11. The Last Anchor
The Last Anchor
"Only one place remains dark," Garrett whispered into the dead quiet of the bedroom.
Nobody moved. The world seemed to stall in the seconds following the blast. The air was thick with the invisible aftertaste of ozone from short-circuited Magic.
Ginnie was still leaning heavily against Carrick’s chest, her breathing shallow, her face as white as a sheet.
On top of the dresser, the empty space where Grey's pocketknife had been a moment ago felt like an open wound.
In the corner, Darcy's monitoring equipment was practically screaming, its digital gauges flashing red and yellow as numbers scrambled across the screens.
Sydney sat frozen right beside him on the mattress, her blue eyes wide, staring at him with a raw, unadulterated terror that tore right through the freshly restored lines of their Mating Bond.
“Five stones, Lad,” Han’s voice rumbled from the bottom of his psyche, a heavy, devastating echo.
Garrett clutched his temples, his jaw locking so hard it ached. “You said there were more stones than lights, Han.”
“There are.”
“How many?”
A long, agonizing pause stretched through the shared spaces of their mind. “Five.”
“Four anchors are burning,” Garrett calculated rapidly, his heart slamming against his ribs. “One remains.”
Carrick immediately stepped forward, overriding the chaos with the booming, unyielding authority of a renowned Guardsman and the Head Elder.
"Inventory lockdown. Right now. Grey, get some of the new Guardsmen training to be Scouts on the horn.
Nobody leaves this property. Nobody goes to sleep.
Nobody touches a single damn thing unless it is structurally necessary.
We need to audit every room and determine what the fifth anchor is before Garrett's subconscious hits the next REM cycle. "
"No," Ginnie interrupted, her voice weak but entirely steady as she pushed herself up from Carrick’s arms. Wiping a bead of cold sweat from her forehead, her sharp Necromancer eyes locked onto Garrett.
"We're thinking about this backward. We've spent days asking what object the mechanism will target next.
We need to look at what the four stolen objects have in common. "
"They're personal trinkets," Grey grumbled, his hand still hovering over the empty wood of the dresser.
"Not physically, Grey. Functionally," Ginnie corrected, stepping closer. "Look at the pattern. Sydney. Carrick. Myself. You. Four different people. Four entirely different Magical signatures."
"Every single one of us has a relationship to the Dragon Guard," Sydney noted, her voice tight.
Inside Garrett's mind, the geometry of the memory shifted again.
With the four lights actively burning, Han could see details he had been blind to before.
The pulsing points of illumination weren't just scattered randomly around the perimeter of the stone circle; they were explicitly positioned.
From each burning stone, a faint, thin line of pure, bleeding light was crawling across the cold earth, running like an electrical conduit straight toward the heavy base of the stone door.
Garrett’s tactical training took over the logistics. He analyzed the line-up like a perimeter grid. Who was missing from the pattern? What signature hadn't been accounted for?
Sydney's ribbon was saturated with Sydney's energy—and through her, Kara's Magic.
Carrick's tie tack carried the unmistakable resonance of Alastair's Dragon King signature.
Ginnie's fountain pen was steeped in the ancient Magic of Heatherton Necromancy.
And Grey's pocketknife carried decades of his brother's resonance, layered over something Garrett himself had given him as a child.
Four people. Four signatures. Four completely different kinds of Magical connections.
Garrett studied the pattern Han could see, turning the possibilities over and over in his mind.
But why those four?
And what the hell could possibly belong in the fifth position?
He didn't know.
"Garrett." Darcy’s sharp, clinical voice cut through his spiraling thoughts. She was staring at her tablet, her thumb flying across the interface as she recalibrated the screaming sensors.
Garrett forced his eyes to focus on her. "Yes, ma’am?"
"You're awake," Darcy said, her Timberwolf eyes snapping up to meet his.
"Yes, ma’am," Garrett growled.
"Your deep-sleep signature isn't," Darcy stated flatly, turning the tablet around so he could see the display.
The digital graphs were supposed to have dropped back to a restful, waking baseline the moment his eyes opened.
They hadn't. A specific, highly anomalous pattern that had previously existed only during the 3:42 AM blackout windows was still actively running in the background of his brain waves. Garrett stared at the display.
Whatever happened to him during those thirty-second voids hadn't stopped when he opened his eyes.
Something was still running.
“Lad...” Han whispered, a wave of heat rolling through the Bond. “The fifth position. Look.”
