Evelyn circled around Phymera, gawking.

  "That's incredible," she said, turning to me. "Look, Cire. She's the spitting image of you."

  Phymera's eyes never left her.

  She looked at Evelyn. Then at me. A fractional pause, like a craftsman judging a fit.

  Then her face changed.

  It was not the fluid melt of flesh. It was ptes sliding, seams shifting, geometry reassembling in increments so small the eye could not catch each individual movement. Metal whispering against metal. A statue re-forged in real time.

  When it was done, Evelyn stood in front of Evelyn.

  Same height. Same sharp line of jaw. Same hair, down to the way it framed her face. Same posture, rexed in the exact way Evelyn used to pretend she was rexed.

  Phymera opened her mouth.

  "The spitting image of you," she said, in Evelyn's voice. Her cadence. Her faint, dry edge.

  Evelyn's face went bnk.

  "No," she said immediately. "Absolutely not."

  Phymera blinked with Evelyn's eyes. "Is this not to your liking? You indicated surprise at the resembnce."

  "It was interesting at first, yes," Evelyn said, the emphasis clipped. "But when it's you, it's unsettling."

  I folded my arms at the comment.

  She darted a gnce at me, then away, ears fttened against her head. "Sorry."

  Phymera mirrored the gesture. "Sorry, Cire."

  Evelyn winced. "Stop. Do something else."

  "With whose form," she asked, still in Evelyn's voice, "do you prefer I speak?"

  Evelyn's face went red.

  Rocher's mouth twitched. He covered it by clearing his throat, which did nothing to hide the amusement in his eyes.

  "Cire," Evelyn said, through her teeth. "Go back to Cire. At least you were cute that way."

  Phymera's head turned toward me.

  Then the ptes shifted again—becoming me once more.

  Evelyn exhaled hard.

  Seraphine, of course, couldn't simply leave it at that. "You make it look easy," she said, leaning forward, eyes bright. "What's the trick behind it? Is it learned, or innate? Do you need proximity? A sample?"

  Phymera waved her away. "Proximity is sufficient."

  Seraphine's mouth curved.

  Lumiere, meanwhile, had not taken her eyes off the floor.

  "Where does it all go?" she asked offhandedly. "The creature that held Cire was enormous. Its tail alone could have crushed stone. Yet now you stand in a form that should weigh no more than she does. I would have expected the ground to crack beneath you where you stand."

  Rocher looked down, as if expecting to find fractures radiating from Phymera's boots.

  The stone remained pristine.

  Seraphine straightened, thoughtful. "Perhaps she is not actually condensing mass," she said. "Perhaps it is simply being reabsorbed."

  Lumiere looked at her.

  She lifted a hand and pointed, not at Phymera, but at the runes. The columns. The floor. The bands around the doors.

  "If the entire structure is the Mountain Guardian's apparatus," Seraphine said, "then Phymera is not losing anything. She is returning it. Not shrinking so much as redistributing it throughout the domain."

  Phymera's head turned to Seraphine with a smoothness that made my skin itch.

  Then she cpped.

  Once. Twice.

  The sound was clean and metallic, like two bdes meeting.

  "How astute," Phymera said, in my voice. "You see the skeleton beneath the skin."

  Seraphine lifted her chin, smug.

  Evelyn made a sound under her breath that might have been a ugh and might have been a groan.

  Phymera continued, unbothered. "I am an extension of Khaz-Vorrim. Within its boundaries, I may alter form, mass, and proportion. Within limits."

  She turned her head toward Rocher.

  It was the first time she had looked at him as if he were a subject rather than a threat.

  "You're the rgest one here," she said. "But among the men who once walked these halls, you would have been considered quite small."

  She tilted her chin at me.

  "Would you like to know what she'd look like if she were taller than you?"

  Rocher didn't hesitate.

  "Yes," he said immediately.

  "That won't be necessary," I said. I shot him a look. "Might I remind you that time is of the essence?"

  Rocher opened his mouth, then shut it again.

  Phymera nodded once. "Understood."

  Then she stepped past us.

  Phymera pced a palm against the seam of the double doors and pressed. As if she was pushing a tent fp.

  They swung inward without sound. Just motion, smooth and inevitable.

  Heat rushed past us, as if a giant had breathed out.

  We exchanged wide-eyed gnces, then followed her in without another word.

  The chamber beyond was not a hall. It was a heart.

  The air changed as soon as we crossed the threshold. Warmth. Density. The faint tang of metal on the tongue.

  The room was circur. Massive. The center was a pit where molten metal y in slow, heavy movement, a ke of liquid fire held in pce by rune-etched stone. Heat shimmered above it in a constant veil.

  Around the pit stood stations that had not been emptied. Anvils. Tongs. Hammers. Fixtures whose purpose I did not have a name for, but whose design suggested specificity and precision.

  Phymera waved a hand over the pit.

  The ke responded.

  It rose.

  A controlled lift, as if the metal itself had been asked politely and complied. It arced upward and spread into a shallow bowl of liquid, hovering in the air at chest height, rim held in a perfect circle by invisible force.

  A scrying pool.

  Lumiere stepped closer despite herself. Her eyes reflected orange light. "Is that—"

  Phymera kept her focus on the pool. "It is my eye," she said. "It sees all within my domain."

  The surface of the molten metal stilled, losing its ripples until it became mirror-smooth.

  Then it changed.

  The orange faded into deep shadow, then into color. Stone walls. Tall banners. A dais.

  A throne room.

  Even through the scrying, I recognized it.

  Marrud-Vael's central keep. Its old seat of power.

