Chapter 7 #3
Completely ignoring him, Syd turned her gaze away from the villain to study the environment.
She forced her emotions down into a cold vault deep in her mind, looking past the horrific blood, iron, and silver to examine the actual structure of the spell.
Inside her mind, Kara woke up, her wise, analytical gaze overlaying Sydney’s vision.
Together, they tracked the flow of the glowing white and gold veins, mapping out the precise directional currents of the Magical pressure.
Detecting the shift in her focus, Carrick subtly stepped sideways. His gold and crimson aura expanded, completely blocking Leviathan’s direct line of sight to Sydney, keeping the monster at bay and buying her every possible second.
From his chains, Garrett watched her through bloodshot, barely conscious eyes, his rattling breath the only sound in the tense quiet.
“What is the matter, Special One?” Leviathan taunted from behind Carrick’s Magical barrier, his voice gaining a sharp, defensive edge. "Don't you want him? Is the great, Fated love of the Dragonkin so easily deterred by a little risk?”
Sydney kept her eyes locked on a pulsing node of light near the base of Garrett’s obsidian pedestal. “More than you’ll ever understand,” she said, her voice entirely flat, entirely steady.
Looking up, she met Leviathan’s gaze over Carrick’s shoulder. “That’s exactly why I’m not touching him.”
Leviathan's smile vanished completely. He had calculated for desperation, for a broken young woman driven mad by the sight of her tortured Mate. Instead, he was looking at terrifying restraint and more knowledge than he could ever fathom.
Sydney and Kara worked in perfect, frantic lockstep, tracing the luminous white and gold veins pulsing through the obsidian floor.
Yet, the math of the spell refused to compute.
The flow of energy was completely lopsided.
Leviathan’s trap was designed as a one-way street.
The moment her key touched Garrett’s anchor, the pressure would force the threshold wide open.
“How do we flip the polarity?” Sydney adamantly asked the Dragon Queen with whom she shared her soul. “Kara, if we can't reverse the flow, the moment we break those chains, everything collapses.”
“I don't see a bypass, my girl,” Kara admitted, her voice tight with a rare, suffocating frustration. “He built the cage around the anchor too perfectly. There are no leverage points from the outside.”
“Sydney.”
The raspy, wet whisper cut through her spiraling thoughts.
Sydney’s gaze snapped back to the center of the room.
Garrett was fading fast. His chin had dropped toward his chest again, his eyes clouded and losing their fight against the darkness.
But there was a sudden, fierce lucidity in the way he stared at her.
Aodhan was pushing through the agony. “You’re looking at the lock,” Garrett dragged the words out, his voice cracking painfully.
Sydney frowned, taking a half-step forward, careful not to cross the threshold line. “Garrett, I have to decode the lock to reverse…”
“No,” Garrett interrupted, a weak but unyielding authority vibrating in his chest. “Look at me.”
Sydney froze. She stopped staring at the glowing sigils on the stone floor and looked directly into his bloodshot lavender eyes.
The realization hit her like a thunderclap, vibrating through every nerve ending in her body.
Leviathan hadn’t just bound Garrett to an ancient, preexisting anchor point.
He had built one around and within Garrett.
He was the anchor. More specifically, Aodhan– the Dragon King sharing his soul– formed the living, breathing foundation of the threshold.
And if Kara was the corresponding Queen…
Sydney’s breath hitched as the entire paradigm flipped.
They had been playing Leviathan's game, trying to figure out how to pick his unholy lock.
But they didn't need to manipulate his dark mechanism at all.
The lock didn't belong to Leviathan. King and Queen were the fundamental fabric of the Dragon Realms. If they aligned their Magic directly, bypassing the stone entirely, they could rewrite the entire structure of the threshold together.
But Garrett's more-than-mortal mind was fractured from the torture. He didn't remember the incantations of old. He didn't remember how.
But Aodhan did. And Kara did.
Sydney looked across the blood-slicked stone at her Mate. For the first time since she had stepped through the door of The Abyss, Garrett wasn’t shouting at her to run. He wasn't trying to push her away to save her life.
He was asking her to trust him.
“Can you do this?” she whispered, her voice trembling but her gaze unwavering.
Garrett’s bruised, bleeding mouth twitched– not quite a smile, but a shadow of the fierce Guardsman he used to be. “No idea.”
Then, a sudden, staggering pressure flooded the cavern. The fading lavender in Garrett's eyes flared into a brilliant, blinding, incandescent white. The rattling wheeze in his chest vanished, replaced by a deep, resonant resonance that shook the dead air of The Abyss.
Aodhan’s deep, rumbling voice rolled through both of their souls, fierce and eternal: “I do.”