Through the Dragon King's eyes, Garrett saw the final dark stone at the edge of the circle begin to pulse. It wasn't a violent flare like the others. It was a low, weak, lavender-white light that vibrated in perfect sync with the rhythmic beat of his own heart. His Magic.
“That's ours,” Garrett murmured aloud to the room, the words sounding hollow.
Han's mental head bowed. “Aye.”
"I'm the last anchor," Garrett said, looking up at his family.
The room went completely, agonizingly silent.
Ginnie stepped forward, her hands trembling slightly as she reached out to touch the golden tie tack resting on the table.
She closed her eyes, using the residual link of Carrick's Dragon scale to run a quick, desperate comparison Spell through the ambient Magic radiating off Garrett's skin.
Opening her eyes, she knew her gaze was heavy with profound sorrow. "He's right. The fifth position resonates perfectly with Garrett and Han's unique frequency."
Closing his eyes, Garrett’s tactical brain processed the ultimate conclusion. A soldier knew when a position was entirely compromised. If an asset was turned into a weapon against the perimeter, you eliminated the asset to save the line.
"Then this ends with me," Garrett said, his voice dropping into a flat, terrifyingly calm, commanding tone.
He looked straight at Carrick. "Sever me from Han if you have to.
Put me down. Put me in a containment vault beneath the mountain where the Magic can't reach.
Whatever it takes to break the circuit before that fifth stone locks in. Do it."
Sydney went absolutely, terrifyingly still to his right. She didn't cry, she didn't scream, and she didn't plead. Instead, a wave of pure, blistering fury erupted through the Mating Bond, her White Dragon Magic flaring so violently around her hands that the air hissed.
"No," Sydney said, her voice dropping into a dangerous, feral register.
"Syd…"
"You don't get to volunteer my Mate for execution because you're scared, Dragon Man," she hissed, stepping directly into his chest, her eyes blazing with absolute iron.
"If I'm the key to the road, Sydney, they will use me to tear this homestead apart…"
"Then we break the damn lock!" she shouted back, refusing to let him retreat into a martyr's grave.
Ginnie stepped between them, her focus turning sharp. "Han. Where is Garrett's lavender light in relation to the stone door? Exactly."
Garrett went quiet, reaching inward to listen.
Han looked through the smoky, dark mist of the memory.
The four external lights were lined up outside the perimeter, their thin streams of energy crawling toward the base of the stone.
But the fifth light, the lavender-white pulse of Garrett's soul, wasn't outside.
It was shining from beneath the gap at the bottom of the door. It was burning on the other side.
"It's behind it," Garrett relayed, a cold sweat breaking out across his collarbone. "The four anchors are outside. My light is behind the seal. Whatever this road is being built to reach... it runs straight through that door."
Ginnie didn't hesitate. She stepped up to Garrett, lifting her hands until her fingers hovered just millimeters away from his temples.
“I'm not gonna do anything crazy,” she deadpanned. “Just gotta touch you to touch the threshold.”
“Ginnie, no!” Carrick roared, reaching for her after the violent blast from moments ago. “It's too dangerous!”
“I'm barely brushing it, Carrick.”
“You don't know what it'll do.”
Ginnie looked at her Mate. “No. I don't.”
Then she turned her attention back to Garrett.
“But something changed when the fourth light appeared, and we need to know what.”
Pressing her fingertips against his skin, Garrett stood perfectly still.
The Magic didn't detonate. There was no explosive shockwave to launch Ginnie across the room. Instead, the invisible barrier within his mind simply opened. Just a fraction. A tiny, microscopic crack tore through the center of the stone door.
From the other side of the seal, a sudden, suffocating wave of cold poured straight into Garrett's consciousness. It wasn't a physical drop in temperature. It wasn't the sterile, chemical chill of the torture chambers where he’d been held, and it wasn't the freezing water of the muddy creek bed.
This cold was older. It was heavy, rotten, and saturated with a primordial, terrifying malice that Garrett had felt a thousand times before. It was the exact, oily sensation that used to coat his lungs every single time the Demon Lord breached his mind.
In an instant, the false trauma explanation died a violent death in the Guardsman’s throat. It was time to face facts.
He knew. Before Ginnie could pull her hands away, before anyone in the room could speak the name out loud, the truth ripped through his head.
"No," Garrett choked out, his eyes widening in pure horror as he stumbled backward, knocking over a chair.
