The Sundering Spire wasn't a tower; it was a needle driven into the mountain's magical heart. Its walls weren't stone—they were solidified silence, a deafening void that swallowed sound and scrambled thought. The air itself felt thin, greedy, pulling at the edges of their will. This was where the Cŵn Annwn broke things they couldn't control.
Jonas and Maria were trapped in its central chamber, a ring of pulsating, rune-etched monoliths. They were held not by chains, but by sympathetic resonance—the monoliths humming at a frequency that vibrated against their own magical signatures, pinning them in place. Maria's telekinesis sputtered and died like a match in a vacuum. Jonas's fire guttered low, feeding on his own life-force to stay alive.
Across the chamber, on a raised dais of black quartz, King Bertram observed them, a vulture awaiting death. Gareth stood at his right hand, his greatsword point-down on the floor, his face unreadable. At his left, Prince David paced, a hungry smirk on his face.
"You see?" Bertram's voice was a dry rustle in the unnatural quiet. "This is the price of discord. Your children's defiance has purchased you this… attenuation. When they arrive, they will see what becomes of resistance. They will choose compliance. Or they will watch you unravel."
He never got to finish his thought.
The outer door of the Spire didn't blow open. It dissolved.
A wave of putrid, biotic decay washed in first—Morwen's calling card. The polished obsidian walls sprouted weeping lichen. The sterile air curdled with the smell of a opened grave.
Through the disintegrating archway, three figures entered.
Kaitlyn came first, a storm contained in a girl's shape. The air around her warped with heat-shimmer. Her weapon was already in her hands—not a hammer, not a shield, but a spiked chain of pure black metal, each link etched with tiny, shifting runes. It hissed as it slithered across the floor like a living thing.
Erik was half a step behind, his eyes glowing faintly with internalized focus. His own weapon had formed into a long, slender staff, its ends capped with sharp, geometric crystals. He didn't look at the king. He looked at the room—his gaze flicking over the monoliths, the runes, the flow of captive energy. Reading the battlefield like a mathematician reads an equation.
Between them, moving with a predator's liquid grace, came Elara. No longer feral, but directed. Morgan's whispered commands had honed her. Her eyes glowed with a cold, focused amber. Her fingers ended in talons of bone-sharp keratin. She stared at the monoliths holding Maria, and a low, hungry growl vibrated in her chest.
"The Dyad," Bertram said, spreading his hands in a mockery of welcome. "And you brought the deserter's pet. How… theatrical."
"Let them go," Kaitlyn said. Her voice didn't echo. It was swallowed by the Spire's silence, but the words hung in the air like smoke.
David laughed. "Or what, wildling? You'll throw another tantrum?"
Erik spoke, his voice calm, dead, final. "Katie. Monoliths three and seven. They're the harmonic keys. The vampire breaks the shells. You rip the roots."
He didn't wait. He moved.
His staff whirled. He wasn't attacking a person; he was attacking the geometry of the prison. He struck the floor at a precise point. The crystal at the staff's end flared, and a bolt of resonant energy—not magic, but pure, disruptive frequency—shot out and hit Monolith Three. The runes on its surface flickered, destabilizing.
"Gareth!" Bertram barked.
The warrior moved, but he was intercepted.
Elara blurred. One moment she was by the door, the next she was between Gareth and the monoliths. She didn't attack with skill. She attacked with biology. She moved faster than sight, a whirlwind of claws and fangs. Gareth's greatsword swept through where she had been, carving only air. Her talons scraped across his enchanted breastplate, leaving deep, smoking gouges. She was a distraction, a chaotic, terrifying delay.
"Now, Kaitlyn!" Erik yelled, already spinning to strike Monolith Seven.
Kaitlyn's chain lashed out. But not at the monolith. It whipped through the air and embedded itself in the ceiling. She yanked.