  The pool held steady, showing the room from above, as if the viewer were suspended near the ceiling beams.

  Rocher's jaw tightened. "Is that where the leak is?"

  Phymera did not look at him. "The leak?"

  He frowned, as if unsure whether that was a question or mimicry.

  The pool shifted, gliding through stone as if it were smoke, passing into corridors, down stairwells, through locked doors, through walls that would have stopped any normal gaze.

  Rocher followed it with his eyes, then tried again, slowly. "The leak, Phymera. The one we came here to fix."

  "Fix it?" Phymera's voice remained calm. "You misunderstand. It leaks everywhere. Always. There's nothing to fix."

  Evelyn's gaze narrowed.

  "The leak is not a fw," Phymera continued. "It is a feature of the trap. The hero Nyxara designed it as such."

  Seraphine flinched at the name. Her fingers tightened on Pulseweaver.

  The scrying pool surged deeper, the image shifting from castle stone to older stone. Runes. The City. Then beyond that, into a darkness that was not simply the absence of light.

  The surface of the pool slowed.

  Then stopped.

  A scene appeared.

  Frozen.

  Danzig the Brave, rger than any living man, caught mid-motion. His body twisted, one arm extended, the other cmped around a wrist that ended in a cw.

  The Demon Lord.

  Its arm was buried in Danzig's abdomen up to the forearm, cwed hand sunk deep. The angle of Danzig's spine suggested pain that should have put him on his knees.

  But Danzig's face was turned upward.

  Defiant.

  And worse than defiant, proud.

  Like a man who had made up his mind.

  Lumiere crossed herself, hand moving instinctively. "Goddess preserve us," she whispered. Then she looked at Phymera. "Is this... the past? I have never seen this depicted. Not in any carving. Not in any scripture."

  Seraphine's expression had gone sharp. "No," she said, voice quiet with certainty. "This should be the present."

  Lumiere stared at her.

  Seraphine did not look away from the pool. "I have seen this sort of scrying before. In the Forbidden Forest. The witch Ysel had used it, through her contract with Velka. It can only monitor the Guardian's domain as it is now. Not as it was."

  "You're half-right," Phymera said.

  Seraphine went still.

  She lifted her hand, and the molten pool responded, zooming in by increments until the image filled the surface with detail. Danzig's fingers, white-knuckled around the Demon Lord's wrist. The cw sunk into flesh. The line of Danzig's mouth, set like he was holding back a ugh.

  "This is past," Phymera said. "It is present. It is future."

  Lumiere's voice came out thin. "How?"

  "It's the nature of Nyxara's trap," I said, because I could not stand the silence pressing against the truth.

  They all looked at me.

  I stared at the pool. At the frozen moment. At the expression on Danzig's face that I had never liked, even in the game.

  "A singurity," I said. "Turning Danzig's fate into one that cannot resolve. Thus the moment of his death is sustained. Deferred forever."

  Rocher frowned, looking down at the metal.

  "That was his choice," I continued. "His sacrifice."

  Lumiere shook her head slowly, disbelief written into every line of her. "The scriptures never mentioned this," she said. "Not once. Danzig is revered as a martyr. As a hero who fell in battle. Not... this."

  "Falling in battle certainly makes a cleaner story," Evelyn said quietly.

  Rocher kept staring at the pool. "If time is frozen there," he said, "how is it that the miasma is still leaking?"

  I drew a breath. The air tasted like hot iron. "Because it's not just frozen there," I said. "It's a gradient."

  Rocher turned his head slightly. "A what."

  Seraphine stepped in, mercifully. "Time isn't uniform here," she said. "The closer we get, the slower it runs. The further away, the faster. Think of it like a slope. The Demon Lord is trapped at the center, spending the same instant, but its output, the miasma, moves outward through yers of accelerating time."

  Rocher's brow furrowed. "So he is stuck," he said, slow. "But his miasma is not."

  She nodded. "While its movement respects the rule of time," Seraphine continued, "mana's expenditure does not. The farther from the center, the more time those outer yers experience. So the miasma accumutes and moves, even as the source remains pinned."

  Phymera watched the pool as if she were watching a patient.

  "The Demon Lord has been leaching energy for a long time," she said. "Without opportunity to recover what he spends. He should be magnitudes weaker now than when he entered it."

  Evelyn's eyes widened. Understanding arrived in her face like a bde sliding into pce.

  "We aren't here to fix the seal," she said.

  The words nded, heavy and irrevocable.

  Rocher blinked, startled. Lumiere's head snapped toward Evelyn.

  Evelyn looked at me. "We're here to break it, aren't we?"

  "No." Rocher shook his head once, hard. "That is not what we signed up for." He turned. "Tell me, Cire."

  "Unfortunately," I said quietly, "she's right."

  Lumiere's grip tightened on her staff. "Cire," she said, voice strained. "You knew?"

  I held her gaze. I did not have the luxury of flinching from it.

  "I did."

  Phymera turned, facing us fully, her metal face reflecting forge-light. "Indeed," she said, calm as an oath. "What I want is for you to grant Danzig peace. To allow him finally to go to rest with his people."

  Rocher's jaw tightened. "Freeing the Demon Lord along with him."

  Phymera's voice did not soften. "You will end things. Once and for all."

  The molten pool held the frozen image between us like a contract written in fire.

  And in the heat of the Forge, with Danzig's satisfied defiance staring back at us, I realized something else, cold and sharp beneath my ribs.

  It was not just a question of whether we could.

  It was a question of whether we would accept what it made us.