The air on deck turned frigid as the violet tether between the two ships hummed, vibrating through the wood and into my marrow. The Hive's flagship was closing the distance with impossible speed, pulled forward by the magnetic hunger of the mark.
"Down!" Silas roared as a second harpoon whistled overhead, shattering the railing.
I collapsed onto the wooden planks, my back against the mast. I shoved the leather strap between my teeth and gripped Kaelen's hand so hard I felt his bones shift. Silas knelt before me, his face a mask of concentrated agony. The man who had been trained to protect life was now forced to mutilate the woman he was beginning to love.
"I have to go deep," Silas whispered, his voice cracking. "The magics of the Old Blood are rooted in the dermis. If I miss a single sliver of the brand, the signal stays live."
"Just... do it," I muffled through the leather.
He didn't hesitate again. The silver blade, blessed by the Unseen, met my skin.
Pain didn't come as a sharp sting; it came as a white-hot explosion that blinded me. It felt as though he wasn't just cutting skin, but peeling back my very soul. My back arched, a strangled scream dying in the leather bit, and the world dissolved into a blur of salt, blood, and violet light.
I felt the tugging—the sickening sensation of the "key" resisting its eviction. The brand didn't want to leave. It pulsed harder, the violet glow flaring so bright it cast long, dancing shadows against the sails.
"Almost... there..." Silas grunted, his fingers slick with my blood as he worked with the precision of a diamond-cutter.
With a final, wet tear, the weight vanished. The crushing pressure on my chest evaporated. Silas slammed the jagged piece of glowing flesh into the lead cylinder and hammered the cap shut with the pommel of his sword.
The silence was instantaneous.
The violet glow vanished. The humming in the air stopped. The tethering ropes attached to the harpoons went limp, their magical light flickering out like dying embers. Behind us, the Hive's flagship groaned, losing its unnatural momentum as the "compass" it was following suddenly went dark.
I slumped against the mast, gasping for air, my shoulder a numb, throbbing void. Silas threw his cloak over me, his hands trembling as he applied a pressure bandage.
"It's over," he breathed, leaning his forehead against mine. "The signal is gone."
Kaelen, however, hadn't moved. He was staring at the lead cylinder on the table. "Lysia... look."
The cylinder was vibrating. Not with the frantic pulse of the beacon, but with something else—a rhythmic, heavy thumping from the inside. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. "It's not just a key," I whispered, the realization hitting me with the force of a physical blow. "It's a heart."
I reached out with a shaky hand, touching the cold lead. Through the metal, I didn't feel the heat of a wound. I felt a memory. My mother's voice. The smell of the High-Valley pines. And then, a vision flashed before my eyes: the Aegis Scroll wasn't a map to Aethelgard. It was a map to me.
The twist of the knife wasn't that I was the key to the sanctuary. It was that the sanctuary was a prison, and my blood was the only thing keeping the "Old Blood" from becoming a plague.
"He didn't want to find the Unseen," I said, looking at Silas with hollow eyes. "He wanted me to lead him to the source so he could harvest the rest of us. Silas... there aren't dozens of us left. There's only one."
The lead cylinder split down the middle, not from the pressure, but because the silver-blue light of the real Aegis Scroll began to manifest out of thin air, woven from the very blood Silas had just spilled.
The scroll had never been a physical object. It was a genetic inheritance, hidden in the scars of the survivors. By "breaking" the key, we hadn't hidden ourselves—we had finally, truly, activated the weapon.
The transition was not a burst of light, but a total, suffocating silence. As the silver-blue radiance of the manifested Scroll wrapped around my fingers, the pain in my shoulder didn't just fade—it was overwritten. Knowledge poured into me like liquid ice, ancient and heavy. I saw the faces of a thousand ancestors, a lineage of wardens who hadn't been protecting a kingdom, but holding back a tide.
The Aegis Scroll wasn't a set of instructions. It was a bridge between the living and the Echo.
