where to put his feet as the garden tried to rearrange itself under him.
Kayla watched with the patient attention of a priest reading a long, beloved prayer.
"You choreograph well," she said. "But dances end."
She closed her hand.
Every band in the garden changed direction at once.
They crossed the air in a lattice. Andy's blade sheared one, two, four—he might have made the eighth if the ninth hadn't found the single angle left. It tucked itself into his guard with coy, perfect cruelty and cinched. Heat bit his bicep. He roared, fire bursting instinctively; the band flashed white, softened, but didn't break.
Nia's barrier came for him. It did not arrive in time for his arm, but it intercepted the band that had been aimed for his throat. The dome rang under the strike and hairline cracks jittered across it. Silver light crawled to mend them, but two more bands stitched the barrier with careless speed. The dome held. For a heartbeat. Then a pressure like a held breath became a pop like the break of skin to a clean needle; the barrier folded and reknit, folded and reknit, then shattered altogether.
"Back—!" Nia began, but the air decided for them.
The gold clenched.
It wasn't an explosion so much as a choice. The bands around them tightened and the garden made a sound like a ship's hull when winter refuses to yield: a long, low groan that echoed out of the stone. The ground did not crack; it changed. A dome of gold light breathed itself into being, firm and springy, like the skin of drum leather, and pushed Andy away from Nia with the thoughtless steadiness of a river that has always been there.
"Nia!" he shouted, throwing his weight to wedge the tip of one blade into the gold. It gave less than flesh and more than iron—a living thing that didn't mind pain. The tip sank hand-deep, then the dome pulsed and spat the blade back out like a snake dislodging a thorn.
Her palm hit the inside of the barrier. He slapped his hand to the same spot. Heat and cool met through gold; their fingers found each other through nothing but their memory of the shape. He could feel the slight callus by her ring finger over bone; she could feel the long-healed nick by his middle knuckle. It wasn't touch. It was recognition.
The barrier thickened until the light itself looked dense—honey congealed into amber.
Kayla tilted her head and smiled as if catching lovers in a stolen moment. "Steady. I want to watch this."
The barrier breathed them apart.
The garden blinked.
And the world was not the garden anymore.
System Alert: Bond Interference detected.
Warning: Host separation exceeding safety threshold.
Stability: 63%… 55%… 49%.
Recommended Action: Anchor synchronization.
Darkness walked in on soft feet. A sky was there, but it had forgotten stars; the moons were dimmed behind a scrim of red cloud, as if the night had been wounded in some other battle. Ash sifted down. Stone emerged under Andy's boots—stone he did not know, stone that did not know him.
His blades were still in his hands, good as prayer.
The thing that stepped through the ash looked like him if someone had scraped away the human with a knife made of thirst. Scales stitched up the ribs and hid the heart. Wings hung at the shoulder blades like drapes of meat and flame. The eyes were his when rage burned hottest—ruddy, faceted, the pupil lost.
"Hello," it said in his voice, and the word carried smoke. "You look tired."
Andy lifted one blade, half-guard, the other low. "I'm not here for you."
"You're always here for me," the dragon-self murmured, slipping close. It moved without steps, as if the ash had decided it was nearer now. "You bring me everywhere. You're what I wear when she's not looking."
It didn't swing. It appeared swinging. Andy crossed both blades and met the stroke, felt it there, the iron, the clean geometry, the love of impact for its opposite. He slid and took a cut, made a cut, found a rhythm he wanted to hate, because rhythm meant kinship.
"You'll burn her," the thing whispered conversationally, probing. Test slash high, test slash low. "Not today, perhaps. Not with the staff watching you like a leash. But one day. You'll be tired. She'll be far. Someone will cry your name. And the fire will answer. It always answers before you do."
He pushed off, flared wings, darted oblique, cut. The blade kissed a seam between scales; flame bled like blood; the dragon-self hissed and laughed.
