The crack in the wall pulsed again.
Not with light, not with heat but something older. A tremor deeper than the earth beneath them. A rhythm that moved like breath through stone, like a heartbeat buried inside the bones of the world.
Kael felt it inside his chest. Beneath his ribs. In his teeth.
It tugged.
No plucked. Like a string strung too tight and vibrating under invisible fingers.
He staggered back from the wall, one hand braced on the rough stone behind him, eyes fixed on the crack as it widened imperceptibly, a thread of glowing blue-white light blooming from within the fracture.
Magic.
Old, quiet, watching.
His voice rasped out. "What did you do?"
Sylen didn't answer at first. He stood with his head slightly tilted, eyes fixed on the glyphs that curled along their chains like vines etched into iron. They pulsed now not the sullen red they once had, but a shifting, eerie silver-blue that flickered with each breath they took.
Sylen's face was calm, but not detached. Not smug. His brows were drawn slightly inward, his jaw tense.
He wasn't entirely in control.
"I tested the bond," he said at last. "I gave it space. A little push."
Kael stared at him. "You manipulated it."
"I guided it," Sylen replied, voice low. "It responds to more than pain. It responds to will. To emotion."
Kael narrowed his eyes, his spine rigid with the instinct to strike. "You used me."
Sylen's lips twitched not a smile. Something smaller. More bitter. "You were already bleeding anger into me. I only… focused it."
Another pulse rolled through the floor this one softer, but deeper. Kael felt it in his bones.
The crack in the wall flared brighter, and a sound rose with it a low hum like a bow dragged across rusted strings. The air thickened, grew heavy with static. The kind of tension that came before lightning.
Kael's breath caught. "You're going to collapse the cell."
"Not the cell," Sylen murmured. He took a slow step forward, toward the glowing crack. "The seal. That's what keeps the bond dormant. If we break it, we can access what the witches suppressed."
Kael stiffened. "You mean more magic."
Sylen finally looked at him and Kael, for one dizzying heartbeat, forgot how to be angry.
The fae's eyes shimmered faintly in the strange light silver, green, blue, and something that shouldn't have existed at all. There was no triumph there. No cruelty. No victory.
Only loneliness.
And weariness.
And the smallest glimmer of something that might have once been hope.
"We are the magic now," Sylen said quietly.
Kael swallowed hard. His pulse pounded through his body, syncing again he could feel it beneath his ribs, behind his eyes, in the blood rushing in his ears.
"You're wrong," he whispered.
"I'm not doing anything, Kael," Sylen said, voice barely audible. "You are."
Kael clenched his fists. Heat prickled at the base of his skull. He turned away, trying to bite it down but the bond wasn't letting go. It was already crawling beneath his skin like fire and ice laced together.
Visions unspooled without warning fragments not his own.
A dreamscape blurred in silver moonlight. Branches shifting like sighs above a still pond. Footsteps across soft moss. A hand brushing his shoulder not in warning. In farewell.
And then another flash one his mind knew, but hadn't invited.
His brother's torn armor lying in a field of charred grass. Screams in the distance. Smoke and blood and fire. And Sylen standing across the battlefield, luminous and still, sword dripping red, eyes wide as if he'd just recognized something awful and irrevocable.
Kael gasped.
The bond flared.
A sudden, silent explosion of magic burst outward from them neither fire nor wind, but pressure. An invisible force that shoved against the walls, hissed through the cracks, and tore the light from the torches in one breathless instant.
Darkness fell.
Kael collapsed to his knees, gasping for breath that wouldn't come fast enough. His pulse galloped. His whole body shook not from fear, not exactly, but from something dangerously close to recognition.
Sylen was down too, his hands braced against the floor, shoulders heaving.
Between them, in the center of the cell's cold floor, a thread of silver hovered in the air.
Thin. Weightless. Pulsing.
A tether.
Alive.
Kael stared at it. "What the hell is that?"
Sylen didn't look up. "The bond. In physical form."
"That's not possible."
