Chapter 299

Atasha's POV

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He abandoned Cassian entirely and lunged for me, blackness surging over his arms like armor turning into claws. He reached as if he could snatch me out of the air before I reached the stone.

Cassian intercepted him again.

He slammed into Xylas mid-lunge, blade flashing across the creature's chest and forcing him off balance just long enough.

My body collided with the stone.

Not hard enough to shatter bone.

But hard enough that my palms struck its surface and the warmth surged through me like a current breaking through a dam.

Light flared.

The hum turned into a pulse that echoed inside my ribs.

Below me, Xylas howled in rage that was no longer controlled.

"You foolish animal," he screamed at Cassian. "Do you know what you have done!"

Cassian answered by driving his blade into the blackness spreading across Xylas's arm, forcing the creature to focus on him. again.

Meanwhile, I did not fall.

The stone held me.

Or perhaps I held it.

Either way, the connection was no longer distant.

It was immediate.

The moment my palms made full contact with the stone, the warmth stopped feeling like heat and started feeling like arms around my ribs.

It was not soft, and it was not gentle in the way comfort is gentle. It held me with a force that made my breath catch, as if something older than instinct had decided I was not allowed to fall again.

The fatigue that had been dragging at my muscles vanished the way a fever breaks, leaving my body too alert, too awake.

Light bled through my skin.

I looked down at my hands and saw thin lines of brightness spidering across my fingers and up my wrists like veins, not burning, not tearing, but sinking into me until my bones felt like they were humming from the inside. The hum in the air deepened, the pulse inside the stone began matching the rhythm of my heartbeat, as if it was teaching my body a new beat and refusing to let it stop.

Behind me, Xylas screamed again, his rage shook the clearing harder than the beasts ever had,

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The sound should have yanked my attention back to the fight, but the stone did not let my mind stay in the present. The warmth tightened once, the world inside my head split open.

Images slammed into me with no warning.

I saw blood on stone.

I saw bodies embedded in earth, not just my father and Celeste, but strangers in lines, men and women with wrists bound, their mouths moving in prayer or protest while the ground drank them anyway.

I saw a circle of white stones floating above a mouth of darkness, and I understood for the first time that this had not begun. with our war, and it had not begun with Nightfall's sins. It had been built. It had been planned. It had been maintained with the kind of cruelty that only looks clean when the person holding the knife calls it necessity.

Then the vision shifted.

I saw a man and a woman standing in front of that same mouth. They were not like us in clothing or armor, but I knew what they were before the thought even finished. They were mates, the bond between them was not something whispered about in stories or used as a chain by kings. It was a force that made the air bend around them, because the moment they looked at each other, everything else in that world lost importance.

They were terrified.

They were also resolved.

I felt it in my chest like it belonged to me, like the stone was letting me borrow the memory and the pain without asking my permission.

The man's hands were shaking as he touched the woman's face. Then she covered his wrists with her own as if she was trying to steady him, but her eyes did not soften in comfort. Her eyes hardened in choice. She spoke to him. I could not hear the words, but I felt the meaning slam into me anyway.

She was telling him she would go first.

He refused.

Then she smiled, not because she was happy, but because she loved him enough to do what he could not do without breaking.

She pressed her forehead to his, and the bond between them flared so hard that it looked like light wrapping around their bodies.

I saw their hands move together toward the stone.

I saw the seal respond.

I saw the mouth behind them writhe like it hated the idea of being chained again.

Then the woman stepped forward, and the man grabbed her arm. The last thing she did before she tore herself out of his grip was look back at him like she wanted him to live even if she did not.

The vision punched harder.

The darkness surged.

The stone flared.

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She screamed.

He screamed too.

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Not because the bond forced it out of him, but because his body understood what his mind could not accept. I felt his grief like it was mine, raw and choking, and the next images came faster, sharper, as if the stone wanted to show me the pattern until I stopped pretending there was another way.

Sacrifice was not a tale.

Sacrifice was the lock.

Then it became my memories.

Not the ones I wanted.

The ones my body kept like bruises under skin.

I heard my own voice begging for approval from people who only gave kindness when they wanted something.

I remembered the first time someone called me useless because I did not awaken, and I remembered the way I swallowed it like it was truth because nobody told me otherwise.

I remembered being told that love was earned by obedience, that love was proven

by endurance, that love meant staying even when staying hurt.

I remembered thinking that the scraps Celeste tossed me were love because she did not outright kill me.

I remembered thinking my father's attention was love because he bothered to look at me at all.

I remembered the way I kept shrinking myself so I could fit inside their version of acceptable, and I remembered how proud I was when I managed it, as if survival was devotion.

My throat tightened.

My eyes burned.

I realized with a slow, horrible clarity that I had spent my whole life mistaking hunger for love, because hunger was what my world offered me, and I had been so starved that I took whatever shape it came in.

Xylas's screams rose again behind me. The sound of steel striking echoed off rock. Through all of it the pulse inside the stone stayed steady, patient, as if it had been waiting for me to understand one simple truth.

This seal was not closed by strength.

This seal was closed by what a bond would pay.

I closed my eyes because the images were too much, because the grief was too heavy. I could feel the pull of the bond in my chest stretching toward him like it was begging me not to do what the stone was asking.

Xylas's voice cut through the chaos, thick with fury. "Get off it!"

The cave answered him with movement.

The world shook again, harder than before. The stone under my hands vibrated like

it was reacting to the pressure in the mouth behind it. Dust poured from the ceiling

in sheets. Rock groaned like it was splitting. Somewhere deeper in the

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mountain, the black passage pulsed, and the hum around the stone spiked until my

teeth clenched from the force of it.

I opened my eyes.

The light around my hands had grown brighter. The warmth had spread across my

chest like a brand that did not burn but still marked. My healing stirred, not frantic now, not panicked, but pulled into alignment with something larger than my body, something that did not care what I wanted and only cared what had to be done. And through the roar of the beasts, the crash of steel, and Xylas's rage, a single word formed inside my skull with the weight

of a verdict.

It landed like a command the world itself had written.

Sacrifice.

AD