The blade had already been drawn.  
Ashmire throbbed in her grasp like a second heartbeat—too large for her hand, too alive for a dead thing. It sang without sound, low and deep, like a wind moving through old bones. Where her fingers touched the leather-wrapped hilt, her skin split open and bled—not from violence, but **as if the blade was drinking**.

The crypt around her warped.

The walls of basalt pulsed. Torches shuddered. A distant sound echoed—a scraping, like antlers dragged across stone.

Then, the darkness swallowed everything.

She stood beneath a black sun.

No warmth. No sky. Just a churning disc of cold fire, its corona flaring outward like cinders fleeing a forge too ancient to name. The world beneath her feet was ash and ruin. The mountains were gone—melted, sundered, or simply forgotten. The horizon burned sideways.

The throne rose before her—built of stone, sinew, and splinters of shattered stars. And seated upon it was the Queen.

She was no longer a corpse. No longer the mummified husk she had once been. She burned now with the memory of flesh. Her skin was pale gold fissured with black veins of flame. Her hair, a shroud of smoke. Her crown had fused to her skull. Her voice did not echo—it branded.

“You are the price,” the Queen said. “But not enough.”

Telaryn opened her mouth to speak—but no words came. Her throat was full of ashes. Her blood felt thick with heat.

“The blade remembers,” said the Queen, rising. “But memory is not strength. Blood is.”

She stepped down from the throne. With each footfall, the ground trembled.

“Would you carry my will?” the Queen whispered. “Then you must bind it. One soul. One bond. One offering.”

Ryn staggered back—but the blade kept her upright. It pulled her forward, tethered her to this place, to this voice, to this terrible promise.

“Not just any blood,” the Queen said, touching Telaryn’s face with burning fingers. “_Yours_. Reflected. Known. Given meaning. That is the law.”

Reality snapped back like a noose.

Telaryn reeled, collapsing to her knees beside the altar in the crypt, Ashmire clattering to the stone floor, singing as it hit. Her chest heaved. Her mouth was dry.

Alisha was there. Pale, trembling.

Ryn saw her through a veil—_not with her eyes, but with something deeper_. Her companion glowed faintly in the dim light, as if the blade itself recognized her.

Alisha took a hesitant step forward. “Ryn… something’s wrong. You’re shaking.”

Telaryn blinked. Her lips parted.

“The blade,” she rasped. “It… it asked.”

Alisha went still. “What do you mean, _asked_?”

Ryn’s hands trembled. “It needs something. It—it needs…”

She didn’t finish.

Ashmire pulsed again. A warm current, rising from the blade, crawling into her chest like longing turned liquid. Her eyes blurred. She saw again..

Alisha’s face, in another time, kneeling in the camp with her head bowed as Telaryn grieved.  
Alisha’s hand in hers, back in Winter’s Edge.  
Alisha’s blood, not yet spilled, but already known.

“One bond,” said the Queen again, voice inside her now.  
“Let her be the bridge. Let her be the door.”

“I thought—” Alisha stepped closer, her voice cracking. “I thought we were searching for something that could help people. That could bring Talpis back.”

Telaryn looked up.

Alisha’s eyes were full of tears. “Not this,” she whispered. “Ryn… not this.”

And Telaryn, with Ashmire vibrating beside her, could not answer.

Because in the pit of her heart, something whispered:  *You already knew.*

It was not the kind of blade made for salvation.  
It was a blade made to _cut away what was weak_.  
To remake.  
To reshape.  
To _feed_.

And the price… was her.

Or someone who mattered to her.

The blood would bind.

The blade had waited a thousand years.

And now, it was _hungry_.