The veil between worlds was thinning.
Raina felt it before she saw it the air was colder despite the rising sun, the wind carried whispers without words, and even Lucien's touch, usually grounding, now felt like smoke in her hands.
The Oracle's voice hadn't left her since she returned:
"To save what you love, something must break."
And something had broken.
The map in the estate's inner library a relic carved from moonsteel and bone now pulsed with veins of crimson. Paths once dormant bled new directions, drawing lines across forgotten realms. Among them, one route pulsed like a heartbeat. It pointed to a name she had only heard in forbidden stories:
The Threshold.
Raina stood over the map, fingers hovering. When she touched it, the ink ignited beneath her skin.
"This is where we go next," she whispered.
Lucien leaned against the doorframe, eyes dark. "The Threshold is cursed. Even the gods don't cross it."
She turned. "Exactly why we must."
He stepped forward. "And if it breaks you?"
Raina exhaled. "Then let it break me. Just not the world."
Lucien's silence was an answer in itself. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her temple. "Then we go together."
The Threshold was not a place. It was a presence.
The trees around it bent in unnatural shapes, bowing inward like supplicants. The sun refused to touch the clearing. In its center, suspended above the earth, floated a mirror shimmering, mercurial, more portal than reflection.
Raina and Lucien dismounted in silence.
"It's waiting," she murmured.
Lucien's voice was tight. "So is something else."
She took his hand. "Whatever happens, we face it together."
She reached for the mirror. The moment her fingers grazed the surface, it rippled outward light bending, space unraveling. They were sucked in without warning, their screams swallowed by silence.
They landed in a realm of fractured light.
No sky. No ground. Just ribbons of memory, spiraling through time. The past walked beside them Lucien as a child, bloodied and wild. Raina standing alone on a battlefield. Maeva screaming as a blade pierced her shoulder. So many futures. So many endings.
At the center of it all stood a throne made of obsidian bone. Above it, a crown spun in the air forged from starlight, antlers, and time itself.
And near it stood a woman.
She wore no armor. No face.
Until she turned.
And Raina saw herself.
Older. Empty-eyed. Powerful. Broken.
"I'm you," the woman said. "The you who wore the crown and paid the price."
Lucien's voice rang out. "We don't want your path."
"Then make a new one," the figure whispered. "But it still costs blood."
She pointed to the crown.
"If she wears it, the veil closes. The war pauses. But something inside her dies."
Raina stepped forward.
Lucien grabbed her wrist. "Don't. Don't let them use you again."
She turned to him. "I'm not doing it for them. I'm doing it for us."
And she placed the crown on her head.
The pain was instant.
Runes ignited across her body symbols older than language. Her veins glowed. Her skin split with light. The ground beneath them howled.
Lucien caught her as her knees buckled.
Her scream was a pulse that tore through dimensions.
And the veil began to sew itself shut.
The fracture in reality knit together like flesh healing but something else bled with it.
Raina's memories unraveled, one by one.
Her mother's voice. The warmth of Lucien's arms. Her own name.
Lucien's voice broke through the storm. "Stay with me!"
"I can't"
And then, silence.
She woke to birdsong.
Grass beneath her. Lucien's arms around her. The mirror behind them, cracked but closed.
Lucien brushed the hair from her face. "You're here."
Raina sat up slowly. Her eyes were no longer gold. Or brown. They were both two realms merged into one.
"I didn't just close the veil," she said softly. "I became its anchor."
Lucien stared at her, fear and awe mixing in his expression. "What does that mean?"
"It means I'm the wall now. Between what was and what's coming."
Back at the estate, the skies had cleared.
The eclipse had passed.
Maeva met them at the gates, breath catching in her throat. "You made it."
Raina nodded once. "We sealed the veil."
But even as she spoke, a chill cut through the air.
They turned toward the horizon where the light should've been full.
But the sky... cracked.
A single rift tore across the clouds.
From within it, something enormous stepped out.
Antlers of bone. Wings of smoke. Eyes like galaxies collapsing.
Lucien drew his blade. "That's not from this world."
Raina squared her shoulders. "No. That's from what comes next."
And as thunder split the heavens, she whispered
"We end this."