Page 31 of Waking Her Dragon

"The first Dragon Queen and her human… Well, seemingly human… vessel," Leviathan purred, his eyes gleaming with mad fervor. "The only force in existence pure enough to turn the mechanism. For centuries, this door has stood between our world and the First Darkness." He looked past them, toward the grinding, glowing stone threshold deeper in the cave. "A primordial Void that existed before Time, before stars, before Light itself. A Hunger that will swallow all of your Realms whole."

Behind his crimson and golden wall of Magic, Carrick went entirely rigid. "Syd... they were right. It's exactly what the texts warned about."

But Sydney’s focus was entirely on the mechanics of the room. Her mind raced, stripping away Leviathan's grandiose words to look at the raw calculus of the trap. She looked at the glowing sigils on the walls. She looked at the white and gold veins pulsing under her shoes.

Then, a cold dread seized her chest as the awful truth clicked into place.

She couldn't simply free Garrett.

The spell binding him to the floor wasn't just a cage—it was a counterweight. If she shattered his chains or ripped him from the floor incorrectly, the sudden imbalance would trigger the mechanism. The anchor would fail, and the threshold would violently tear itself wide open.

Leviathan saw the exact moment the realization hit her face. His smile turned monstrously wide, practically dripping with malice.

"Go ahead and take him, Special One," Leviathan taunted, throwing his arms out wide in an open invitation. "Smash the iron. Tear him from the rock. Do it. Save your Mate."

Garrett let out a ragged, terrified gasp, his lavender eyes wide as he looked at Sydney. He couldn't remember her face, but his soul knew enough to understand the cataclysm she was holding back. "Don't..." he wheezed. "Sydney... don't."

Leviathan leaned forward, his voice dropping to a sickeningly sweet whisper. "He wants you to rescue him, Sydney. Your love for him brought you all this way. Use that Power. Break his chains and see what crawls out from the Darkness."

Sydney stood frozen between her bleeding Mate, the roaring black water, and the grinning monster before her. Leviathan didn't need to force her to open the door. He was betting everything on the fact that her love for Garrett would make her reckless enough to open it herself.

Leviathan’s monstrous grin remained stretched across his face. She knew he was waiting for the predictable explosion of female tears and desperate, reckless Magic.

“Ha!”

Instead, Sydney took a step back.

She did not touch Garrett again. Her hands dropped to her sides, her fingers uncurling as she deliberately broke the physical line of tension.

Across the cavern floor, Leviathan’s smile faltered, a slight, imperceptible twitch marring his smooth brow. This wasn’t in his script.

Completely ignoring him, Syd turned her gaze away from the villain to study the environment. She forced her emotions down into a cold vault deep in her mind, looking past the horrific blood, iron, and silver to examine the actual structure of the spell. Inside her mind, Kara woke up, her wise, analytical gaze overlaying Sydney’s vision. Together, they tracked the flow of the glowing white and gold veins, mapping out the precise directional currents of the Magical pressure.

Detecting the shift in her focus, Carrick subtly stepped sideways. His gold and crimson aura expanded, completely blocking Leviathan’s direct line of sight to Sydney, keeping the monster at bay and buying her every possible second.

From his chains, Garrett watched her through bloodshot, barely conscious eyes, his rattling breath the only sound in the tense quiet.

“What is the matter, Special One?” Leviathan taunted from behind Carrick’s Magical barrier, his voice gaining a sharp, defensive edge. "Don't you want him? Is the great, Fated love of the Dragonkin so easily deterred by a little risk?”

Sydney kept her eyes locked on a pulsing node of light near the base of Garrett’s obsidian pedestal. “More than you’ll ever understand,” she said, her voice entirely flat, entirely steady.

Looking up, she met Leviathan’s gaze over Carrick’s shoulder. “That’s exactly why I’m not touching him.”

Leviathan's smile vanished completely. He had calculated for desperation, for a broken young woman driven mad by the sight of her tortured Mate. Instead, he was looking at terrifying restraint and more knowledge than he could ever fathom.

Sydney and Kara worked in perfect, frantic lockstep, tracing the luminous white and gold veins pulsing through the obsidian floor. Yet, the math of the spell refused to compute. The flow of energy was completely lopsided. Leviathan’s trap was designed as a one-way street. The moment her key touched Garrett’s anchor, the pressure would force the threshold wide open.

“How do we flip the polarity?” Sydney adamantly asked the Dragon Queen with whom she shared her soul. “Kara, if we can't reverse the flow, the moment we break those chains, everything collapses.”

“I don't see a bypass, my girl,” Kara admitted, her voice tight with a rare, suffocating frustration. “He built the cage around the anchor too perfectly. There are no leverage points from the outside.”

“Sydney.”

The raspy, wet whisper cut through her spiraling thoughts. Sydney’s gaze snapped back to the center of the room. Garrett was fading fast. His chin had dropped toward his chest again, his eyes clouded and losing their fight against the darkness. But there was a sudden, fierce lucidity in the way he stared at her.

Aodhan was pushing through the agony. “You’re looking at the lock,” Garrett dragged the words out, his voice cracking painfully.

Sydney frowned, taking a half-step forward, careful not to cross the threshold line. “Garrett, I have to decode the lock to reverse…”