The trek back to the Palace felt like a descent into a fever dream. Without Caelum's wind magic, every step was a battle against gravity. The weight of her blood-drenched gown, now shredded and caked with forest floor mud, felt like iron chains. Seraphina clutched the Silver Crest so hard the metal bit into her palm, using the pain to keep from blacking out.
She reached the edge of the Palace gardens just as the sky turned a bruised, sickly indigo. Ahead, she saw a flash of silver armor—Alaric. He was moving with a frantic, uncharacteristic desperation, shouting orders to a group of retreating knights.
"Alaric!" she croaked, her voice barely audible over the low-frequency thrum of the Siphon Stones.
He spun around, his sword already drawn. When his eyes landed on her, he didn't see the Duchess who had saved him; he saw a ghost.
"Seraphina? No—stay back!" he shouted, rushing toward her, though he was too panicked to truly look at her yet. He grabbed her by the shoulders, his breath coming in short, jagged bursts. "You have to get out of here. The Palace... it's over. The final sequence has started. The Prime Minister's body was just a conduit, and the stones are already at 90% capacity. The ballroom is a death trap!"
He was talking so fast he was nearly hyperventilating, his mind consumed by the tactical nightmare of the city's collapse. "We're evacuating the Emperor, but the ritual is self-sustaining now. There's no way to—"
He stopped mid-sentence.
The adrenaline that had been driving him flickered and died as he finally looked at her. He felt the wetness on his hands where he held her shoulders—not the silk of a dress, but the sticky, cooling dampness of blood.
His eyes traveled from the jagged gash on her cheek to the deep crimson soak on her shoulder, and finally down to the ruined, shredded mess of her skirt where her thigh was crudely bandaged with a strip of lace.
"Seraphina..." His voice dropped from a frantic shout to a horrified whisper. The color drained from his face, leaving him even paler than the corpses they had found in the ballroom. "You're... you're covered in blood. What did you do? Where have you been?"
Seraphina didn't collapse, though her knees were shaking. She slowly opened her hand, revealing the Silver Crest of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, stained with her own blood.
"The anchor in the forest," she whispered, her voice trembling but certain. "I broke it, Alaric. It's not just the cult. It's the Ministry. They were guarding the heart of the ritual."
Alaric didn't even look at the crest. He looked at her trembling hands, then back at the trail of blood she had left across the garden path. The realization hit him like a physical blow: while he had been worrying about politics and palace walls, she had been fighting a war alone in the dark.
"You went to the forest?" he choked out, his grip on her shoulders softening as he realized he was hurting her. "Alone? Seraphina, you can barely hold a practice sword..."
"I had help," she said, a small, tired smile touching her lips as she thought of Caelum. "But the ritual... if I broke the anchor, why is it still activating?"