The darkness inside the passage was thick, heavy enough to feel like a physical barrier pressing against Daniel's chest.
It didn't swallow light; it rejected it. The pale blue glow of the fungi on the ceiling stopped sharply at the threshold, refusing to bleed even an inch into the abyss.
"Daniel," Lily whispered, her hand extending to lightly touch his shoulder. Her fingers were cold, shivering slightly through her leather gloves. "Look at his hands."
Daniel kept his eyes locked on Finn Foster.
The rogue operative wasn't moving toward the passageway, nor was he reaching for them. He stood by the cold fire pit, his bare forearms hanging limp. Where the pale, bone-like iron was fused to his skin, thin streams of gray soot were beginning to leak out, drifting lazily toward the dark opening like iron filings drawn to a magnet.
"You're dissolving," Daniel said, his voice flat.
"I'm stabilizing," Finn corrected softly. "The mountain doesn't let anything waste. Every drop of strength I have left is being pulled toward the core to maintain the seal. When my tally is full, it moves to the next."
He pointed a single, blackened finger at Daniel's chest—right over the spot where his academy badge used to pin his cloak shut.
"Your marrow is soaked in vervain," Finn said. "Your steel is already rooted in your flesh. In three days, you won't be able to drop that blade even if you chop off your own fingers. The mountain will own the muscle, the bone, and the weapon."
"We aren't staying here to be your replacement," Lily said, stepping forward. Her voice had lost its hesitation, hardening into the sharp, lethal edge she used when facing down beasts in the lowlands. "We'll cut our way through the mountain if we have to. We'll tear the rock apart."
Finn let out a dry, clicking sound from his throat. A laugh.
"Tear it apart with what? The steel it gave you?" He shook his head slowly, the movement jerky, like a puppet whose strings were being pulled too tight. "You don't understand the scale of what you're standing on, girl. This peak isn't a mountain. It's a grave, and the academy is the undertaker making sure the lid stays shut."
Daniel took a step toward the passage.
The air blowing out of the opening was freezing—so cold it turned his breath into instantly solid crystals of ice that rattled onto his coat. The black veins on his blade throbbed with a vicious, rapid rhythm, matching his racing heart.
The weapon wanted to go in. It was pulling his arm toward the void.
"If the academy built the gates to anchor this place," Daniel said, turning back to Finn, "then Arthur and Bill knew what would happen to us the moment we crossed the ridge. They knew we'd end up here."
"Of course they knew," Finn said. His voice was growing weaker, thinner, sounding more like rustling paper than a man's voice. "Every five years, two students are sent. Never one. Never three. Two. One to hold the line, and one to feed the seal when the first gives out."
He looked at Lily, then at Daniel.
"Vance was paired with a girl named Clara," Finn murmured, his white eyes flickering as if trying to recall a memory buried under miles of rock. "She didn't make it past the monolith. Vance carried her sword all the way to the throne. That's why he broke."
Daniel felt a sudden, sharp coldness in his gut that had nothing to do with the wind from the tunnel.
He looked at Lily.
She was looking at him, her dark eyes wide, the truth settling between them with the crushing weight of a falling avalanche.
One to hold the line. One to feed the seal.
"They didn't give us a rescue mission," Lily said, her voice barely audible over the low, thrumming pulse of the mountain. "They gave us a choice of which one of us dies first."
"No," Daniel gritted out, his jaw clenching so hard his teeth ached. "We aren't playing their game. We aren't Vance, and we aren't Clara."
He reached out and grabbed Lily's hand.
The gray-veined skin of her knuckles met his. The moment their bare skin touched, a violent pulse of energy shot through both of their arms—a sharp, electric shock that made the black veins on their hands glow with a sudden, fierce crimson light.
Not gray. Not white.
Crimson.
Finn's milky, featureless eyes snapped wide. He took a stumbling step back, his iron-fused forearms twitching violently.
"What..." Finn gasped, his paper-thin voice cracking. "What did you drink?"
"The wine," Daniel said, his grip tightening on Lily's hand, feeling the surge of raw, unrefined heat flowing between them. "Bill gave it to us. But he didn't give it to us to make us soft."
Daniel drew his sword fully, the crimson light spilling off his skin and igniting the black veins of the steel in a brilliant, burning arc.
"He gave it to us so we could burn the tether."