The passage narrowed until the light behind them thinned to a dull smear.
Stone here was different—older, darker, threaded with veins that pulsed faintly as they passed. The air tasted of metal and something else beneath it, something stale and patient, like breath held for centuries.
She felt it the moment they crossed the threshold.
The bond shifted.
Not tightened. Not strained.
Reoriented.
He slowed, one hand lifting instinctively as if to steady himself. "Do you feel that?"
"Yes," she whispered. "It's… quieter."
He frowned. "No. It's listening."
The inner battleground did not announce itself with spectacle. There were no flaring sigils, no alarms, no hunters stepping from the dark. Instead, the silence deepened, pressing in layers, each heavier than the last.
Memory lingered here.
She took a step—and the ground answered.
Images bled into her vision without warning: stone drenched in old light, figures kneeling in concentric circles, voices chanting in a language that scraped against understanding. Pain—not his, not hers—rippled through the bond like an echo replayed too many times.
She staggered.
He caught her before she fell, fingers tightening reflexively around her wrist. The contact sent a tremor through the bond—sharp, immediate.
"Don't pull away," he said quickly. "It anchors you."
"I'm not—" She swallowed as another fragment surfaced. "This place… it remembers the first binding."
His jaw clenched. "That's impossible."
The inner zone answered by shifting again.
The corridor opened into a vast chamber carved directly from bedrock. Symbols ringed the floor—not glowing, not active, but etched so deeply they seemed part of the stone's bones. At the center stood a structure neither of them could fully name: a lattice of fractured pillars, broken and reassembled around a hollow core.
The heart of the curse.
The bond hummed—low, resonant—like something recognizing its origin.
"They wrote it here," she said, the certainty startling her. "Not as a spell. As a solution."
"To what?" he asked.
She didn't answer immediately.
Because the answer hurt.
"To you."
The system stirred—faint, constrained. Its presence here was muted, filtered, as though forced to speak through layers of old rules it could no longer override.
Warning, it murmured, weaker than before.
Inner protocols unstable.
He released her wrist slowly. "Stay behind me."
She almost laughed.
"That stopped working chapters ago," she said softly.
A ripple passed through the chamber.
Something shifted within the lattice—stone grinding against stone as a presence unfolded, not solid, not whole. A shadow shaped like intention, stitched together from fragments of old commands.
The echo of the curse's first voice.
"You were never meant to cross the threshold," it said—not aloud, but everywhere.
Pain flickered through the bond, restrained but insistent.
He stepped forward anyway. "You bound me."
"We contained you," the echo replied. "You were necessary."
"And her?" he demanded.
Silence—thick, evaluative.
"She was unforeseen."
The words sent a chill through her bones.
"You designed the bond to limit him," she said, finding her voice. "But you never accounted for someone who would balance it."
The lattice shuddered.
"Balance was not the objective."
"What was?" she pressed.
"To end the war," the echo said. "At any cost."
Images surged—cities in ruin, skies split by power, weapons walking in human skin. She gasped, the bond flaring in sympathetic pain.
He closed his eyes briefly. "I remember fragments of this."
The echo leaned closer, its presence thickening. "You remember obedience."
Anger burned through the bond—hot, defiant—and this time, she did not suppress it.
"Then remember this," she said, stepping to his side. "Your solution failed."
The chamber shook.
Cracks raced across the etched symbols, light bleeding through like wounds reopening. The bond surged—not chaotic, but aligned, their emotions folding into something sharper.
The system pulsed weakly, alarmed.
Containment breach probability rising.
The echo recoiled. "You are destabilizing the framework."
"Good," she said.
He glanced at her—surprised, then grimly approving.
"Careful," he warned. "If we push too hard—"
"I know." Her hands trembled, but she didn't pull back. "But if we don't, it will keep rewriting us."
The lattice screamed.
Not in sound, but in pressure—commands unraveling, old bindings straining against new variables they could no longer predict.
The inner battleground responded the only way it could.
By choosing.
The symbols flared—once—then split, the light dividing into two paths spiraling away from the core.
Protocol divergence detected.
She felt it then—the moment the curse ceased to be singular.
Two outcomes.
Two evolutions.
And only one of them would let them leave this place whole.
He reached for her hand without thinking.
"Whatever happens," he said quietly, "do not let go."
The system went silent.
And the inner battleground began to collapse inward, forcing a decision neither of them had been meant to make.