POV: Aphrodite
She watches her fifth mate die. And cannot save him.
The gates are locked from the inside and my hands are on the iron and the iron is old and it is not moving.
Alric's form is cracking visibly — the stone and shadow quality of the curse's dissolution running through the visible architecture of him, the surface of what he is becoming something else, the specific terrible beauty of a curse breaking itself against the person it was built through because the person turned the curse's own mechanism against the curse's foundation.
I can save him.
The thought is not a plan, it's the specific certain knowledge of the Direwolf blood that there is power in me that has not been spent and the blood seal's work is done and the power that was running through the blood seal's contact is available and if I can reach the anchor point that Alric is holding from the inside I can take it, I can hold it myself, I can give him the margin to step back from the curse's lethal fracture.