System Notice: Cognitive intrusion pattern recognized.
Defense Bias: Elicitation (Fear). Counter with Affirmation (Shared Vows).
Stability: 44%… 41%…
He didn't know if the System was a voice in his skull or a thought he'd dressed as one. He didn't care. He knew what the instruction meant.
He saw Nia's mouth in his mind. He heard her say Always. He said: "I have a vow."
The dragon-self smiled with his mouth and made it a weapon. "Vows are oil. Fire loves oil."
It lunged. He met it. For a breath, the world narrowed to the hinge of a wrist and the weight of a shoulder and the old truth that poised steel denies lies. Then the illusion changed—not attacked, changed—and the dragon-self was no longer scaled, or rather the scales had sloughed and left behind a man who was Andy if all the cares that ever laid a hand on him had slid away: not gentle change, not exhaustion, not grief, but the cold that comes if you choose not to love anything to keep from losing it.
This version didn't glow. He gleamed. The blades in his hands were clean of ash. His hair was combed. His eyes had the clarity of clear water and the compassion of stone.
"I am you without her," he said, and the voice was quiet enough to be almost a mercy. "I am precise. I am faster. I am not weighed."
"And you are empty," Andy said, and his own voice startled him, because it knew that for certain.
The other Andy tilted his head. "Emptiness is light."
It moved.
No dragon surge. Just a step and a cut that had no wasted muscle in it. Andy brought his blades up in a cross and understood, as he felt his wrists jar, that the worst opponent he would ever face would be the version of himself who'd decided to never be tired.
He gave ground, and the ash tightened its circle like a crowd leaning in.
Stability: 38%… 35%… 31%.
"Stop pretending the fire is the problem," the empty Andy murmured as he wrote line after line across the red air. "The problem is the girl. You have allowed the world to hinge on a soft voice and a ring. You have put your neck under it."
He batted a blade aside and slid under the angle to stab. Andy twisted, took the shallow cut in the meat of his shoulder instead of the throat. Heat bled; he used it; he let the dragon in him lick the pain and turn it to speed. The other Andy's eyes brightened a fraction, like a man noting a technique in a student and awarding it a small nod.
"Better," he said. "But not enough. You could be a god if you stopped loving the ground."
Andy grounded his heel and felt every blade of ruined grass that wasn't really there. He breathed and in that breath he heard Nia's voice say the word together with its bright, unarguable center. He drove forward in an ugly, human rush, no form at all, and because the empty Andy's forms were perfect they did not know where to put themselves around that mess. The first blade caromed off a hip; the second caught the knuckles. He leaned into the bodies colliding, into the sour smell of ash and the taste of blood in his mouth and the ridiculousness of heartbeats doing their animal work.
He headbutted himself in the nose.
It wasn't smart. It wasn't pretty. It was terrible and real. The empty Andy cursed, stumbled, and the illusion around him slipped and for a blink Andy saw something like fear under the clear water and loved it.
"Not empty enough," he said, and drove him back.
The ash shifted. The sky lowered. The other's clarity reknit. It rolled its shoulders with a faint sharpened amusement and began again.
Stability: 29%… 26%… 22%.
Countermeasure recommended: Anchor synchronization.
Anchor link: Weak… Weak… Unavailable (Obstruction).
Obstruction. Gold in the way.
He shut his eyes on purpose and let the dragonblood come up, the heat he was always told to keep under the door, the rush and the burn and the idea of tearing through anything tight. He did not unleash it. He aimed it at the word obstruction. Something creaked in him, like an old hinge that had been un-greased for a while and was finally asked to work. He felt, faintly, the answer at the base of his finger where a ring lay kissed against skin.
He heard a breath that wasn't his.
— — —
Nia's illusion was a miracle of taste. The hedges were trimmed, the fountain's water ran clear and clean as wine, and the roses were not flowers so much as definitions of what roses would be if they were ideas and not proofs. She stood in the civility of it with her staff and thought: This is how it must seem to him, looking at me: a place that always thinks symmetry is the same thing as safety.