With a scream of tortured architecture, a huge section of the silicated ceiling tore free. But she didn't let it drop. Holding the chain with one hand, she gestured with the other. The massive chunk of rock hovered. Then, with a snarl of effort that tore from her throat, she hurled it, not at the monolith, but at the space between the monolith and the floor.
The impact was cataclysmic. Stone met enchanted stone. The harmonic prison shrieked. The runes on Monolith Seven shattered like glass.
The resonant field holding Jonas and Maria flickered and died. They collapsed, gasping.
"Kill them!" David shrieked, drawing his own slender, cruel sword. He lunged, not for Kaitlyn, but for the dazed Maria.
He never made it.
Kaitlyn's chain retracted from the ceiling and reformed in her grip. It became a short, heavy spear. She didn't throw it. She willed it.
The spear shot from her hand, not as a physical throw, but as a telekinetic projectile, guided by her rage and Erik's instant calculation of trajectory. It passed so close to David's face he felt the wind of its passage, and buried itself to the haft in the black quartz dais at Bertram's feet, cracking it up the middle.
The message was clear: Next one is in your throat.
David stumbled back, his face pale with shock, his bravado shattered.
"Enough!" Bertram roared. His own power, deep and cold, surged. He wasn't a warrior; he was a conduit. He raised his hands, and the Spire itself answered. The remaining monoliths glowed blindingly white. The sucking silence intensified, becoming a pressure that sought to crush their minds, to separate their wills, to sunder the very bond that made them powerful.
It was a direct attack on the Dyad itself.
Erik cried out, grabbing his head. The assault was psychic, a deafening noise in the frequency of their connection. Kaitlyn staggered, her telekinetic hold failing.
Bertram smiled. "You are a tool. And tools can be broken."
But he had forgotten the third actor in the room.
The creeping decay from Morwen's power reached the dais. The cracked quartz blackened. The king's connection to the Spire's power short-circuited. The pure, ordered magic of the Cŵn Annwn met the chaotic, unbinding rot of the witch, and cancelled.
The psychic pressure vanished.
In that moment of stunned, magical nullity, Erik and Kaitlyn acted as one.
They didn't speak. The bond did it for them. A single, unified purpose: END HIM.
Erik's staff melted and flowed up his arms, becoming a lattice of dark metal over his hands and forearms—foci. He slammed his palms together. A pulse of invisible energy, a targeting laser of pure intent, shot out and enveloped King Bertram, highlighting every magical weakness, every flaw in his aura, every point where his stolen life-force was tenuously grafted to his body.
Kaitlyn didn't need the signal. She felt it. Her spear yanked itself from the dais and flew back to her hand. It didn't stop. It melted and expanded, becoming a ballista bolt of shimmering black force hovering before her. She drew back her fist, not to throw, but to punch the air.
With a sound that finally broke the Spire's silence—a CRACK-THOOOM—the bolt of force launched.
It followed the path Erik had painted. It didn't strike Bertram's flesh. It struck the nexus of his power, the artificially sustained vitality at his core.
There was no explosion. There was an unmaking.
Bertram didn't scream. He diminished. The stolen vitality—decades of it, leeched from Elara, from the land, from his own people—ripped out of him in a visible torrent of fading gold light. He aged a century in three seconds. His skin papered over collapsing bone. His regal robes hung on a suddenly frail, skeletal frame. He collapsed onto his cracked throne, not dead, but emptied. A king of dust and echoes.
The Spire, deprived of its master and poisoned by Morwen's touch, gave one final, seismic groan.
"The mountain is coming down!" Jonas yelled, hauling Maria to her feet.
Gareth, seeing his king a withered husk, his life's purpose lying in ruins, did the only thing left for a man of honor. He slammed his sword into the floor, snapped the blade with a boot, and turned to face the collapsing ceiling, making no move to stop them.
Elara flitted back to the doorway, where Morgan now stood, her eyes wide at the devastation.
"Time to go!" Morgan shouted.
The family—whole, rescued, and victorious—fled the crumbling needle as the world of the Cŵn Annwn died around them.