The moment the fury drains from Selene’s eyes, Adrian understands.Not through logic. Not through words.But through silence.A raw, trembling silence that seems to hollow out the entire room.Selene stands frozen before him, her body taut like a bowstring that has finally snapped. The energy she’d unleashed seconds earlier still crackles faintly in the air—shattered glass humming with leftover charge, curtains drifting in a breeze that doesn’t exist, the scent of ozone clinging to the back of Adrian’s throat. But the storm has already passed.Now, there is only her.Her breathing shudders unevenly, her chest rising in quick, frightened bursts. The wild light that had filled her eyes just moments ago fades, shrinking into something smaller… something wounded. Her lips part, but no words emerge. Her hands—once balled into fists—drop limply to her sides, fingers twitching as if they’re unsure of what they’re allowed to feel next.And Adrian understands.This was never anger.This was

Kael stumbled through the final breach, half-dragged by instinct, half-driven by the raw panic clawing at his chest. The Citadel’s inner passageways were warped, shadows pulsing with leftover echoes of Selene’s outburst. He could taste static in the air—metallic.“Adrian!” he called out, his voice swallowed by the vastness of the chamber ahead.When he stepped inside, the world stopped.There—at the center of the wrecked heart of the Citadel—Adrian sat beside Selene’s resting form, his posture rigid with vigilance. The ruined crystalline platforms glowed faintly around them, fractured but slowly knitting themselves back together under the Citadel’s residual automation. Yet all of Kael’s attention tunneled in on one thing:Selene was unconscious.Her head rested on a low platform, body slack with exhaustion, her chest rising and falling in shallow but steady breaths. Pale bioluminescent veins along her arms flickered weakly—far too weak for someone of her power.Kael froze.A thin s

Adrian exchanged a brief glance with Kael—a silent, wordless agreement born not of trust, but necessity. Selene stood before them like a candle in a storm, flickering between clarity and collapse. Her demand hung in the unstable air, sharp as broken glass.Tell me what happened.Adrian stepped forward first, but the Citadel’s wards stirred at his movement, trembling like disturbed water. Selene inhaled sharply, instinctively bracing. Adrian froze again, fingers curling, expression twisting with helplessness.“Then don’t move,” she whispered. “Just talk.”He exhaled.“Selene… you lost control. The Citadel responded to you—more strongly than to anyone before. You seized the central wards, bent them, reshaped them. You nearly tore the network apart.”A muscle twitched in her jaw.“And you tried to stop me,” she murmured.“I tried to reach you.”Selene turned to Kael then. His steady, dark gaze met hers without flinching.“And what did you do?”Kael didn’t soften it.“I contained what I c

Selene drifted in and out of shallow breaths as the room steadied around her. Dawn’s pale light had sharpened into something warmer, brighter—yet the tension inside the small space made the air feel too heavy, too thick.Adrian and Kael stood like two opposing forces that had been shoved into the same narrow corridor, neither willing to retreat, neither willing to yield. And she—caught in the crossfire of two different kinds of devotion—felt the weight of both on her chest.Adrian was the first to move.He adjusted the blanket around her with slow, deliberate hands, as if afraid she might break again from something as simple as touch. His calm presence had been the only thing that kept her conscious during her outburst, the only anchor strong enough to hold her steady when her instincts threatened to rip everything apart.But Kael was a storm—restless, charged with guilt, confusion, and a protective fury that barely held itself in check.“What exactly happened before I arrived?” Kae

The citadel had quieted, but only on the surface. Beneath the stone, beneath the wards, beneath the pulses of redirected power… something still trembled. Something still shifted.Kael felt it first.He stood near the eastern balcony, arms folded, eyes fixed on the trembling lines of power threading along the stone walls. “She’s awake,” he murmured. “And she’s changing again.”Behind him, Adrian exhaled slowly. He had barely slept. Selene lay resting in the inner chamber, but her presence still brushed against him like faint static — a whisper, a pulse, a question without words.“She’s stabilizing,” Adrian said, though even he didn’t sound convinced.Kael turned sharply. “That’s not stabilization. That’s escalation.”Adrian faced him fully. “You don’t understand what she went through.”“And you don’t understand what she’s becoming.”The air tightened between them.Kael stepped closer, voice low but cutting. “Every ward in this citadel bends when she breathes. Do you know what that mean