Andy stepped out from behind a hedge with the specific, terrible quiet of a man who did not wish to surprise the person he would hurt.
She knew at once it wasn't him. The mouth was right, and the slanted line of the left eyebrow, and the scar under the chin. The eyes were not. They were perfectly polite. His voice, when it spoke, was gentle and wrong.
"Lady Nia," he said, and the title made her roll her fingers tighter around the staff because she knew her Andy didn't say it like that, as if he held a tray.
"You're not him."
"No," the phantom agreed with friendly courtesy. "I am what you fear he becomes when you are not looking. The reasonable version. The version who understands that if the equation is arranged correctly the fire can be made to produce work with minimal loss."
"Work," she said, and kept her voice from shaking by making it precise as the blade of a paring knife. "What a thrilling way to speak of the person I love."
"Love, yes." The phantom put his hands in his pockets and considered her. "You are a beam. He is a wall that refuses to be straight. You brace him. It is admirable. It is exhausting. You will be admired and then you will be adored and then you will be resented. Because beams tire."
She lifted the staff to hide the way her fingers wanted to tremble. "I am not a beam. I am a person. I am allowed to choose things that cost me."
"You are a House." The new voice that entered the garden came not from the phantom but from behind her. It was the voice she had grown up inside of like a room—a deep, careful voice that had rarely raised itself because others had learned to lower theirs. "You are duty. You are Everhart."
Nia turned slowly.
Lord Everhart stepped into the light of the perfect fountain. He looked exactly as he did in memory—more exact, perhaps, because illusions have time to polish memory. He carried his authority the way some men carry a blade: loosely, without fuss, because it knows how to bite without being waved.
"Father," Nia said, and the word knocked against her teeth like a foreign coin. "Not now."
"Especially now." His gaze slid to the phantom Andy and disliked him courteously. It slid back to her. "You can put your hands in a fire to warm them. You cannot put your future there. You will leave nothing for the city but bones."
She stood very straight and breathed carefully because the air here remembered how to smell like old parchment and lemon oil and the dust of training halls. "I am a House," she said. "And I am your daughter. And I am also a person who chooses her life."
"The city chose you before you could speak." There was sadness in it, which is what made it a better knife. "It cost your mother, who also loved the way you love: instantly, and with the part of her that she should have left for herself. Do not make me watch you go the way she did."
The phantom Andy looked down at the fountain, saw himself in it, and sighed as if inconvenienced by the chance to perform decency. "He is dangerous," he said, making the sentence sound like the truth you want to tell kindly but early.
Nia found that somewhere in all the symmetry the roses had little flaws—the petal edges wanted to brown where old sun had touched them. She loved the flaw with a sudden ferocity that lit her from the bone out. She lifted her chin. "He is dangerous," she said. "So am I. So is the world. I am not here to choose safe things. I am here to be true."
Her father's mouth moved as if he wished to smile and had forgotten the muscle for it. "Truth is a rafter," he said quietly. "It looks beautiful from the floor. It is not what keeps roofs up. Be rational."
"Rafters do keep roofs up," she snapped, and surprised herself into laughter because of the relief of simple accuracy. "And you built me like one. I am your city. I am simply choosing to be a roof over the person who will stand in the rain and the fire for it."
The phantom Andy was at her shoulder immediately with his softness sharpened to suggestion, and the old trick of it nearly undid her: "Then watch as he stands in the fire in a way that will simply make you want to run into it."
She turned the staff and the crystal at its tip gathered the fountain's light and made a small sun. The light showed the seam in the world like chalk lines. The Lord Everhart in front of her put a hand up against the brightness and for a second one of his fingers did not cast a shadow.
