Serena lost count somewhere after the eighth puzzle. The temple dragged them through hours.

Chamber after chamber. Puzzle after puzzle.

Each one more viciously engineered than the last, as though the architects had designed this place with a specific hatred for anyone foolish enough to enter and a grudging respect for anyone stubborn enough to keep going.

Her magic burned through her veins until her insides felt scorched. Both pink and gold. She’d never felt that drained sensation with her gold before, but it was there. This temple either was making it harder for her to use it, or when she could use it, was taking too much. She wasn’t sure.

Her limbs trembled. Her breath had gone thin three rooms ago and hadn’t recovered. She kept moving because stopping meant dying, and dying meant the people behind her died too.

She saw each of them in flashes between chambers. Fin, steady and lethal, dispatched from a wall looking like the temple owed him money. Hyran and Aeron, ejected from a shared chamber still arguing about whether a glyph descended left or right. Maelor, alone again, emerging from a wall with his robes pristine and his expression suggesting the temple had finally asked him a question and he had corrected its grammar before answering.

Gav she worried about. He didn’t have magic, didn’t have a matebond where someone could feel if he was okay, didn’t have centuries of reincarnated knowledge buried in his bones. He had instincts and a sword and the particular stubbornness of a man too proud to die in a building.

But every time the maze spat him out, he was upright. Uninjured. Outrageously calm. He caught her eye once across a corridor and gave her a thumbs up that was either genuine reassurance or the bravest lie she’d ever seen.

She finished the last chamber with a brutal surge of gold magic that left her ribs aching. The instant the mechanism recognized completion, the walls shifted. Stone rippled under her feet and sucked her through, launching her into a new space so fast she hit the ground before she registered the transition.

She lay there. Breathing. Counting the seconds it took for her vision to stop swimming.

Then she looked up.

"Finally," she whispered.

She had reached what she recognized, instinctively and undeniably, as the final chamber. She was alone.

She glanced around. It was immense. Ancient. Breathtaking in a way that pressed against her chest and forced a moment of stillness she couldn’t afford.

A massive underground lake stretched before her, its surface half-solid with delicate ice patterns that glimmered like constellations trapped beneath glass. Frigid ice crept across the water, cold mist hovering above the parts that remained liquid. Crystals jutted from the cave walls and ceiling in a riot of colors: violet, emerald, ruby, sapphire. Fractured light scattered across the cavern in shimmering halos.

A waterfall thundered from a ledge at least fifty feet up, pouring into the lake like liquid glass. The roar filled the chamber, swallowing everything.

She lifted her gaze. The ceiling was carved into a map of constellations. Glowing. Shifting. Alive. An entire night sky trapped beneath the earth, bending to the temple’s will.

The air tasted like old magic, prickling against her skin, and beneath the prickling sat something heavier. A warning. The chamber wanted her to understand the cost of what came next.

Serena pulled herself to her feet. Her legs shook. She locked her knees and made them stop.

That meant she was the first one to complete the puzzle sequence. She made a note to not mention that ever to any of the three mages. They would be upset if they learned the truth.

She wondered who would make it here next. If she were a betting woman, she’d say Hyran.

The item that she needed to retrieve lay behind the waterfall. Hidden in an alcove. But the door behind the waterfall needed the token to open.

She’d seen a vision of this in the scroll when she read it earlier. At the bottom of the lake, somewhere deep beneath the ice and dark, there was a golden dragon she had to touch, and a token she had to retrieve.

She crouched at the edge and dipped her fingers in.

The water bit instantly. Freezing cold shot up her hand, through her wrist, and sank into her bones with a precision that felt personal. The lake was testing her before she’d entered it.

At least eighty feet to the bottom. Likely closer to a hundred.

She ran the math on what she had left. It wasn’t much. Her gold magic was guttering. Her pink had burned out completely, and she’d need Maelor to get it going again. Something that Maelor found ridiculous because she could fabricate items, but he kept having to jump start her every time she ran out, which was, apparently, something that only happened to Fae children.

Pink was dead. Gold was the winner. She would wrap whatever she had around herself to hold in warmth, but the margins were razor-thin. Too much magic and she’d black out before reaching the bottom. Too little and hypothermia would take her in under a minute.

She was alone until someone else completed all the puzzles, which could be awhile.

Serena drew one long breath. Held it. Let the cold settle against her skin.

She dove.

The shock hit like a fist to the sternum. Every muscle seized. The cold didn’t creep. It invaded, bypassing her magic entirely for one devastating second before her shield snapped tight: thin, controlled, pressed close to her body. The bare minimum between surviving and dying.

Unlike normal, the lake didn’t turn gold when she entered. It stayed black. She realized this halfway down, because the only light source she had was her own magic.

She swam hard. Driving herself downward into darkening water. The light from the surface dimmed above her, the lake turning from blue to black. Her eyes adjusted, green bleeding into something sharper, the vision her ancestors had carried when they lived inside ice and learned to see in the deep.

The lake floor materialized below her. Silt. Stone. Shapes that had waited here for millennia.

Then she saw it.

A golden dragon statue half-buried in silt. Massive. Wings spread wide. Jaws open toward the surface, frozen mid-roar. The craftsmanship predated the temple, predated the city, predated the wall she’d cracked open hours ago.

She swam towards it. Her gold magic surged brighter, causing her insides to burn.

Her fingers brushed the head of the golden dragon.

The lake changed.

Sapphire bled outward from the point of contact in a pulse so violent the water shuddered around her.

The sapphire light continued spreading, pushing further, illuminating the lake floor. It was only then that she saw the scale of what she was floating in. Her stomach turned to ice that had nothing to do with temperature.

The dragon was enormous. What she had touched was only its head. The body stretched across the entire lake floor, curled protectively inward, wings folded against a ribcage the size of a building.

It wasn’t holding the token anywhere that she could see.

She scanned, looking for it, knowing full well she was running out of air.