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The silver currents immediately closed over us, dragging our locked bodies down, down, down into the lightless, bottomless depths of the ancient pool.

I knew what this place was. I had stood at its shores before, felt its silver tides hum against my skin. But the Mani Vatn was not a place of healing for a male of the High Court. Its primordial, raw magic was a sacred, volatile crucible—deadly to pure-blooded Fae warriors whose bodies could not assimilate the ancient, unrefined magic of the First Era.

Caspian had known.

As the silver swallowed his face, as his broad chest shuddered against mine, the terrifying realization hit me through the dense water: he had known the consequences of his choice. He had known that leaping into the sacred pool was a death sentence for his own body, that the silver water would try to burn his fae core to ash.

And he had plummeted with me anyway.

His massive arms remained locked around my waist, his iron grip refusing to loosen even as the density of the silver pool ripped us deeper into the abyss. But the currents of the Mani Vatn were alive, ancient, and indifferent to devotion. The liquid swirled violently between us, a heavy, fluid wall that relentlessly pried his calloused fingers from my waist, dragging his body away from mine into the shimmering gloom.

I reached out blindly, my fingers clawing through the dense silver, trying to catch his leather jacket, trying to anchor him to my chest.

Caspian! I tried to scream, but the silver flooded my open mouth, coating my tongue in a bitter taste.

My lungs burned for air. The pressure mounted, pressing against my shattered ribs, threatening to crush my chest.

When I had entered the Mani Vatn before, the pool had hummed with quiet, ancient secrets—soft, ethereal whispers echoing from the dawn of the realm.

There were no whispers now.

The depths of the Mani Vatn roared with the deafening, agonized screams of the Goddesses.

The sound resonated directly inside the marrow of my bones, a chorus of primordial voices shrieking through the dark. It was the sound of screaming prophecies—a raw, terrifying chorus wailing of light and dark, of the eclipse that would consume the realm, of twin souls forged in fire and bound in blood, doomed to burn together or tear the realm apart.

“THE DUAL MARK WAKES!” the voices shrieked through my skull, grinding against my thoughts like stone against iron. “THE BLOOD OF FJÖRN AND THE SHADOW OF THE VOID! TWIN SOULS BOUND IN THE DEEP!”

Through the thick silver, I heard another sound—a sound that shattered the remaining pieces of my heart.

Caspian was screaming.

It was a raw, guttural roar of unadulterated agony echoing through the water not far from me. The volatile silver was attacking him, burning through his skin, trying to dissolve the magic in his blood. He was so close. I could feel the violent turbulence his thrashing body created in the liquid but the silver was too thick, blinding my eyes, keeping him completely out of reach.

Caspian! my mind screamed frantically, my blood-soaked hands cutting through the heavy liquid. Caspian, hold on!

I couldn’t reach him. The currents dragged us further apart, swirling in violent, chaotic circles around my broken frame.

Then, the water around me began to change.

From the gaping, open wound in my lower abdomen where Vaelthrys had pierced my flesh, a thick, dark cloud began to bleed outward. It wasn’t just blood. It was the raw, unrestrained essence of my soul.

A thick, arterial wave of deep crimson and midnight black poured from my gut, streaked with the smallest, brilliant twinge of celestial gold.

I watched in dazed, suffocating awe as the black-and-crimson thread detached from my skin, pulled by an unseen, magnetic tide through the silver depths. It didn’t dissipate into the water. It formed a thick, pulsing umbilical line of living magic, stretching through the opaque gloom straight toward the source of Caspian’s screaming.

The moment my blood touched him in the dark, his agonizing roars choked off into a heavy, shuddering gasp.

My dual magic—the darkness and the light—was wrapping around him, shielding his body from the pool’s lethal bite, taking the raw, destructive force of the Mani Vatn onto myself.

And then, the burning began.

“AAAGH!”

A scream ripped from my throat, lost in a cloud of silver bubbles as the pool turned its full, terrifying power upon my shattered body.

It felt as though I had been plunged straight into the heart of a dying star. The sacred silver didn’t just touch my skin; it seeped into my open wound, into my veins, into my bones, ignited by the magic bleeding from my chest.

Screams of pure, unbridled agony tore through my soul as my body became a battleground of divine creation and destruction.