"Not him," Nia said gently, and—because this was her father's shape even if it was not his self—she did not strike. She reached, instead, and pressed two fingers to the image's sleeve where it had always been shiny from years of cuffs rubbing. And because memory was her ally, the illusion flinched and cut away from her fingers as it remembered a seamstress scolding.
It wavered. She saw behind it the girl she had been, reciting until her throat ached, the weight of the diadem tried on in a mirror and put back into its box because her head had been too small. She saw the woman she was now, letting a commoner tuck blankets around her knees after battle because she had been too proud to admit cold.
She faced the phantom Andy, whose eyes were patient as a ledger. "I do not leash him," she said. "I love him. He is not a wall I brace. He is the other half of the arch. We lean and we hold and the city crosses under us."
"How poetic," the phantom said, the smile slight and neat.
"How factual," she said, and swung.
She did not use Light Barrier. She did not defend. She invoked nothing that made a dome. She used Arcane Amplification and lanced a beam of clean white through the phantom's sternum and watched it write its disbelief in the air as it came apart.
"Good girl," Lord Everhart's shape murmured, and for a terrible second she wanted to cry because the inflection was almost right. Then, like a gentleman who finds he has been seated beside an uncouthness at dinner, the shape folded its napkin perfectly and dissolved movingly back into the fountain's reflection.
System Notice: Cognitive intrusion mitigated (Nia).
Resilience modifier: +12%.
Stability: 21%… 19%… 17%…
Status: Anchor link—Attempting handshake… Failed (Obstruction).
"Andy," she said aloud, into the stable air of the perfect picture. A pulse in her ring answered, faint, scared, hot.
— — —
In the red ash, Andy found that the empty version of himself did not like being dirty. So he threw ash.
He didn't hurl it like a weapon. He stepped it. He used his wings to pool it in the path the other wanted to use for beautiful footwork, and when the other's boot sought purchase and got grit instead the small irritation wrote a big miscalculation somewhere up the chain in a clean brain. He took advantage. He cut across the line that would have taken him in the throat. He paid for the decision with a slice on his forearm. The System ran a warm hand along the cut and said nothing useful and everything necessary: there.
The other Andy disrupted all the ash at once with a little kick of annoyance that revealed preference and Andy grinned like a fool because preference is humanity. He bled on purpose where the illusion liked clean.
He bled, and he thought of Nia's laugh back at the keep when someone had spilled ink and she had dipped a finger in it and drawn a mustache on a portrait. He bled and he thought of her hand in his, and how there was a little ridge by the knuckle from the staff's long relationship with bone.
"I choose the ground," he said conversationally, and slashed.
The blade connected. It didn't cut the other's body as much as it cut a thought that the body had built around itself. The thought warped and the skin under it rippled with the warp. The other Andy's eyes went wide for the first time. "You—"
"Love is weight," Andy said. "It keeps me from blowing away."
He leapt into the close. The clean blades were too honest to lie. They told him where they would be. He listened and he put something in that space that was messy and living. His shoulder. His knee. His heart.
The other Andy broke finally—only slightly, only half a breath, but like a violin string splitting grain. It snarled. It lost its neatness and found a line from the dragon-self's book. It ripped.
The world shuddered with it.
Stability: 15%… 13%… 11%…
Warning: Critical threshold approaching.
Countermeasure: Bond Anchor 2.0 initializing…
Anchor path: Blocked (Divine Compression).
Secondary path: Engagement Ring—Pulse Sync.
He thought: Pulse.
He felt it.
Not under his finger. Under his ribs. A silver beat that did not give itself to gold. It hit the inside of his chest and then the inside of his skull and then a place that wasn't a place where he had once whispered words to a girl in a cave and received a laugh like a light.
"Nia," he said.
— — —
The perfect garden frayed like silk set too close to a candle.
"I hear you," Nia said, and lifted her staff until it vibrated with enough power to make her wrist bones thrum. She tapped the Lunar Sigil Pendant at her throat with her free hand and it burned a clear, comfortable cold, the kind that kisses a fever away. The pendant's sense rolled out like a tide and mapped the symmetry of the place, found a seam that looked like it belonged next to a hinge.
