Pandora’s Bite (The Forbidden Gate #2)

Chapter 1

ONE

Aria

The Sanctorum was no longer a room. It was an open wound in the sky.

I stood in the center of the chamber, my head tilted back, staring up at a ceiling that wasn't there anymore.

The heavy stone dome, which had pressed down on generations of Keepers like a physical manifestation of our burden, had dissolved into a shimmering veil of aurora light.

Beyond it, pressing uncomfortably close against the fabric of our reality, lay a landscape of impossible mountains and clouds that burned with internal gold.

Olympus.

It hung above us like a planet in low orbit, massive and terrifying, its gravity tugging at the blood in my veins. The air in the Sanctorum tasted thin and sharp, smelling of ozone and crushed pine needles, scents that didn't belong in the chamber I had visited every day for the last few years.

"I broke it," I whispered, both awed and horrified by what my actions might have done.

"We changed it," Kaelen corrected, his voice rough.

I turned to look at him. The Dragon Prince stood solid beside me, no longer flickering or translucent. He looked terrifyingly real, stripped of the dream-haze that had always softened his edges in the Threshold. But he wasn't free.

Thick cords of golden light, pulsing like arteries, tethered his wrists and chest to the Gate's structure.

They weren't the black iron chains of Tartarus anymore; they were woven from my own magic, from the choice I had made to bind us together.

He was anchored to the rift I had torn open, a living keystone holding two colliding worlds apart.

"I broke the world," I said, the realization settling in my stomach like lead. "Look at the walls."

The stone boundaries of the Sanctorum were shivering, phasing in and out of existence. Where the masonry vanished, glimpses of a dark, star-speckled void peeked through. We weren't just in the Sanctorum; we were everywhere and nowhere, suspended in the friction between realms.

Kaelen stepped toward me, the golden tethers pulling taut but holding. He reached out, his fingers grazing my cheek. His touch was warm, fever-hot, radiating the dragon fire that had saved my life. "You ended the lie, Aria. Chaos is just the truth sorting itself out."

A howl shattered the moment.

It didn't come from the mountains above or the tunnels below. It vibrated from the Gate itself, that swirling vortex of light and shadow standing in the center of the room. It was a sound of pure, predatory impatience, jagged with raw need.

Flynn.

My heart hammered a double beat against my ribs. "The others… They're still in there." They had started to come into our world, I had seen it. But something had changed, stopped them from completing the transition.

I spun toward the Gate. The surface was a roiling storm of amber and grey, clouds of magic spiraling around a central darkness. I could feel Flynn close to the surface, pacing, his claws raking against the barrier that had become a membrane.

"They should be here," I said, panic spiking. "The Wolf's Heart seal shattered when Ellie stabbed me. The Bear's Sorrow dissolved. They should all be standing here with you, with us."

"The door is open," Kaelen said, his eyes narrowing as he watched the swirling energy. "But they have to step through." He paused and his head cocked to the side as though he was listening to something I couldn't hear. "Or be pulled."

Another howl ripped through the air, louder this time, laced with pain. It wasn't just impatience; he was stuck. Caught in the friction I had created.

I moved to the Gate without thinking. My hands, still stained with dried blood and glowing with the golden markings of my transformation, reached for the place where the Wolf's Heart seal used to sit. The stone there was scorched and cracked, bleeding silver light.

"Flynn," I called out, pushing my consciousness into the connection.

I felt him immediately. A blast of winter air, the scent of wet fur and iron, and a chaotic, savage panic. He was fighting a current I couldn't see, trapped in the turbulence between the Threshold and the Sanctorum.

Aria! His voice roared in my mind, not words so much as a blast of intent. Pull me!

I grabbed the golden thread that connected me to him, a bond forged in dreams and solidified by years of my blood offerings, and I hauled back with everything I had.

It felt like trying to drag a mountain. The resistance was immense, a physical weight that strained my muscles and made my bones groan. I dug my boots into the shifting floor, gritting my teeth.

"Come on," I snarled, channeling the power of the transformed Gate. "Cross over!"

The Gate flared, amber light exploding outward. I felt Flynn's form begin to materialize, the heavy pressure of his presence pushing into the room. A hand, clawed and furred, swiftly shifting to human skin, reached out from the light, grasping for purchase.

I reached for him.

And behind me, Kaelen screamed.

It was a sound I had never heard from him, not in my nightmares, not in his rage. It was a cry of pure, shock-induced agony.

I spun around, my hand freezing inches from Flynn's reaching fingers.

Kaelen had fallen to his knees. His back was arched, his head thrown back, and the golden tethers binding him to the Gate had turned a sickly, frozen blue. Lightning arced down from the ceiling where I'd been staring at Olympus and pierced Kaelen's chest.

Thick, white frost crusted his lips and was spreading across his skin. It raced up his arms and across his body from the points of light that connected him to me and to the gate, turning his dark tunic white, creeping up his neck like a strangling vine.

"Kaelen?" I gasped, the name tearing from my throat.

He looked at me, his molten gold eyes wide with shock. His skin, usually radiating furnace-heat, was pale as milk, the veins beneath standing out in stark relief.

"Stop," he choked out, a cloud of visible vapor erupting from his lips with the word. The frost cracked on his jaw as he tried to speak. "Aria... stop."

I looked back at the Gate, at Flynn's desperate, reaching hand, and then at Kaelen, who was freezing to death before my eyes.

If I pulled Flynn through, would I kill Kaelen?

I let go of the connection.

Flynn roared in fury as he was sucked back into the vortex, the amber light dimming instantly. The pressure in the room vanished with a thunderclap that knocked me off my feet.

I scrambled across the floor to Kaelen. The frost stopped spreading, but Kaelen was shivering violently, his body convulsing.

