The silence that followed was not peaceful. It was the ringing quiet after a detonation, where the world holds its breath, waiting to see what remains.
Dust, fine as ground bone, settled on their shoulders and in their hair. Before them, the Sundering Spire was a gutted ruin, its central column split like a rotten tree, oozing the last dregs of the king's stolen magic—a sickly, fading gold that sizzled where it met Morwen's creeping black blight.
Jonas and Maria stood together in the center of the shattered throne room, leaning on one another. Jonas's arms were blistered from containing his own wildfire; Maria's nose was bleeding a thin, steady trickle from the psychic backlash of the spire's collapse. They were alive. That was the miracle.
Kaitlyn pulled her hand from the rubble. Her shifting weapon, which had been a brutal war-hammer moments before, retracted into a simple, dark bracer around her wrist. It was warm, almost humming. Not with power, but with… satisfaction. A job done.
Across the wreckage, Erik knelt, one hand pressed to the cold floor. His own weapon, which had formed a razor-edged longbow to snipe the runes powering the spire's core, was now a sleek dagger in his belt. His eyes were closed, his senses stretched out through the bond, not for threats, but for stability. The mountain's heartbeat is erratic, he sent to Kaitlyn, a clinical observation laced with profound unease. It's dying.
"Not dying," a voice rasped from the shadows near a collapsed archway. Morgan emerged, half-carrying, half-dragging her sister. Elara clung to her, trembling violently, her vampire-pale skin now grey with dust and exhaustion.
Her glowing eyes were wide, unfocused, darting at every shifting shadow in the stone. "It's being unmade. She's turning it back into mud and memory."
As if summoned by the words, the air thickened. The fungal glow on the walls pulsed. From every crack, every shadowed corner, tendrils of wet, dark corruption crept forward—not attacking, but claiming. The flagstones softened underfoot. The taste in the air shifted from ozone and blood to peat and decay.
Morwen was not finished.
"We need to leave," Jonas said, his voice a graveled command. "Now. Before the way out is swallowed."
They moved as a single, ragged unit—no longer two families, but survivors of the same shipwreck. Morgan and Elara took the point, Elara's head lifting, nostrils flaring as she found a scent-path through the dissolving chaos. Kaitlyn and Erik flanked their parents, their bond a silent, protective net. Behind them, the world of the Cŵn Annwn dissolved.
—
The escape was a brutal, sensory dream.
They did not run through halls; they fled through a carcass.
Morwen's curse worked its will with silent, biological inevitability. Tapestries depicting glorious hunts melted into weeping fungus. Suits of armor rusted into orange dust in minutes. The very air grew thick and cloying, smelling of turned earth and rotting lilies.
Alongside it, the mountain's physical collapse roared. Ceilings buckled with sounds like dying giants. Chasms opened in the floor, venting steam that smelled of the deep earth's forgotten breath. They leapt over gaps, ducked through falling debris, and followed the frantic, skittering path of Elara, who seemed to see the architecture of collapse before it happened.
At one junction, a massive oak-and-iron door, the royal seal of the Cŵn Annwn still proud upon it, blocked their path. Jonas planted his feet, fire coiling around his fists. But before he could strike, Kaitlyn stepped forward.
Her bracer flowed like liquid shadow down her arm and into her hand, forming not a weapon, but a key. A complex, skeletal key of pure black metal. She didn't know how she knew its shape—the weapon seemed to whisper it to her muscle memory. She inserted it into the lock. There was a click that seemed to resonate in their bones. The mighty door swung inward on silent hinges.
Erik met her eyes. Alistair's gift, the bond whispered. It remembers the ways in.
They stumbled from a fissure high on the mountain's shoulder as a false dawn painted the sky the color of a bruise. They collapsed onto a shelf of resilient heather and moss, the clean, cold wind scouring the taste of rot from their mouths. Below them, the forested valleys of the mortal world stretched into mist.
For long minutes, there was only the sound of ragged breathing, sobs of relief, and the distant, final groan of settling stone.
Morgan was the first to find her feet. She moved to the edge of the shelf, Elara a silent shadow beside her. Together, they looked east, where the first true rays of sun were beginning to gild the peaks.
"We go that way," Morgan said, not turning. Her voice was stripped of its old competitive fire, leaving only a weary, unshakable resolve.
"Where the forests are old enough to hide us, and the sky is too big for any king's ambition."
