Hours earlier...
Time slowed to a blur inside the Needle's Eye.
High noon didn't reach here. Above the clearing, ash and frost-mist churned in a slow vortex, thinning the sunlight to a dull gray. The ground lay in shadow, as if the sun stood hours off.
Eris sat slumped against the weeping shale, paralyzed.
The pull dragged silver straight from the Frost-Lace on his left arm. His veins ached. His scars pulsed, leaking a glowing fog that should have risen. Instead, it sank—drawn from his palm into the cracks of the black stone.
Beside him, Bailor's black warhorse stood still. Its eyes caught what little light there was, like wet stone. Frost caked its mane, mixed with dust.
Kaylah pulled her hands back from Eris's spine, breathing hard. "The mountain… it's not stopping. The connection is holding."
Barik dropped to a crouch, locking his arms around Eris's chest. "Move. Help me break contact with the stone before it takes all his magic."
Dara's hands shook as she pushed the lantern closer to Eris's face. Too pale. Too still. She couldn't see his eyes in the dark.
The truth hit them all at once: They couldn't go on without him. Not without the one carrying the Cold Sun.
Kaylah flinched, then lunged forward, seizing Eris's shoulder. "Look—" Her voice cracked. "It's ripping the silver out of his hands!"
"To where?" Dara gritted her teeth. They hauled Eris backward, his body scraping over the shale. The shadows on the clearing's edge shifted, as if the Brier itself braced against them.
Kaylah didn't answer. Her clan taught that silver magic rose. It drifted up, like smoke from a fire. Only one thing went down.
Divine.
The mountain wasn't eating him. Something deeper was pulling.
Her eyes cut to Eris's face.
His eyes opened. Just a slit.
She froze.
No pain there. No fear. Only depth. A weight older than the stone.
The fog from his palm didn't run straight. It spiraled down into the cracks—the same spiral painted on temple murals. The same one the old women drew in ash.
Her fingers found the nape of her neck. The green spiral was cold under her braid—not metal, not stone. Something carved from living wood, old as root.
What if it isn't the mountain? she thought. What if it's Her?
Barik and Dara didn't know about Celestia. Speaking a dead goddess's name with the Brier listening would be like shouting in a wolf's den.
Kaylah dropped to her knees. "We don't know what's at the heart of this place," she said. "But Eris can't fight it. Not like this." Her eyes flicked to the lantern, then to his face. "He needs a spark. Now."
She reached into her tunic and pulled out a crushed bundle of blue flowers, torn from the Needle's Eye in panic. "The black vines avoid these patches. The Brier won't touch them. And Barik—"
She nodded to the heavy pouch at his belt. "You still have the lore-powder, right?"
Barik patted it, brow furrowed. He rubbed his thumb over the worn leather. "I do." A pause. "But we don't know if the powder or raw petals are poison."
He shook his head. "Force the powder down his throat, and the reaction's too fast. He'll choke on his next breath while the cold-fire burns him from the inside out."
His fist clenched. "Eris needs something gentle. Something that flows. Not lightning."
Dara paced, tapping her bicep. She bit her lip. "Then we use the nectar."
A beat. "But how do we know it won't kill him?"
Her gaze went to Eris's pale face, then back to Barik. Her voice dropped. "If the stone takes any more, there won't be enough left to bring back."
Before anyone answered, Bailor's warhorse lowered its head. It nudged Eris's shoulder and let out a low, vibrating rumble—as if it heard something they couldn't.
Hooves clicked softly against shale. With deliberate care, the beast took some petals from Kaylah's hand in its teeth and tore them free.
"Hey!" Barik's hand went to his axe.
"Wait." Dara put out an arm to stop him. "Look."
The horse chewed the flowers. For a heartbeat, its breath turned a faint blue.
Then, for three terrifying seconds, it reacted. Eyes rolled back, whites flashing. Massive flanks shuddered so hard the iron stirrups clanked against its ribs.
Then—a snort. Explosive.
A thick, roiling cloud of bluish fog billowed from its nostrils. The moment the mist touched air, the black vines recoiled. They swayed back as if burned by invisible flame.