She raised the staff and brought it down like a bell hammer on a world. The seam yelped and sprang. Behind it was nothing tidy—red ash and a man coming toward her with his hair mussed and his arm bleeding and his mouth open because he was saying her name.
"Anchor," she said.
"Anchor," he echoed.
The world did what the word said.
System Notice: Anchor synchronization—Partial.
Stability: 18%… 22%… 24%.
Host interference: Divine Chains—Active.
Recommendation: Dual affirmation.
Andy reached for her through the seam. The gold between them made a noise like a harp string drawn to breaking. He couldn't fit his hand through; she couldn't fit hers; they both put two fingers to the split and the light flared angrily.
"Say it," she told him, and the command steadied his heart like a hand pressed hard against a wound.
"I am not my blood," he said.
"And I am not only my House," she said, and the seam buckled.
"I am yours," he said.
"And I am yours," she said.
"Together," he said.
"Together," she said.
Kayla's laughter poured through the garden like candlewax spilled in a pattern. "Say anything you like," she sang in that echoed voice. "Words are thin."
"Not these," Nia said, and slammed the staff down one last time.
The seam tore. It did not open a door. It turned the space between their breaths into a bridge.
System Notice: Anchor synchronization—Full.
Stability: 37%… 42%… 48%.
Eternal link condition—nearing…
Warning: Divine Compression increasing.
The gold collapsed.
Not into nothing; into more. Bands multiplied, thickened, braided until the air was a cathedral of chain. Each link bore a saint's face with its mouth sewn shut and its eyes weeping molten metal. The cathedral closed gently around their attempt at a bridge.
Andy narrowed his eyes. "You decorate your prisons."
Kayla's voice smiled. "I beautify mistakes."
He looked at Nia; she looked at him; and without planning they moved. He took the dragon heat and pushed it into Dragon Veins until the fire sought structure instead of fuel. She took Arcane Amplification and stripped it of its grand gesture to get to its cleanest energy. He cut. She traced. The chain-cathedral revised itself to avoid him and had to expose a support to do it; she lanced the support; he grabbed the falling weight and swung it into another trellis of gold. The air filled with the hiss and ring of hot metal shedding holiness for honesty.
The System's pulse thudded through their bones like a third heart.
Stability: 52%… 56%…
Bond Progression: Star 2 – 48% → 49%.
Foreign Influence: High.
Note: Extended engagement risks permanent separation.
Sweat carved cold paths through ash on Andy's face. He laughed without amusement. "We're not winning fast enough."
"We don't have to win," Nia said, breath ragged and delighted with the ugly truth. "We have to not lose until she makes the mistake we need."
"She doesn't make mistakes."
"She thinks love is thin," Nia said, and gave him a look that burned hotter than his blood. "That's already two mistakes. She thinks vows are only words. That's three."
He wanted to kiss her stupid right then; he settled for living through the next minute so that he could.
The chains shuddered. New sigils flickered along them, unfamiliar and mean, shapes that made the eyes want to turn away. The cathedral began to hum. The hum went into the bones of their teeth; into the drum of the ears; into the place under the salt of the tongue where the body decides if it trusts a meal.
"New song," Andy said tightly.
"Counter-song," Nia said, and lifted her staff. Public Resonance would have been simple if the city had been here. It wasn't. She made do with memory: faces in windows, the weight of coins in the hands of the baker when they paid late and he pretended not to notice, the guard who'd grinned and slid them extra water after the last fight. She sang—not with her throat, but with the exactitude of her love for those things.
The chains faltered. Not stopped. Remembered.
"One more—" she began, and the cathedral decided it had played long enough.
It folded.