"Lysia?" Silas's voice sounded like it was coming from miles away.
I stood up, my movements fluid and strange. The blood on my tunic began to shimmer, turning into threads of mercury that wove back into the bandage, sealing the wound. I felt the Aeon's Wing beneath my feet not as a ship, but as an extension of my own body.
"The fog," I whispered, pointing toward Califer's approaching flagship. "It isn't just weather. It's him."
Califer's ship, the Dread-Sovereign, was closing the gap again, even without the beacon. He didn't need a compass anymore; he could see the celestial light blooming from our deck. The black ship loomed like a jagged mountain of ironwood, its cannons swiveling toward us.
"We can't outrun them now," Kaelen groaned, clutching the railing. "And we can't fight a flagship with a scout boat."
"I can," I said. My voice sounded deeper, layered with a resonance that wasn't mine. I raised my hand, and the silver-blue light spiraled upward, mimicking the shape of the mast. I was prepared to burn my very soul to push the Dread-Sovereign back into the depths.
But as I prepared to strike, the sea between the two ships didn't just churn—it opened.
A massive, bioluminescent hull erupted from the waves, positioned exactly between us and Califer. It was a vessel unlike anything the Unseen or the Hive possessed. It was built of bone-white coral and reinforced with translucent glass, humming with a frequency that shattered the Hive's harpoons like they were made of sugar.
A single figure stood on the prow of the newcomer, draped in robes the color of deep-sea trenches. They held a staff topped with a rotating brass sphere that seemed to swallow the violet light of the Hive.
"The Hive always did have poor timing," a voice rang out, cutting through the roar of the gale.
The figure leapt from their ship, gliding through the air on a cloak that rippled like a manta ray's wings, landing softly on our deck. They pulled back their hood to reveal a face covered in shifting, iridescent scales and eyes that held no pupils—only the swirling depths of a nebula.
"Who are you?" Silas demanded, his sword leveled at the stranger's throat.
"A debt-collector," the stranger said, ignoring the blade and looking directly at me. They bowed low, their movements hauntingly elegant. "And you, Lysia, are late for your coronation. My name is Elara—the real Elara."
I froze. I looked at the stranger, then back at Kaelen, who was gaping. "But Califer's daughter... he called her Elara. She had the brand."
The stranger let out a soft, melodic laugh. "Califer's daughter is a puppet made of wax and stolen blood. She is a decoy designed to make you believe the lineage was broken. I am the Last Scion of Aethelgard, and I have been waiting ten years for the Scroll to bleed again."
She turned toward the Dread-Sovereign, which was now firing its first broadside. The heavy iron balls screamed through the air.
The stranger didn't flinch. She tapped her staff once against the deck. The water around the Aeon's Wing rose up in a colossal, shimmering wall, catching the cannonballs and dropping them harmlessly into the deep.
"You have the Key, Lysia," the real Elara said, her eyes glowing with an ancient hunger. "But I have the Lock. And if we don't combine them in the next ten minutes, Califer isn't going to kill us—he's going to use that 'Dread-Sovereign' to tear the veil between worlds wide open."
The twist hit me like a physical blow. Califer hadn't been hunting the Unseen to destroy them. He had been hunting them to find the "Lock"—this woman, this real Princess—so he could merge the two and rewrite reality itself.
"He's not behind us anymore," Elara warned, her voice dropping to a whisper.
I turned around. On our own deck, standing right behind Kaelen, was a shimmering reflection of Califer. Not a man, but a projection of pure, violet spite.
"Thank you for the introduction, daughter," the projection of Califer sneered. "Now, give me the Scroll, or I'll watch the Reaper kill her 'brother' with her own hands."
He pointed a finger, and suddenly, Kaelen's eyes turned a milky, glowing violet. He unsheathed his sword and turned toward me, his face twisted in a silent, agonizing scream of betrayal.