The horse lowered its head. Calm now. Breathing even. A vibrant sheen returned to its coat. It looked stronger. Alert. Alive.
"It filtered the raw silver," Kaylah breathed. Revelation lit her eyes. "The flower isn't poison to us. It's poison to them. It takes the mountain's chaos and turns it to dead cold—a cold-fire. The Brier fears it because it anchors. It freezes their mouths shut."
Dara nodded, sharp. "If the horse can take it, so can Eris."
Barik grabbed the rest of the blooms from Kaylah's hand and pressed them to Eris's lips. "Eat, boy. Chew."
But Eris couldn't. His head rolled limply. Skin the color of curdled milk. Lips cracked, bone-dry.
When Barik tried to part his jaw, Eris's throat only convulsed. Too parched to swallow. Too weak to know medicine from stone.
With a shallow, rattling gasp, his eyes rolled back.
Eris slipped entirely into the dark. Into blinding darkness... then, light.
The agonizing weight of the mountain vanished. The cold left his bones. He found himself standing in a boundless, silent void where the shattered remnants of silver architecture—towers, bridges, arches—floated like ghosts in an endless sky.
...Celestia, he rasped.
From the silver mist, she formed. She didn't walk; she simply existed, a towering figure wreathed in swirling vapor. Her presence radiated a cold, heavenly light that made the scars on Eris's arms ache with sudden recognition, her voice like a wind through frosted pines as she whispered.
Eris...
Eris was frozen still. Against her presence, he was nothing.
You're here... The thought came as a desperate realization, anchoring him to the vision.
I have... no strength left. The mountain... it took everything.
In the real world, Kaylah flinched as she watched his slumped form.
For a heartbeat, a terrifyingly familiar aura brushed against her senses, and another presence rode just beneath Eris's shallow, ragged breathing. It was older, colder, and seemed to echo from the very stone itself.
Cel—" Kaylah cut herself off. She stepped back as the weight of the heavenly spirit pressed into the cavern.
Simultaneously, within the boundless void of his mind, the goddess's presence flared. She didn't speak the word aloud, but her voice bloomed directly inside his consciousness, sharp, absolute, and echoing with divine authority.
Eris... Look.
Under the command of that unseen hand, his vision shifted violently.
He saw himself from above—his physical body slumped helplessly against the weeping shale, palms pinned flat to the ground. Thin, silver tendrils of fog bled continuously from his skin, snaking directly into the fissures of the rock to vanish into the deep.
Around him, the Black Brier's vines pulsed in a rhythmic, terrifying frenzy, drinking it in and growing visibly thicker and darker as they gorged on his essence.
The Heavenly Maiden's eyes fell to his left hand. The air between them thinned, stretching like fabric under a blade, as her luminous finger traced the empty space.
She began weaving a thread of starlight toward his palm, where the void yawned like a jagged wound in the fabric of the world. At the exact point where his physical flesh met the stone, his silver bled out in unbroken threads, vanishing into the cracks like rain into a starving sea.
You tore the bedrock's heart into your veins to live, Celestia said.
And you never sealed the breach.
The void in his palm pulsed. Far below, the Brier pulsed with it.
The mountain does not take.
Stone has no hunger.
It only gathers what the rain leaves behind.
Her gaze moved from his palm to the dark beneath them. To the vines.
But the Brier... A pause. Sad, not angry.
The Brier is bound to drink.
That is its only law.
Her gaze sharpened, frost on steel.
It tastes your silver because you left it running loose.
Not stolen. Not lost. Just... unheld.
And the Brier cannot ignore what flows free.
The threads of silver leaving his palm shuddered. For a heartbeat, they strained toward him—like hounds that remembered their master's voice.
It is a leech, Eris. Not a beast.
But it cannot keep what you hold.
Call it yours.
And it must let go.
Eris tried to speak. But in this boundless space, he had no voice.
You cannot fight a parasite with power, she said, eyes burning with ancient authority.
Power is what it eats.
She stepped closer. The ruins brightened around her. The light did not touch him.
Turn the siphon inside out.
Command through the center of your palm.
