They fell.
For a long, dizzying heartbeat the world was only blur and sound — air rushing, shard-sparkle light from the shattered sanctuary, the Devourer's roar paling into a monstrous echo. Dirt and crystal and shadow tumbled past them like a sky of broken stars.
Ronan's arms were iron around Aria. He didn't look at the fall, didn't count the distance. He only held. He only kept her tight enough that she didn't slam into him and loose enough that the light around her could breathe.
The bottom hit with a crushing silence that swallowed the echo of the Devourer. Rocks shifted beneath them. The cavern below was a maw of older stone — carved by time, by hands they did not know, and by whatever had slept beneath the mountain long before the sanctuary was carved.
Ronan lay on his side first, Aria curled against him like a living ember. She was still glowing, but the light had softened into a humming warmth rather than the wild flame it had been. Her breaths were sharp and fast, each one a small fight.
He dragged a hand through the dust and barked out, "Aria. Look at me. Breathe with me."
Her lashes fluttered open. Silver light pooled behind her eyes, but at least she was clearly here — not lost in whatever threshold she'd been floating through. She clung to him, fingers finding his sleeve, voice raw. "Ronan. The Devourer — it's not done with us."
"No," he said. "And we're not done with it." He tried to laugh; the sound came out a broken snarl.
The stranger had fallen close by, a heap of robes and bruises. He pushed himself up, grimacing, clutching a rune-etched staff that still flickered in muted blue. He spat dust out of his mouth and took in their surroundings with a single, sharp look. "This cavern is old. Older than the sanctuary. It was never meant to be used as a battleground."
Ronan went still. "Then where does it lead?"
The stranger's eyes were flat. "Deep. To a heartstone chamber. If we're lucky, there's something there — an anchor, an old ward. If we're unlucky, the Devourer knows the way."
Aria pushed herself to a sitting position. Her muscles trembled. The glow in her veins dimmed and brightened like breathing. "My power — it feels raw," she said. "When I used it, something inside scratched back. It was… hungry."
Ronan's jaw bunched. "It wanted you."
"I know." She pressed her forehead to his chest and listened to his heartbeat. "But it didn't get me."
Not while he held her.
The stranger wiped his hands on his robes and stood. "We cannot stay here. The mountain will not allow the fight to be confined. It will push the Devourer to reclaim what it believes is right. We move — now."
They picked their way down a narrow chute of stone, the air colder as they sank. Shadow coiled around their ankles like smoke. At the lip of a deeper chamber they paused. The cavern below opened into a vast cathedral of ribbed rock, the ceiling lost in black. In the center stood a stone dais, pitted and old; circles of runes ringed it like frozen ripples.
The Devourer's presence thinned here, but it did not vanish. Instead it circled — patient, scenting, waiting like a tide at the mouth of a harbor.
Aria stumbled; Ronan caught her without thinking. The bond between them thrummed now — steadier, like a drum in time with their steps. It was not invulnerable. It was not invincible. It was real. It was theirs.
The stranger stepped forward, staff raised. "This place once held a seal," he said softly. "It held something that taught the Moonborn how to bind light. If we can rekindle the seal, it may weaken the Devourer."
"And if we can't?" Ronan asked. His hands curled at his sides. There was the faint taste of iron in his mouth from his earlier wounds.
"Then we buy as much time as possible." The stranger's gaze slid to Aria with something like pity and fierce calculation. "We make a stand here. The Devourer will come for the heartstone."
Silence folded around them. Then the cavern breathed — a slow, rasping sound as if the mountain itself exhaled.
The first wave came as a ripple of cold. Tendrils of shade slid along the floor, testing. Ronan's teeth bared. He shifted, posture low, alpha stance unspoken and immediate. Aria stayed in front of him by instinct, not from weakness but from purpose. She lifted a hand. A filament of silver snapped outward — not a blast this time but a finger of light, probing, measuring the shadow.
They met. Light met dark and fizzed like flint. The Devourer hissed in a way that vibrated their bones.
The cave answered with a low groan. A vein of runed stone on the dais pulsed weakly, hungry for the light Aria had sprouted.
"Now," the stranger breathed, and began to chant. The words rolled like stones, ancient and slow. The runes along the dais sparked, picking up the stranger's echo and feeding it back like a choir. Aria felt the energy like a pull in her sternum — the seal was waking.
The Devourer understood, of course. It surged.
