The screams of the Whispering Glades were not like the screams of people; they were the sound of reality itself tearing. As Lucien's white fire touched the silver birches, the air filled with a high-pitched, harmonic screeching. The bioluminescent mist, once a soothing balm, was instantly vaporized, replaced by an acrid, blinding smoke that smelled of burnt ozone and ancient memories.
Lucien sat atop his charcoal wolf, his face illuminated by the jagged, white flames dancing in his palms. He looked like a fallen sun, a beautiful and terrible deity of destruction.
"Stop it, Lucien!" I screamed, running toward the edge of the clearing.
"Stop?" Lucien's voice cut through the roar of the fire. He didn't look at the burning trees; he looked at the Heart Pool, his eyes grey and cold as ash. "Why should I stop, Elara? This place is a monument to a lie. Our mother's sanctuary? It's a tomb for the children she didn't want. Let it burn. Let the world see what happens to secrets when the light finally finds them."
"She didn't want this!" Leo roared, lunging forward with his daggers.
But Lucien didn't even shift. He simply flicked his wrist, and a lash of white fire caught Leo in the chest, throwing him back across the moss. Leo hit the ground hard, his furs smoking, a pained grunt escaping his throat.
"Leo!" I scrambled to his side, my hands frantically patting down the embers on his tunic.
"Stay back, Elara," Leo wheezed, his face pale. "His fire... it's not hot. It's... it's hollow. It's eating the air."
Elder stepped forward then. He didn't draw a weapon. He raised his gnarled staff, and the ground beneath his feet began to pulse with a deep, emerald light. The water in the Heart Pool rose in a shimmering wall, trying to push back the encroaching heat.
"Lucien, son of Silas," Elder said, his voice a thunderous resonance that seemed to steady the very earth. "You carry the fire of the Blood-Crag, but you use it like a common arsonist. You think you are hurting the mother who left you? You are only hurting the world that needs you."
"The world doesn't need me!" Lucien shrieked, jumping down from his wolf. His movements were a blur of lethal grace. He landed in front of Elder, his hand closing around the old man's staff. "The world wants the Hallowed Queen! It wants the Golden Child! It never wanted the twin who was raised in the pits, eating rats and drinking the blood of the dead just to stay alive!"
The white fire on Lucien's skin flared, and the emerald light of the staff began to crackle and dim.
"I am the Forsaken King," Lucien hissed. "And I have come to collect the debt."
I stood up, the wooden wolf carving slipping from my tunic and falling into the moss. I felt the void in my chest—the emptiness where the Hallowed light and the Sapphire frost had been. I was a Queen without a crown, a sister without a brother, and a mate to a monster.
But as I looked at the Heart Pool, I saw my own reflection. One eye gold, one eye sapphire. The power wasn't gone. It was just waiting for me to stop being afraid of the price.
The light and the dark will tear you apart, the High Queen had said.
"Then let them," I whispered.
I didn't reach for the light. I didn't reach for the frost. I reached for the Blood. I reached for the connection that tied me to the two men standing in the clearing—the brother who protected me and the brother who hated me.
I stepped between Elder and Lucien.
"Elara, get back!" Elder warned, his face drenched in sweat.
"No," I said.
I grabbed Lucien's wrist.
The moment our skin touched, the white fire didn't burn me. It recognized me. The Hallowed blood in our veins, split at birth and twisted by fate, suddenly completed a circuit.
A shockwave of energy—part gold, part grey—blasted outward. The white fire on the trees didn't go out; it turned a brilliant, searing silver. The Heart Pool erupted in a geyser of starlight.
I was no longer in the Glades.
I was standing in a room of mirrors. In every mirror, I saw Lucien. I saw him as a baby, crying in a stone cell while Silas watched. I saw him being branded with the thorns of the Forsaken. I saw him killing his first guard just to get a crust of bread.
And in the center of the mirrors, I saw our mother.
She wasn't a goddess. She was a woman, her face gaunt, her eyes full of a sorrow that could drown the sea. She was holding two infants. She was weeping.
"I can only save one," her voice whispered in the mirrors. "The boy carries the fire... Silas will kill him the moment he sees it. The girl carries the light... she can be hidden. I must give the boy to the shadows. I must give the girl to the wolves."
She wasn't choosing a favorite. She was choosing a survival strategy. She had sent Lucien to the Forsaken because she believed they were the only ones strong enough to protect a boy who carried the fire of the Sun. She had left me with Silas because she believed my "wolfless" nature would keep me beneath his notice.
She had been wrong on both counts. But she had loved us.
I snapped back to the clearing. Lucien was staring at me, his grey eyes wide and wet. The white fire in his hands had died down to a faint, shimmering ember. He had seen the vision too. He had felt the truth through the touch.
"She... she sent me away to save me?" Lucien whispered, his voice cracking.
"She thought the Forsaken would be your pack," I said, my own tears falling. "She thought you were too strong for Silas to handle. She didn't sell you, Lucien. She hid you in the only place she thought he wouldn't look."
Lucien fell to his knees, his forehead touching the moss. The Forsaken warriors behind him lowered their pikes, their light-drinking eyes flickering with uncertainty. The rage that had fueled Lucien for a decade—the hate that had made him a King—was suddenly gone, leaving only a hollow, broken man.
But the moment of peace was shattered by a sound from the sky.
A black rift opened in the air above the Heart Pool. It looked like a tear in the fabric of the universe, and from it poured a scent that made every wolf in the clearing whimper.
Cedar. Rain. Cold steel. And the cloying, sweet rot of lilies.
"Kaelen," I breathed.
The Shadow King didn't emerge slowly. He fell from the rift like a meteor, slamming into the Heart Pool. The crystal water turned instantly to black ink.
Kaelen—or the thing wearing him—stood up in the center of the pool. His white hair was now a crown of frozen obsidian, and his black eyes were fixed on the three of us.
"The reunion," the entity hissed, its voice echoing from the trees. "The Fire, the Light, and the Little Lion. How convenient of you to gather in the one place where I can kill you all at once."
The entity raised Kaelen's hand, and a shard of the broken Mother-Lode—the one Selene had stolen—floated in the air. It was pulsing with a dark, necrotic rhythm.
"The High Queen has a message for you, Elara," the entity said, its black eyes locking onto mine. "The 'Rite of the Sanguine Dawn' requires three. But she only needs two to die to make the Eclipse permanent."
Lucien stood up, his white-hot fire reigniting, but this time, it was steady. He stood beside me, his shoulder brushing mine.
"I don't know who you are in my brother-in-law's body," Lucien growled, his grey eyes burning. "But you're standing in my mother's garden. And I don't like trespassers."
Leo stepped up on my other side, his daggers gleaming. "The 'Little Lion' has teeth, you bastard."
The three children of the Blood-Crag stood together for the first time. The Light, the Fire, and the Protector.
Kaelen's entity smiled, a jagged, horrific thing. "Three against one? I like those odds. It makes the slaughter so much more... poetic."
The entity lunged.