Chapter 25
Alina
The Barrow
First of all, trying to leave an enchanted chamber when your viyen is the Lord of Earth who magicked the place to begin with—yeah, it’s not easy.
So, I don’t bother trying to get through the wards Dagan and his blood brothers placed on this room.
Instead, I use my connection to him, to his powers, and I look at the place where I just saw the crown.
I close my eyes and I let my powers search through The Barrow, past stone, and clay, rock, and dirt—and I find it.
And I lift.
At first, The Barrow rejects my plan. It doesn’t want to do this.
But I coax and I command, and eventually, I feel the sand shift.
The weight lifts and I drag my hand from the floor to the air as if lifting something—and when I hear them all gasp, I open my eyes.
And there it is.
“Holy fuck,” Delia mumbles.
“She did it!” Phoebe claps.
“Milady, that’s the crown,” Clarisse whispers.
“Of course, she did it. She’s a badass,” Jules says, and I hear the smile in her voice.
I try to catch my breath and just look at the thing.
At the way its glow flares a little whenever one of the men’s power surges through the bonds.
At the way it dimmed when Aurel fell, Dagan told me, and never quite woke again.
“Okay, so tell me the plan and use small words because baby brain is real, ladies,” Jules says.
“It’s built to respond to a Prime,” I say quietly. “To one ruler. One head. One will. We have four. It doesn’t know how to divide itself.”
“So we teach it,” Delia says simply.
My gaze snaps to her.
“How?”
She smiles, tired and fierce.
“You’re the one who reads fault lines and stress planes, Alina. What happens when a single line takes too much pressure?”
“It cracks,” I say automatically. “And then it breaks.”
We all look at one another.
“No,” Phoebe says, half horrified, half intrigued. “You want to break it?”
“Not destroy,” I say quickly. “Reshape. Redistribute. Like… like taking a single load-bearing beam and turning it into a ring of pillars.”
“And you think the crown will just let us?” Jules asks.
I think of the way the Barrow has been rearranging its halls around me since the day I arrived.
Of how the Marches went quiet the first time Dagan touched my hand.
Of how Nightfall itself feels tired of being forced into one mold.
“I don’t think the crown wants Idris,” I say. “I don’t think it wants a tyrant any more than the rest of you do. It’s just stuck in the old pattern. So yeah. I think if four true bonds and four Lords all tug at the same time—” I swallow. “We might be able to rewrite it.”
Jules lets out a low whistle. “So we jailbreak the magic hat.”
Delia snorts. “The most New Jersey description of a god-tier artifact I’ve ever heard.”
Phoebe hugs her knees for a second, thinking. “What do you need from us?”
My mouth goes dry.
I look at each of them in turn.
Jules, pale but steady, one hand on Marcel’s tiny back.
Phoebe, curls wild and eyes fierce, mind already racing with tactical implications.
Delia, buzzing with adrenaline and fear and stubborn compassion.
I love Dagan.
I don’t know when it happened, exactly—somewhere between the first time he called me Oona and the way the earth went quiet under my boots when we stood together over that fault.
But I know it now.
And I know this.
I will not sit here and do nothing while he bleeds himself dry, trying to hold up a collapsing system we could fix.
“Do you trust me?” I ask.
The room goes very still.
Not because they’re unsure.
Because they’re weighing the cost.
Phoebe is the first to nod. “You’re the only one here who understands this stuff on a structural level. If you say it might work?”
“I’m in,” Delia says, stepping closer, dark eyes shining. “You saved people on your world with your brain. You’re trying to save all of ours now. That’s good enough for me.”
Jules looks down at Marcel, then up at me.
“I know we’re not blood,” she says, voice thick. “But you three are the sisters I never had. So hell yeah, I say we trust you, Alina Fawcett.”
My throat tightens.
She shifts, wincing a little, and jerks her chin toward the crown. “Now you go do whatever you’re gonna do—for our sake, for our viyens, and for this kid’s, too.”
Clarisse steps forward, hands trembling just a little as she reaches for Marcel.
“I will stay with Lady Jules,” she says. “I will guard the young, and this chamber. If anything breaches the inner wards, the Barrow will tell me.”
Jules presses a kiss to Marcel’s forehead and smiles at Clarisse.
For a second, her hand curls in the air, empty.
Delia takes it.
Phoebe takes Delia’s other.
I step in front of them, close enough that we’re almost one cluster of hearts and fear and stubbornness.
My hands shake.
I look at the crown.
It hums louder now, responding to the bonds thrumming under our skin, like a tuning fork starting to sing.
“Okay,” I breathe. “Here’s the plan. We take the crown. We get all four Lords touching it at once, with us. We pull together. Hard. And when it cracks, we don’t let go. We shape it. We aim it at them and us, not Idris. But Jules, maybe you should stay—”
“No. Clarisse, you’ll stay with Marcel, won’t you?”
“Yes, milady,” the older woman bows.
“Good, because I need to go fight for his future at his father’s side.”
Jules bends and kisses her son’s brow, then stands tall and strong, ignoring the tears that trail down her cheeks.
Phoebe swallows. “And if Idris feels it, too?”
“Then he can choke,” Jules says.
Delia grins, but her eyes are wet.
“Let’s move before our boys do something dumb like die heroically without backup.”
The Barrow seems to hear us.
The door’s vines slither aside, unlocking themselves.
A path unspools in my mind—down one corridor, left at the singing root, through the hall that smells like damp earth and lightning.
Straight to the chamber where Dagan keeps the crown when he’s not glaring at it.
I take a breath.
“Okay,” I say again, louder this time. “Let’s go jailbreak a magic hat.”
And together, hand in hand, we step out of the safe room and into the living heart of the Barrow—toward the crown, toward the fault line in Nightfall’s future, hoping like hell we can keep it from shattering.