"Garrett?" Sydney cried, reaching for him.
His entire body shook violently. His hands gripped his hair as the broken walls inside his head utterly imploded. The fragments weren't tiny flashes anymore; they were a raging, roaring torrent of memory.
"No!" Garrett screamed, his voice cracking as he backed into the corner of the room, his chest heaving.
Han roared a deafening, panicked war cry from within the Guardsman’s soul that poured from his mouth. Drakara answered through Sydney, her bellows shaking the rafters.
Carrick and Grey moved so quickly they were little more than a blur. Their hands reached out to anchor Garrett as the room plunged into an absolute, blinding storm of magnificent Power.
The memories didn't simply bleed back into his mind like a gentle stream. They slammed into his skull like a battering ram, a rapid-fire succession of fast, violent flashes that tore away the last barriers protecting the memory.
Garrett saw the sterile, white floor of a subterranean laboratory.
The lights flickered, casting long, monstrous shadows against the concrete walls that seemed to skitter and stop, then skitter again with a creepy, disjointed rhythm.
Standing directly over him was the silhouette he had spent years trying to forget– the Demon Lord of Envy.
The creature's form seemed to warp the very air around it, a shifting mass of dark, oily smoke coalescing into a tall, terrifyingly elegant figure. Its eyes were two burning pinpricks of cold, emerald fire, and its skin had the pale, iridescent sheen of rotten wood.
A long, slender hand with nails like black glass pressed hard against Garrett's forehead.
The Demon Lord spoke words Garrett couldn't understand at the time.
Its voice was a low, rhythmic, multi-tonal chant that sounded like stones grinding together in a deep chasm.
Garrett remembered the agonizing physical sensation of his own consciousness being violently compressed, squeezed like a handful of sand, and pushed deep behind a heavy, invisible wall.
Inside him, Han fought with everything he had, tearing at the internal structures of their shared soul, while Garrett screamed until his throat bled.
Then came the sound of a massive stone door slamming shut in the dark.
The Demon Lord leaned down. His emerald eyes flashed with a sickening, amused triumph as he whispered a final command, “Sleep well, Dragon.”
The vision shattered. Garrett’s back slammed against the wall, his breath hitching as the sunny Texas morning rushed back into his eyes.
The realization hit him with a cold, devastating precision.
It wasn't structural neurological damage.
It wasn't an accidental psychological fracture caused by the trauma of his captivity.
It was entirely deliberate.
Lifting his head, Garrett locked his gaze onto Ginnie with a fierce, terrifying intensity. "You were wrong."
She went pale, her hands dropping to her sides. "About what, Garrett?"
"It isn't residual," Garrett choked out, his voice raw. Looking around the circle of his family, his knuckles turned white as his hands clenched into tight fists. "It's not old scar tissue or a dormant piece of enemy spellwork. He put it there."
Nobody in the quiet bedroom needed to ask who he was. The primeval, heavy malice vibrating through the air told the story for them.
Not everyone agreed.
Stepping into his space anyway, her jaw set, Sydney needed the true parameters of the threat spoken aloud. "Who, Garrett?" she demanded, her voice tight. "Name him."
Garrett’s eyes met hers. "Leviathan."
The name broke something loose inside Han. Not another complete memory. A sensation. Darkness.
Garrett trapped behind stone. Han clawing desperately from the other side. And somewhere beyond them both...
Leviathan.
Not a memory. Not an echo. Present. Garrett's stomach dropped. “He's still connected to me.”
The moment Garrett spoke Leviathan's name aloud, everything changed.
The security monitors on the headboard didn't just spike; they exploded into a frantic, high-pitched alarm. The digital readouts scrambled, the blue indicator lights turning into a solid, blinding red.
It wasn't 3:42 AM. The sun was streaming through the windows. It was broad daylight, and Garrett was very wide awake.
Inside his soul, Han let out a sudden, deafening war cry that vibrated through his ribs. “Lad! The circle!”
Garrett went rigid, his eyes widening in pure horror as he looked inward.
The weak lavender-white pulse of Garrett's Magic ignited into a hard, blinding flame.
Five lights.
Five stones.
None remained dark.
Deep within his mind, the heavy stone door swung wide open.
For the first time since his rescue, a voice drifted through the gap from the other side of the seal. It wasn't a memory, and it wasn't an echo from his past. It was smooth, perfectly lucid, and deeply, terribly amused.
“There you are.”