The wound you made—make it a mouth.
Let it drink from the void.
Her hand hovered over his hollow palm.
Open the black hole within you, and force the vines to remember their master.
But know this, Eris.
When the leech kneels… something deeper will hear its name called.
As she spoke, the black vines above them shuddered and pulled apart. The forest fell away. The vision plunged.
Down past the roots of the Brier. Down through bedrock and bone. Into an abyss buried so far beneath the stone that his mind recoiled from the depth.
There, under layers of seal-stones, it waited. A threshold.
Carved from a single slab of abyssal iron. Bound in petrified chains, each link thick as a man's chest. Old blood seeped from the metal—not fresh, not dry. Stagnant. Like the gate itself was a wound that refused to close.
A dread poured off it. Not heat. Not cold. Weight. The kind that bends time.
Look further, Eris.
Behind the Brier's domain lies the Ominous Gate.
The chains rattled. No wind. No sound. They remembered.
The founders of the Iron Order sealed it from the inside.
With sacrifice.
Eris felt his spirit tremble. Just to look at it hurt.
Do not seek it.
Do not let your curiosity walk into its shadow.
You are still fractured,
The goddess warned. Her luminous form wavered—the vision straining under the mountain's weight.
Your core cannot bear the gravity of what is chained beyond that door.
She looked at him again. Not as a mother. As a judge.
To face the Ominous Gate, you must first master the Brier. Entirely.
And you must seek the fragments...
Her voice softened, but the frost remained.
Only when your silver and I become whole will you have the strength to command the deeper dark.
Something in her tone changed. It grew quieter, weighted with an ancient finality.
There is a price, Eris.
One you are not ready to understand.
One that I paid once.
The shattered architecture of the void began to blur, the silver mist rippling as the reality of the physical world threatened to tear him away.
The Gate will wait, the goddess's voice echoed, fading but absolute.
It has waited a hundred years for a cold sun.
It can wait until you are one.
The image of the bloody gate began to burn away, turning to ash rather than flame. The crushing weight of reality rushed back into his senses, the phantom heat of his own blood mixing with the suffocating chill of the mountain.
For now, tame the wild wood.
Reclaim what is yours.
Her luminous hand touched his chest. No warmth in her grip. Only a vast absence that sank like an anchor into his core.
Survive this, she whispered, her form unraveling into threads of starlight.
For both of us.
"Eris! Wake up!"
Kaylah's voice cracked. Her hands clamped his shoulders, shaking him. "Eris, come back!"
Her breath came raw, edged with fear, as she turned toward the dark. "Barik, help me! He's not breathing right!"
Heavy hands grabbed Eris and hauled. The back of his head struck shale. He stayed limp, chest locked, caught in the gray between life and death.
Deep within his consciousness, the last of Celestia's words echoed like a sovereign command: Tame the wild wood. Reclaim what is yours.
As the divine voice faded, it left him suspended in a breathless dark. His body felt distant, a failing thing—hollow, freezing against the stone, airless. Yet he refused to let go. Her chill still held in his chest, a hook sunk deep against the void.
Survive this.
The words weren't hers anymore. They were his now, branded into bone. But he couldn't do it. Not alone.
Above him, Kaylah's hand tore from his shoulder. He heard her scramble back over the shale. Cloth ripped. She cursed, low and rough, a prayer with the edges worn off, as she dug through her satchel.
A moment.
Her shadow fell over him again. She didn't look at Barik. Didn't look at Dara.
At the edge of the lantern's light, Jag stood motionless. Too motionless. The alpha's eyes were fixed on Eris's chest, not blinking. Barny shifted, his ears flat against his skull. A hoof scraped shale—once. Then silence.
One of the children reached for Eris. Another small hand yanked them back into the dark.
Kaylah looked at his mouth.
Her jaw was set. Her eyes were wet. Her hands were steady now.
Eris's lips were blue. Under her fingers, his pulse stuttered, skipped—like a moth hitting glass.
Barik's grip tightened on his axe. He wasn't looking at the Brier.
She swallowed. Her throat clicked.
If this doesn't work…
***