Hyran and Aeron both flinched, teeth gritted. Their Hidden Flame marks felt like hot iron was being pressed on their skin.

Maelor was too busy looking at the lake to notice.

He stood at the waterline, staring at the churning, icy-black water where the tentacle had disappeared. The lake hissed, seething with dark energy and cold that felt like it could stop a heart on contact.

The three mages exchanged a glance. All wearing the exact same expression: absolutely, categorically, under no circumstances.

"I have limits," Maelor said, staring at the water.

"I’d be in the way," Hyran confirmed.

Aeron nodded once. "We hold the shore."

Beneath the surface, the water was a nightmare. Black. Freezing. Alive with something ancient and furious that had been sleeping under this lake for longer than the temple had stood.

Whatever had dragged Serena into the depths did more than pull her. Something pierced into her side, deep, sharp, cruel, and the pain blasted through both matebonds so violently that Fin and Dex felt it as though they were the ones being stabbed. It ripped the breath from their lungs underwater, a sensation so disorienting that both men nearly inhaled the lake.

Gav felt nothing through a matebond. He felt it worse. He felt nothing, which meant he had to imagine it, and his imagination was a cruel, thorough machine that had been running scenarios about Serena being hurt since the day he realized what she meant to him.

Then something happened that none of them expected.

Dex’s body ignited gold.

His own gold. From his own core. Power he hadn’t touched since being marked, power that had been sitting dormant inside him, waiting for a moment catastrophic enough to wake it. The cold receded. The dark receded. He burned in the water like a second sun, and the shock of it nearly stopped his stroke.

Beside him, Fin’s wolf lit gold a fraction of a second later. Serena’s power was flooding into Xeon from wherever she was bleeding in the dark. She pushed it to him on instinct, pulling from backup reserves she didn’t know she had until her mate needed it.

Gav lit gold third. Warmth flooded back into his body as he swam.

Then his hands vibrated.

A sword materialized in his grip. Golden. Humming. Solid as steel and thrumming with a resonance that traveled up his forearms and settled into his bones. He stared at it for one disbelieving second.

Serena had put one in his hand from the bottom of a lake while something was trying to kill her, because even in agony, even dragged into the depths, she could still fabricate.

A sword formed in Dex’s grip at the same moment. Two men and a wolf, burning through the black water of an underground lake toward the woman who had armed them all.

Gav spotted her first. Fifty feet below, deep in the sapphire dark. He kicked hard, slicing through the icy water with a Gamma’s ferocity. Xeon shot after him. Dex followed like a golden comet, his newly ignited power cutting through the cold.

Serena’s eyes glowed gold. Burning, unnatural, borrowed from a place deeper than her own reserves. She was fighting.

She drove a golden dagger, conjured the same way she had shaped their swords, straight into the tentacle wrapped around her waist. The blade sank deep, slicing through dark flesh and magic alike. The creature spasmed, the water around her shuddering with the force of its pain.

She twisted the dagger once. Viciously. Teeth clenched in fury and survival.

The tentacle recoiled.

Instead of kicking towards air, she kicked horizontally to get the token. Because of course she did.

All three men tore through the water towards her.

She swam. Hard. Fast. Blood streaming from her side in long crimson ribbons that dissolved into the water behind her. The wound was deep, and the cold was making it worse, but she had the creature’s attention split between her and three men with golden swords who were dismantling its limbs with methodical violence.

Dex surged forward, putting himself between the creature and Serena’s path, his gold burning so bright it lit the entire cavern floor. Every tentacle within thirty feet recoiled from him, flinching from the Dragon King’s power like it remembered what that light meant.

Gav flanked her. Swimming beside her, sword out, scanning the dark for anything that came from below or behind. He couldn’t feel her pain. He couldn’t channel her magic. He couldn’t sense the creature through a matebond. All he had was his body between her and whatever came next, and he offered it without hesitation.

Serena reached the dragon. Its eyes glowed the moment she entered its radius. Reacting to her the way the entire temple had reacted since the moment she arrived.

She pressed her fingers to the dragon’s snout.

Runes ignited across its jaws. Gold light raced through the carved scales. The stone mouth opened, slow and grinding, revealing the token resting on its tongue: a coin the size of her palm, carved with a dragon on one side, constellations on the other, glinting with a light that had been waiting for her since before she was born.

She seized it. Cold. Impossibly heavy for its size. She wrapped her fingers around it and held on.

Then she pushed off the dragon’s head and kicked with everything she had left.

Gav wrapped an arm around her waist and launched upward, swimming so fast the currents warped around them.

Halfway to the surface, something slammed into her ankle and ripped her out of his arms.

Gav spun, fury blazing in his eyes. Dex was already there, slashing the tentacle clean through. Dark magic burst from the wound in a cloud of corrupted ash that dissolved on contact with his gold.

Gav caught Serena before she could drift, pulling her against his chest and kicking hard toward the light above.

Then everything went to hell.

Behind him, a tentacle spike shot from the darkness and buried itself in Dex’s side. Deep. The pain was white-hot and absolute. It coiled tight and yanked him backward into the dark.

Another erupted from the gloom and drove through Xeon’s shoulder, the force violent enough to shove him several feet before it dragged him down.

The wolf shifted back into man in the same instant, blood clouding the water around him in a dark bloom.