"What happened?" I demanded, grabbing his face. His skin was terrifyingly cold, hard as marble. "Kaelen, look at me."

He gasped, drawing in a ragged breath that rattled in his chest. The golden tethers hummed, returning to their normal hue, but the damage lingered. He leaned into my touch, trembling, seeking my warmth like a lifeline.

I pressed my palms against his cheeks, channeling warmth, trying to force the blood back into his frozen skin. He felt like winter stone, sucking the heat straight out of my flesh. The frost on his tunic had stopped spreading, but it wasn’t melting, either.

"Kaelen," I urged, my voice cracking. "Tell me. Did the feedback loop hurt you? Is it the connection?"

He didn’t blink. He didn’t even seem to know I was there, kneeling in the wreckage of the Sanctorum with my hands on his face. His molten gold eyes, usually so focused, so piercing, stared right through me, fixed on some point in the swirling aurora above our heads.

"Kaelen!"

Nothing. No recognition. No sarcastic retort or commanding reassurance. Just a vacant, terrifying stillness, interrupted only by the violent shudders racking his frame.

I tried to push into our mental bond, to force my presence into his mind the way I had done a hundred times before. Answer me!

But where I usually found a roaring fire or a wall of iron will, I found... static. A wall of white noise, pulsating and angry, crackling with interference that stung my mental touch. It was like shouting into a storm.

Then, he stiffened. His head snapped to the side, chin lifting, ears straining toward the gaping hole in the roof where Olympus hung heavy and threatening.

"What?" I whispered, looking up. I saw nothing but the bleeding sky and the shifting stone. "What do you hear?"

The silence in the chamber was absolute, save for the low, thrumming vibration of the golden tethers that bound us.

But Kaelen was listening to a cacophony I couldn’t perceive.

His pupils dilated until the gold was nearly swallowed by black.

His lips moved, shaping words that didn’t belong to a human throat, syllables that twisted the air as they left his mouth.

"Ktheaa... voros nill..."

The sounds were guttural, liquid and sharp all at once, vibrating with a resonance that made my teeth ache. It wasn't the old tongue I used for rituals. It was older. Heavier. It sounded like rocks grinding together at the bottom of the ocean, or the wind howling across a dead planet.

"Athos... mori..."

He grabbed my wrists, not to hold me, but to move me aside, his grip bruising. He wasn’t looking at me; he was looking past me, toward the transformed Gate, toward the darkness where Flynn had vanished, his expression twisting into something unrecognizable. Not fear. Not rage. Devotion.

"Kaelen, stop. You're scaring me. That language…I don't understand."

He ignored me completely, his body rigid as a bowstring. He leaned forward, eyes wide, whispering to the empty air, to the void, to the monsters on the other side of the veil.

"Eiss... eiss thalorra..."

"Kaelen!" I shouted, shaking him hard enough that his head should have snapped back. Instead, he remained rigid as iron, his gaze locked on the swirling void where Flynn had vanished.

He didn't blink. He just kept chanting those terrible, liquid syllables, his voice vibrating with a resonance that rattled the teeth in my skull. "Eiss... thalorra..."

"He cannot hear you, Aria."

The unexpected voice made me jump, my heart kicking against my ribs.

I spun to see Master Theron stumbling through the debris of the Sanctorum's entrance. The old archivist looked frail against the backdrop of the bleeding sky, his robes torn and covered in dust, but his eyes were sharp, fixed on Kaelen’s frozen form.

He clutched the journal he’d given me to his chest like a shield.

"What is happening to him?" I demanded, my hands hovering over Kaelen’s shoulders, afraid to touch him again, afraid to freeze. "I tried to pull Flynn through, and—"

"And Olympus noticed," Theron finished breathlessly, stepping over a fissure in the floor that leaked golden light. He didn’t look at me; he looked up, past the shattered dome, to the looming mass of Olympus pressing down on us.

"The language he speaks... it is the Tongue of Creation.

Or perhaps Unmaking. The journal warns of this. "

"Warns of what? Speak plainly!"

"Drawing the attention of the gods, girl!

Look at them!" Theron gestured wildly to the golden tethers pulsing between Kaelen, myself, and the Gate.

"You are trying to act as a door, simply opening and closing to let them pass.

But you are not a door." He fumbled with the journal, his gnarled fingers trembling as he turned pages brittle with age.

"Pandora’s final entry... I missed the nuance in the translation until I saw you standing in the light. "

He thrust the book toward me. The ink seemed to writhe on the page.

"The prophecy does not say the daughter will open the Gate," Theron rasped, his voice cutting through the unnatural hum of the chamber.

"It says she will become it. The Four are not meant to be pulled through one by one like drops of water.

They are the corners of the foundation. If you pull one without the others, the structure collapses.

The Dragon Prince is freezing because of two things.

One, you are siphoning his existence, his power, to anchor the Wolf Prince's passage. "

I looked down at Kaelen, at the frost creeping toward his throat. He wasn't just cold; he was fading, his solidity wavering with every second Flynn hammered against the other side.

"And the other?"

"Your destruction or binding with the gate, turning it into a door, was one thing, but trying to open it and bring one of the princes through?

That drew the attention of Olympus. Beings they have probably assumed were lost were suddenly there, or at least they became aware of them.

Power like theirs wouldn't go unnoticed.

And trying to use the Dragon Prince's power to bring the Wolf Prince though, even if it was unintentional, has alerted them to something going on. "

The ice that was covering Kaelen suddenly felt like it was spreading through my own chest.

It hadn't just been stirring as I had previously thought. "Olympus is watching."

"Indeed, Aria, indeed. And what are they going to do when they realize that they can enter this world?"