The red light didn't just illuminate the cavern; it scorched it.
Where the crimson energy spilled off the edge of Daniel's blade, the ancient gray ash on the stone floor hissed and curled back like burning paper.
Finn Foster stumbled backward, slamming into the edge of his cold fire pit. His milky eyes, once as blank and unreadable as winter frost, were wide with something rare and long-forgotten.
Fear.
"That's not vervain," Finn choked out. The pale, bone-like iron fused into his arms began to crack, thin spiderwebs of dark red light seeping through the fractures in his skin. "The old crows... they didn't send you as food. They sent a poison."
"They sent us to finish it," Lily said.
She didn't let go of Daniel's hand. The crimson pulse flowing between their palms was hot—a sharp, stinging heat that burned away the numb, icy creep of the mountain's influence. The gray veins on her knuckles, once dull and metallic, flushed a deep, fierce red, throbbing like a newly awakened pulse.
The mountain felt it too.
The rhythmic, breathing tremor deep within the stone instantly shattered into a chaotic, violent heave. The ground beneath their boots shuddered, throwing up clouds of pulverized black rock. From deep inside the void-like passageway, a sound echoed out.
It was no longer a low hum.
It was a scream—a grinding, subterranean screech of ancient iron being twisted and torn against its will.
"Stop!" Finn roared, dragging himself up using the rock face for support. Black soot was pouring freely from his cracked iron arms now, dropping to the floor in heavy, smoking clods. "If you break the seal without an anchor, the entire peak collapses! Millions of tons of ash—it will bury the valleys! It will bury the gates!"
"Then let it fall," Daniel said, his voice echoing with an unnatural, double-toned resonance that seemed to vibrate directly out of the crimson-stained steel in his hand. "The gates were built on a lie anyway."
Daniel raised his blade.
He didn't swing at Finn. He turned toward the pitch-black passageway—the maw of the mountain that had demanded a toll of blood and steel for generations.
Beside him, Lily raised her weapon in tandem, matching his arc, their grips locked tightly between them. The two black-veined blades, now blazing with violent red light, crossed in mid-air, forming a single, gleaming X of living fire.
"Together," Lily whispered, her voice devoid of fear, filled only with a quiet, lethal resolve.
"Together," Daniel agreed.
They stepped over the threshold into the absolute dark.
The void tried to swallow them, but the crimson light carved a path right through its gut.
Inside the passageway, the walls weren't made of stone or shale. They were built from thousands of shattered academy swords, rusted pauldrons, and broken badges, all fused together by decades of pressurized black tar. It was a tomb of forgotten soldiers, a literal wall of dead intent keeping the core contained.
And in the center of the vast, circular chamber at the end of the tunnel suspended over a pit of liquid iron, was the Heart.
It wasn't a organ.
It was a massive, jagged sphere of cracked black star-steel, twice the size of the monolith, humming with the trapped energy of every Ghost Killer who had ever died in the ridge. Hundreds of thick, iron-like cables snaked out from its core, embedding themselves into the walls, anchoring the mountain to its stolen life.
The Heart pulsed, sending a wave of crushing, icy pressure toward them.
The red light around Daniel and Lily flared defensively, meeting the cold blast with a roar of steam.
"Look at the cables!" Lily shouted over the deafening noise, pointing her blade toward the base of the sphere.
At the end of each cable was a rusted silver emblem.
The badges.
Every single one the academy had ever forged was plugged into the sphere, draining the life of the living to keep the dead locked away.
Daniel tightened his grip on Lily's hand, feeling the crimson energy surge to a fever pitch, turning the air around them into a shimmering furnace.
"We don't cut the mountain," Daniel said, looking at the mass of chained silver and black steel.
"We sever the leash."