Page 251 of Feralheart

My boots scraped across the polished stone, my body walking forward, yanked by invisible ropes.

“Eradin, stop.” Fen’s grip tightened, trying to hold me back.

I couldn’t stop.

I was hauled closer, out of his arms. Five feet. Three. The light blazed brighter, and the pull intensified until I swore my bones would crack from the pressure building inside me.

My palm hit the surface.

The Oracle recognized my magic the way a starving man recognized meat. A shadow inside the column lunged toward me, its hunger scraping across my flesh.

The images didn’t flood my mind; they smashed through me.

A dragon screaming as its collar flared white, magic ripping from its body in streams that had weight and texture, flowing here, into this column, feeding something that had been eating for centuries.

A rider on their knees. Red lines up their arms. The floor swallowing them whole.

Another.

Another.

Too many faces. Too many open mouths.

Too many to count, overlapping until my mind blurred.

When the next image hit, my palm seared where it touched the column.

And it showed me…

The entity inside wasn’t granting wishes.

She was a prisoner, and prisoners didn’t have the power to give. They could only take.

The elite weren’t honoring this thing. They’d caged her. Chained something vast and ancient and at one time, benevolent, inside, then spent centuries feeding her to keep her docile. Every winner and dragon that died in the trials had flowed here, keeping the prison intact.

Keeping their power intact.

And we’d walked in wrapped in wild magic, bound together by a fragmented pact that made us the perfect fuel.

I finally saw the whole machine and found it as simple as a ledger. The collars bled the dragons. The pillars carried what they bled. The trials culled everything too weak to feed her, and delivered whatever was strong enough to hold her.

Commons were never barred from the machine because they threatened it, but because they had nothing worth bleeding. No dragons, no collars, no magic. Nothing to harvest.

Until me.

The wish was never the prize. The wish was the bait.

The floor beneath my boots glowed, and the Oracle’s desperation tore through me, a wave of feral rage.

The information had cost me. The Oracle hooked deeper, threads of light spreading from my palm up my forearm, burning channels through flesh. I caught my scream in my throat because screaming meant opening my mouth, and I couldn’t afford to lose even that much control.

“Fates,” I hissed.

Fen’s gaze tracked to the left, and he went rigid beside me. He peered into the shadows.

A figure slumped on the floor there, barely visible, folded in on itself.

The person looked up.