She turned then, her gaze finding Kaitlyn's. No smile. No thanks. Just a nod. A recognition between two sparks that had, for a moment, made a conflagration. She reached into her tattered tunic and pulled out a small, curved horn, dark as jet. She tossed it to Kaitlyn, who caught it on instinct.
"If you ever need a blade pointed at something the world says can't die," Morgan said. "Blow it. The sound doesn't travel on the wind. It travels in the quiet places. We'll hear it."
Then she looked at Elara. Her sister was staring at her own hands, flexing her fingers as if seeing them for the first time. Morgan's expression softened into something heartbreakingly tender. She simply held out her hand. Elara stared at it for a long moment, then slowly, hesitantly, placed her cold, sharp fingers in Morgan's warm palm.
They turned and, without another word, began to pick their way down the rocky slope, two silhouettes merging with the dawn shadows, leaving no footprints.
A small, choked sound came from behind them.
Mills stood apart, her arms wrapped around herself. She was not looking at the departing sisters. Her eyes were fixed on the tree line to the north, where the shadows were deepest, and the air shimmered with a unnatural chill.
Morwen stood there.
Not as a conquering queen, not as a vortex of rage. She stood as a monument to grief. The blight had receded from the land around her, drawn back into her form, leaving a circle of dead, grey grass. She looked ancient. Hollow. And her pale, pupil-less eyes were fixed on Mills with an intensity that was beyond hatred, beyond love—a pure, absolute attention.
Mills took a step toward the tree line.
"Mills." Erik's voice was raw. He took a step after her, his hand half-outstretched.
She stopped, turned. The face she showed him was not the shy, blushing girl from the library. It was a woman's face, etched with a sorrow as deep as the mountain's roots. Tears traced clean lines through the dust on her cheeks.
"I have to," she whispered, the words carrying on the thin alpine air. "The rot in her… it's in my blood, too. The grief. The power. If I leave it with her, it will just… fester. It will spread. If I go…" She looked at Morwen, a staggering courage squaring her shoulders.
"Maybe I can turn it. Not into something good. But into something that ends. Instead of something that spreads forever."
She looked back at Erik, and her composure cracked for a second, showing the girl beneath. "Tell your mother… thank you. For the kindness. It was the last real thing in that stone tomb."
Before Erik could speak, before he could find the words that didn't exist, she turned and walked steadily toward her grandmother. She did not offer her hand. She simply came to a stop a pace away, a small, determined figure facing a legend of despair.
Morwen looked down at her. The terrible focus in her gaze did not soften, but it… shifted. It contained a spark of something that might have been recognition. Might have been curiosity. The ghost of a lost daughter, seen in new eyes.
Without a sound, Morwen turned and walked into the deep, dark pines. Mills followed. She did not look back.
—
The silence they left behind was absolute. The four of them stood alone on the mountainside: Jonas, Maria, Erik, Kaitlyn. The wind mourned in the pines. Somewhere far below, a hawk cried.
Jonas let out a long, shuddering breath, as if he'd been holding it for thirteen years. He sagged, and Maria was there, her arm around him, holding him up.
Kaitlyn looked at the dark horn in her hand, then at the bracer on her wrist. She thought of Alistair, broken in their garden. Of Arthur. Of a truck's grille bending around her fists. She closed her fingers over the horn and stowed it in her pocket.
Erik was still staring at the spot where Mills had vanished. His face was a blank mask, but the bond trembled with a loss so profound it had no name. Kaitlyn moved to stand beside him, her shoulder pressing against his. No words. Just presence.
"What now?" Jonas asked the sky, the question they had been running from for a lifetime.
Maria looked south, toward the distant, mundane world of motorways and mortgages, a life that was as lost to them now as the citadel. Then she looked at her children. At her son, whose mind could map the fault lines in reality. At her daughter, whose will could reshape it. At the invisible, unbreakable tether between them.
She looked at her husband, who had burned for her.
"We walk," she said. And it was not a suggestion. It was a founding principle.
"We walk, and we learn what the world holds for a family like ours."
They turned their backs on the mountain. It stood behind them, a broken tooth against the brightening sky, a tomb for ghosts and kings.
Before them lay a deer trail, winding down into sun-dappled, unknown woods. Jonas took the first step. Then Maria. Then, in perfect, silent unison, the twins.
Their weapons were quiet on their bodies. Their bond was a quiet hum in their souls. They carried no maps, no destiny, no crown.
They carried each other. The road ahead was not a path. It was an opening.
And for the first time since a desperate mage had woven two souls into one, the story that followed was entirely, blessedly, their own.