POV: Aphrodite
Freedom hurts more than chains.
The prison door opens.
The seal break completes in the specific sequence it was always going to complete — the blood seal fracturing last, the Direwolf blood having done the work the blood seal required, and the fracturing produces the same white light that ignited the seals, running outward through the stone in every direction and then going out, the light that marked the seal's existence disappearing because the seal no longer exists.
My father is on the other side of the open door.
I move through the prison's interior toward his cell, through the collapsing architecture that is continuing its inward fold despite Alric's anchor, the collapse proceeding toward its final geometry but slower now, the redirected inward pull giving us the margin the plan required. The prison's interior is not what I expected.