This was not the scattering tendril-storm of before. It came as a wave of thought — pressure on their minds like hands closing. It reached for the bond between Aria and Ronan before it reached for bodies. It sought to pry their anchor loose, to whisper old fears into old wounds.
Ronan staggered, a hand slapping the side of his head as if to clear the sound. The voice inside his skull was not the Devourer's alone; it used faces — uses faces they both knew — and memories — small cuts that would open if they allowed it. For a second he saw Aria's mother leaving, not in the distant memory Aria had reclaimed, but as betrayal — and the room blurred.
"Ronan!" Aria's voice cut through like a blade. She kept her eyes on him. Her other hand still danced the light across the dais, feeding the runes. "Remember the snow. Remember how you found me. Remember how you made me stand."
He blinked like a drowning man. Her voice — live and immediate — anchored him. The Devourer's whisper slid off like water on stone.
The stranger's chant rose, keening higher. The dais shuddered. A lattice of pale light spiderwebbed out from the runes and wrapped around Aria's feet like a cradle.
"That's it," the stranger said. "Feed the seal with her light. Tie her to the heartstone's root."
"How?" Ronan snarled. "She's the one who'll be drained."
"She is its seed," the stranger answered. "If the heartstone can digest and redirect her power, it can turn tide."
Aria looked up at Ronan. Her chin wobbled with the faintest tremor. "If this kills me, promise me—"
"Promise you what?" He peered down at her like she was both everything and the only thing he could see.
"Promise—promise me you'll still be there when the light goes out."
He felt the air between them thin. For a breath he considered the impossible: to let her step into the heart of something older than their feud and risk not seeing the sunrise.
He kissed her forehead without thinking, a rough, tethering press. "I'll still be here," he said. "I swear it."
She nodded. The stranger's chant turned into a rush. The runes brightened into white, into brand-silver.
The Devourer screamed.
It didn't attack them physically now. It threw hallucinations, tempers, beloved faces turned cruel to pry them apart. Aria clung to the chanting stranger's rhythm and the taste of Ronan's promise like a lifeline. The seal opened its mouth to drink her light.
She fell to her knees on the dais, hands pressed to the runes. Her glow flared — not frantic now, but deliberate. The heartstone took the light like a thirsty root takes water; for a moment it felt like being unmade and remade at the same time. Warmth bled through her veins and then into the stone. The runes drank it, and the pattern on the dais rewove itself, stronger than before.
Ronan felt the pull — it wanted him. He felt the bond strain as every ounce of Aria's power fed the sealing net. The Devourer launched one final desperate shove — the cavern went black as if night descended in a single heartbeat.
He could have let go. He could have run. He could have savored his own animal survival and lived. The world narrowed to a single light: the faint sound of Aria's breath on the stone, the feel of her hand through his shirt.
He broke every rule and held anyway.
A lance of silver arced from the dais and shattered the descending shadow. The Devourer shrieked, recoiled, and for the first time in a long while — it could not simply devour what it wanted.
Aria sagged, pale and exhausted, the glow in her dimming but not gone. Her chest rose in shaky breaths. The stone by her knees hummed with new geometry; the runes had sealed into a pattern that would hold — for now.
Ronan lowered himself beside her so slowly she could feel the weight of his presence. He put an arm around her shoulders and rested his forehead against hers. She smiled, thin and real.
"We did it," she whispered.
"For now," the stranger said, voice ragged but relieved.
Outside, far above them, something inside the mountain cracked and reformed — the Devourer's fury rearranging its strategy. The cavern inhaled and settled, the seal standing like a scar across the heartstone.
Ronan tightened his hold. "We buy time."
Aria's fingers found his, weak but lucid. "For how long?"
He didn't know. He only knew the truth that steadied him: she was still there, and she had chosen him in the place where everything had been trying to pull her away.
He kissed the knuckles of her hand, sacred and simple.
"We fight," he said. "We stand. We find the place where we can end this."
She watched him, the moonlight finally settling like armor on her shoulders. "Then let's not waste the time."
They stood together, battered and trembling but whole enough to keep going. The darkness had followed them down into the bones of the world — but so had their light, quieter now, determined and steady.
And outside, somewhere in the layered cold, the Devourer reassessed its prey.
It would come back. It always did.
But they had learned something in the fall: love could be a kind of weapon, not because it was soft but because it anchored. And anchors — if forged strong enough — could hold the heavens steady.