Maelor straightened and turned his palms over, studying them with the detached precision of a man cataloguing his own failure.

"The spikes are the anchor," he said, voice flat and clinical. "Dark Fae origin, threaded with parasitic magic designed to burrow. Every second they remain embedded, the corruption spreads deeper into the host." His mismatched eyes flicked to Hyran. "Your magic failed because you were trying to heal around an open wound still actively poisoning him. Mine failed for the same reason."

"So pull them out," Gav said.

"Bare contact with dark-forged material will necrotize flesh on touch." Maelor held up his own hands, where faint black veins had already bloomed across his palms.

Aeron looked at his own hands, then back at Maelor. "How do we extract them?"

"Barrier between skin and spike. Fabric. Leather. Anything." Maelor’s tone carried zero comfort. "And the removal will be the worst pain either of them has ever felt, so steel yourselves accordingly."

Gav was already moving. He tore a strip from the hem of his training suit, wrapped it twice around his right hand, and dropped to his knees beside Dex.

"Hold him down," Gav ordered.

Hyran pressed both palms flat against Dex’s shoulders. Aeron braced across his legs.

Gav gripped the first spike through the fabric, set his jaw, and wrenched it free.

The sound that left Dex was inhuman. His body arched so violently that Hyran’s arms shook holding him, and the scream tore from somewhere deeper than his chest, deeper than his lungs, ripped from the place where pain lived before language existed to name it. Blood sprayed across Gav’s forearm in a hot, dark arc.

Gav gave him zero recovery time, because recovery was a luxury they could lose him during. He grabbed the second spike and pulled with everything he had.

Dex screamed again. Raw. Shattered. The kind of sound no Alpha prince was ever supposed to make, the kind that told every wolf within earshot that their heir was dying and meant it.

The third spike was the deepest. Gav’s fingers slipped on the first attempt, the fabric already soaked through, and he had to re-grip with both hands and brace his boot against the stone beside Dex’s hip.

He pulled.

Dex’s body seized. His eyes rolled, and for one hideous second his back lifted fully off the stone while every muscle in his body locked rigid. The spike came free with a wet, sickening crack that echoed off the cavern walls and bounced across the surface of the lake.

Dex collapsed, his breathing threadbare and rattling.

"Fin." Aeron’s voice was rough, and he was already kneeling beside the Alpha King, tearing a strip from his own suit. "I need you on your stomach."

Fin’s dislocated shoulder hung useless at his side. He rolled with his good arm, and the movement alone drew a sound from his throat that he would have killed any man for witnessing.

Aeron wrapped his hand once. He gripped the first spike embedded in Fin’s shoulder, the one that had missed his heart by less than an inch.

"Do it," Fin said through his teeth.

Aeron pulled.

A raw, savage sound tore out of Fin, echoing off stone and carrying across the underground lake like a war horn blown in grief. His fist slammed the rock beneath him hard enough to split skin across his knuckles.

The blood that came with the spike was so dark it looked black against the stone, and the smell of it, coppery and wrong, hit the air thick enough to taste.

Aeron gave him two seconds before gripping the second spike in his abdomen.

"Do it. Now!" Fin rasped.

Aeron wrenched it free. Fin’s yell ricocheted through the cavern, feral and furious, the sound of an Alpha King who refused to go quiet even when his body was begging him to. The third spike, lodged between his ribs, came out with a sound that made Aeron’s stomach turn, wet and wrong, accompanied by a spray that painted the stone beneath them.

Fin’s breathing was ragged. His fingers clawed the rock, and every exhale shook through his entire frame.

Maelor had already moved back to Dex. He placed both hands over the first wound, closed his eyes, and shifted languages. The words were older than anything Hyran recognized, threaded with a cadence that belonged to Fae courts long buried beneath history, and the magic that answered was entirely different from anything they had seen tonight.

It burned emerald. Deep green, bright as foxfire, pouring from his palms in tendrils that sank beneath Dex’s skin and latched onto the dark corruption still threading through his veins.

Dark magic poured out in skeins of black smoke that dissolved the instant they touched air.

Dex’s body jerked with each extraction, muscles spasming, jaw clenched so tight the tendons in his neck stood in sharp relief. The pain was written across every line of his body.

Maelor moved to Fin without pause. Same ancient language. Same emerald light fighting its way through tissue and blood, hunting the dark threads and tearing them out by the root.

Fin made no sound during the extraction. His eyes stayed open, and his breathing was controlled with a discipline that had been beaten into him by years of war. But his hands shook, and the blood drained from his face until he looked gray.

Hyran knelt beside Dex the moment Maelor cleared the corruption. Gold magic flooded from his palms, finally taking hold, sinking into the wounds, sealing ruptured vessels and knitting torn muscle.

Color crept back into Dex’s face.

Aeron pressed his glowing palms to Fin’s chest. The gold magic washed through the Alpha King’s torso, closing the three open wounds in slow, agonizing increments that made Fin hiss through each one.

"These will take time to fully heal, even with magic," Hyran said, sitting back on his heels. Exhaustion had settled into the lines around his eyes. "It will still bleed internally. We need Alaric to properly treat these."

Gav tore what remained of his training suit sleeve into strips. He moved to Fin first, wrapping the shoulder wound with tight, controlled precision, the kind of hands that had treated battlefield injuries more times than he cared to count. He bound the abdomen, checking for swelling, for puncture angles, for signs of venom that Aeron’s magic might have missed.

He moved to Dex and repeated the process. Every motion was fast and exact, no wasted energy, no hesitation.

Then Gav turned around.

His blood went cold.

Twenty feet from where they had been working, Serena was lying against a large stone. Still. Far too still.

He crossed the distance at a dead sprint and dropped to his knees beside her, hands already reaching.