The blood oath blazed between us.
Golden chain binding our wrists.
Anchoring my divinity.
Making us weapon.
Luna stared.
Horrified.
Realizing what we'd done.
What we'd become.
Then the soul-heart screamed.
Not Luna's scream.
Not the wolves inside.
The heart itself.
The organ.
The living construct.
The sound was wet and organic, a death rattle magnified a thousand times. It echoed through the chamber with visceral wrongness—the sound of muscle tearing, of tissue rupturing, of something fundamentally alive beginning to die.
It pulsed violently.
Erratically.
Failing.
The masks were its power source.
Fed it energy.
Sustained its beating.
But the masks were breaking.
Thousands of them.
The cascade consuming Luna's network.
And without masks to feed it.
Without draining to power it.
Without harvest to sustain it.
The heart was dying.