They were pressed flat together by a force that didn't understand ribs. Gold streamed past like a river discovering it can go down a mountain faster if it is less interested in poetry. Andy tried to throw a barrier with his shoulder; Nia threw one with her staff and it cracked immediately. The cathedral's roof sealed. The world dwindled to the hot space between his mouth and hers and the sweet awful fact that they could not breathe enough for both.
Stability: 44%… 39%… 33%… 27%.
Warning: Hypoxia risk—mental collapse imminent.
Countermeasure: Anchor 2.0—hard engage.
Status: Failing (Divine Compression).
Secondary: Engagement Ring—Resonant Pulse… Sync Achieved (Weak).
The ring burned.
It wasn't heat that took flesh away. It was heat that left truth. Under their rings, bone remembered a promise. Nia choked a laugh into the sound of the garden trying to be a throat.
"Andy."
He tried "Nia" and it turned into "N—" because the air wasn't enough.
She head-butted him softly, perfectly, like the apology you give before you say what you must. He saw her eyes up closer than the shape of himself. He saw there the thing the dragon-self had tried to persuade him did not exist: a patient, idiot miracle that said I am not leaving with such sweet stupidity that gods should have envied it.
His lungs found air they had no right to. He found a word he had not used yet because it belonged to other rooms and other ceremonies and because it was heavy and he had wanted to be sure his hands were strong enough to hold it when he put it down between them.
He said: "Oath."
Her mouth broke into a smile that tasted of salt and home.
She said: "Oath."
The ring's pulse synced. The Bond Anchor spun like a coin and fell onto the one side that had both their names carved into it.
System Notice: Anchor synchronization—Resonant Lock.
Stability: 33%… 36%… 41%… 47%.
Precursor Condition: Eternal Soul Resonance—Threshold 91%.
Foreign Compression: Increasing.
Advice: Maintain dual affirmation.
Gold pressed. They pressed back, not with muscle—muscle was busy being alive—but with insistence. They insisted with the soundlessness of two people who have decided a room will not be a cell.
The cathedral cracked.
When it did, it did not do it in drama. It did it in administration. A link misfiled. A sigil mis-copied. A seam allowed to meet another seam at an angle that had not been approved. Nia found it and pointed; Andy cut it; the huge beautiful wrong thing failed like a schedule under a good storm.
Air came in.
They fell forward and their foreheads touched and the laugh that ran out of them both made the old hedges remember wind.
The garden crept back, shyly. A broken statue tried to be a person again; a rose attempted a petal and managed a curl of black that still smelled like sweetness.
Kayla's silhouette stood amid it, gathering itself until it looked less like a woman and more like an idea of a woman forced through a jar too small. Her cheek's crack had widened. Light's blood ran down it and did not cool. Her smile had too many meanings.
"You will crack your hearts," she said softly, and her chorus had gained voices, some not quite human. "It will be so easy to put my hands into them when they do."
Andy lifted a blade that had done a night's work and still wanted morning. Nia set the staff and it found her shoulder with the comfort of a thing that had known exactly where it belonged since before anyone wrote down where to put it.
"Try," Nia said.
Kayla's eyes flashed, and the flash had a geometry that made the pupils of everyone who saw it want to be circles. The ground rolled. The fountain lifted its water like ribbons; the ribbons turned to glass and hung in the air, catching moonlight and sharpening it into spears without needing metal.
System Notice: Divine Power escalation.
Threat Tier: Archon Fragment → Ascending.
Bond Progression: Star 2 – 49% (Locked).
Forecast: Breakthrough potential in progress window (T < short).
Andy and Nia glanced at each other once more, the glance that says the rest of the conversation out loud without wasting time on words. He stepped into the fire. She stepped into the light. The fire and light stepped into each other.
The garden screamed. The spears fell. The night decided whether to burn or shine.
And somewhere above them, the twin moons watched with their old, cold love, as if they had been waiting a very long time to see if two small bright stubborn creatures would do what the sky had bet they might.
To be continued in Chapter 52B.