The monster’s hundred mouths whispered his name, every tone a different wound. “Jason.”The sound crushed the marrow in his bones, pressed on his lungs like stone. The colossal Broken Aria loomed above, its body stitched together from faces he loved and faces he feared.Every smile was an accusation. Every scream was a plea. Every whisper demanded his surrender. Jason’s ember flared in panic, firelight crawling across his skin, but his knees buckled.The storm around him funneled inward, feeding the monster, thickening its patchwork flesh until each shard-shard became a vein of light. He could not breathe. He could not think. And still, he refused to look away.A hundred hands, each ending in mirrored claws, reached down to seize him. Their fingers were her fingers, warm, trembling, calloused from the way Aria had always carried her blades.The sight tore him in two. One half wanted to collapse into those hands, let them hold him, even if it meant his death. The other half fought to r

The storm howled, glass shrieking as the tower shook under the monster’s weight. Jason’s ember clawed at his chest, a caged sun begging to be unleashed. The perfect voice thundered again: “Burn everything, Jason!”But beneath it, faint, cracked, nearly drowned out, her voice, raw and imperfect: “…don’t you dare.”Jason’s entire body convulsed. He could feel his veins straining, blood boiling under the pressure of his restrained fire. Every instinct screamed to obey the perfect command. Every shard in him wanted release.But he closed his eyes, teeth clenched, blood dripping from his lips. “I’ll take the broken one,” he whispered.And he held. The monster descended. Claws like towers pinned him to the ground, each talon digging into his flesh. His ribs cracked under the weight, blood flooding his mouth.Its hundred mouths stretched wide, exhaling a hurricane of ash and glass that burned his skin raw.Still, he did not strike. His ember boiled against its cage, bursting through in ragge

Jason fell. The abyss was endless. Glass winds howled around him, slicing his skin raw. Fragments of towers, faces, and storms whirled in an infinite cyclone.Gravity itself seemed to have abandoned reason, tugging him downward but also sideways, backward, inward. He didn’t care. All he cared about was the body in his arms.Aria or the thing half-born as her, shook violently, torn between warmth and frost, flesh and glass. One half of her clung to him desperately, nails biting into his neck as though she feared being ripped away.The other half lashed with mirrored tendrils, chains of fractured light jerking against him as though she wanted out, wanted release, wanted destruction.Jason locked his arms tighter around her, ignoring the cuts, ignoring the fire tearing his own veins open. “Stay with me!” His voice was shredded raw, nearly drowned in the storm. “Stay—dammit, Aria, stay!”Her head thrashed against his chest. Two voices erupted from her throat, overlapping, fighting.“Jason

The glass plain trembled under Jason’s boots, humming like a thousand voices holding their breath. Before him knelt two half-born Arias. Identical. Both bleeding, both trembling, both reaching for him.Flesh and glass warring across their skin, human eyes cracked with terror, mirrored eyes flickering with unstable light. Both whispered in the same cracked breath: “Save me, Jason.”Jason’s throat closed. His fists trembled. His ember pulsed like a star about to explode, clawing at his chest. This was the choice. This was the trap. And he hated it.Jason staggered a step forward, then froze. His breath came ragged. His whole body screamed at him to lunge, to grab, to choose.But his mind, raw, ragged, torn though it was, still clung to the one defiance that had carried him through every impossible truth so far. “No,” he rasped, voice shaking but steadying.Both half-borns flinched, glass chains rattling from their shoulders.“I won’t choose. Not like this. Not between you. Not ever.” Ja

Silence.For the first time in forever, Jason couldn’t hear the sound of his own heartbeat. Only the soft hum of light.He opened his eyes, or something like eyes, and found himself adrift in a sea of silver glass. The air shimmered like liquid mercury.Above him, the fragments of the labyrinth spun slowly, orbiting a pulsing core of light that looked disturbingly like a heart suspended in glass.His body was wrong. Too light. Too quiet. And his hands… his hands were holding something warm. Two someones. Except, no. Not two. One.A single figure lay tangled in his arms, her form half-shattered, half-whole. One side of her face glowed faintly with human color; the other shimmered with mirrored skin, smooth and cold as moonlight.Her hair was divided too, half gold, half silver, and when she breathed, the sound trembled between a human sigh and the hum of crystal strings.“Aria…” Jason whispered. His voice echoed through the light, like speaking through water.Her eyes fluttered open. A