"Neither is surviving a soulbind without shattering your mind, and yet here we are."
Kael's chest rose and fell in jagged rhythm. "Why is it visible?"
Sylen lifted his gaze slowly. "Because it's learning us."
The silence after that sentence was deeper than before. Like the room had paused. Like the magic had stopped to listen.
Kael stood slowly, wary of any new flares of power, but the air had calmed. The light from the thread hovered steady now, casting faint shadows on the stone around them.
It wasn't threatening.
It was… watching.
"It has awareness?" Kael asked, voice rough.
Sylen nodded. "All old magic does."
Kael turned toward the crack in the wall. "And if it wakes fully?"
Sylen rose to his feet. He didn't answer for a long moment.
Then: "It either destroys us or shows us what we're becoming."
Kael's fingers twitched toward his sword instinctively. But it wasn't there. Stripped when he was captured. Taken along with his titles, his armor, his freedom.
And maybe, now, his certainty.
He studied Sylen really studied him. Not as the enemy general he'd fought on the field. Not as the fae who'd cost him too many lives.
But as the one person who could feel everything Kael felt. Who could wound him without lifting a blade. Who knew him now through the bond better than anyone alive.
Kael wanted to hate him for that.
He couldn't quite manage it.
"You should've killed me when you had the chance," he said.
Sylen gave a ghost of a smile. "I tried. Remember?"
Kael did. The sword, the glare, the spell
But also the hesitation.
The way Sylen had stepped back in that last moment, eyes wide with something almost like regret.
Kael shook his head. "So what now? We sit here and wait for the bond to decide our future?"
"No." Sylen turned toward the tether, and the glow shifted with him. "We test it again. Push the connection. Find its limits."
"You mean force another surge."
"I mean understand it. Before it controls us instead."
Kael hesitated. Every instinct screamed no. Every moment of his training, every rule of war, every memory of his brother's funeral pyre
But something in his chest twisted anyway.
Something that wanted to know.
He stepped toward the silver thread.
It pulsed brighter as he approached.
Sylen moved with him, slow, deliberate.
When they stood shoulder to shoulder, the thread rose higher, curving gently in the space between them. It shimmered faintly, not like metal or glass, but like memory fluid, half-lit, pulsing with breathless weight.
Kael reached toward it.
Sylen did the same.
Their fingers didn't touch.
But the bond did.
And in that moment
The stone around them disappeared.
They were standing beneath stars.
Or maybe not stars something larger. Brighter. A sky fractured by streaks of silver and violet, like a night sky painted in shattered light.
Kael's breath hitched.
This was not the prison cell.
This was nowhere he had ever seen.
Sylen looked around, eyes sharp. "A vision," he said. "A shared one. The bond pulled us into it."
"Then whose memory is this?"
"I don't think it's a memory."
Kael turned slowly. The ground was black glass, reflecting the sky but not their bodies. There were no walls. No horizon. Just infinite space stitched together with starlight.
"This isn't a dream."
"No," Sylen said. "It's the space between us. The bond's core. It's showing us what it knows of us. What it is because of us."
Kael stepped forward. The ground rippled faintly, like water. He knelt and touched it and felt a surge of emotion that wasn't entirely his own.
Hope.
Guilt.
Something softer, stranger.
He looked back at Sylen.
Their eyes met.
Neither of them moved.
Neither of them breathed.
The silence in the dreamscape was deafening.
And then
The vision fractured, a sudden crack in the sky above them splitting light from light.
They were yanked backward, ripped from the bond's dream without warning.
The cell returned like a punch to the ribs. The cold. The chains. The damp air.
Kael gasped, stumbling to the wall, bracing himself.
Sylen landed hard beside him, teeth bared in pain.
They said nothing for a long time.
The tether still hovered, quieter now. Dimmer.
Kael's voice came ragged. "What was that?"
Sylen stared at the floor. "The first gate."
Kael didn't ask what that meant. He knew better.
But he did know this:
Whatever that space had been… it had seen them.
And it hadn't looked away.