The waning moon hung low above the valley, its diminished light casting the Hollow Stones in pale silver. The twelve monoliths seemed taller in the dark, their frost-covered surfaces gleaming like the bones of giants.
I stood before the central stone, barefoot in the snow, my shirt stripped away despite the cold.
"Axel," Draven said, his voice carrying the tight control of a man holding himself together through sheer will. "Walk us through this one more time, every step."
"Atlas draws the blade across his left palm and presses the wound to the central stone," Axel replied from outside the circle. "He must hold the connection and endure whatever comes. If he lets go before the curse is fully burned away, the ritual fails and cannot be attempted again."
"How long will it take?" Ava asked, her arms wrapped tight around herself at the circle's edge.
"I don't know… Minutes or hours. The ancestors will decide."
"That's not reassuring, Elder," Kobe said quietly from his flanking position.
"It's not meant to be. It's meant to be honest."
Draven stood just inside the circle at my left, his hand locked around mine. His grip was iron-warm, unyielding, and through the bond I could feel the controlled terror beneath his calm exterior: a storm held behind glass.
"I'm right here," he murmured, his thumb tracing a circle on my knuckles. "I'm not going anywhere."
"Atlas," Ava called out, her voice tight with the effort of holding steady. "You come back to us. That's not a request."
I met her eyes across the circle. Then I drew the ritual blade across my left palm. The pain was bright, a clean line of fire that split the skin. Blood welled up, dark and hot, gleaming with a faint silver luminescence that didn't come from the sky.
I pressed my bleeding hand flat against the central stone.
The world detonated.
Silver light erupted from every stone simultaneously: blinding, total, a radiance that burned through my closed eyelids.
The ground shook. The air split apart, and from the fracture poured something vast and ancient and overwhelmingly alive.
The ancestral silver wolves materialized between the monoliths—enormous, luminous shapes the size of horses, their fur blazing white-silver, their eyes burning with the accumulated power of a bloodline three centuries dead.
Then the power hit me.
It entered through my palm and flooded upward: raw, primal energy pouring into every vein with the force of an avalanche.
The pain was catastrophic. I screamed, my body seizing, spine arching, muscles locking rigid as the ancestral magic collided with the curse inside me.
"ATLAS!" Hyde roared back to full consciousness, his voice massive, thunderous, no longer distant. "I'm here! I'm fighting with you! Hold the stone, don't let go!"
The curse thrashed like a cornered animal, its dark tendrils lashing against the silver fire flooding my blood. Every nerve became a battlefield.
"His body's seizing!" Ava shouted. "Axel, how long does this last?"
"The curse is fighting back!" Axel's voice was barely audible over the roar of energy. "The ancestral power must burn through every sigil. He has to endure it!"
"He's burning up! His skin is on fire!" Kobe yelled, moving toward the circle. "We need to pull him out!"
"If you break the connection now, it kills him!" Axel commanded. "Stay back, both of you!"
"Atlas!" Draven's voice cut through the chaos.
His hand was still locked around mine, and I could feel the energy burning his skin where our fingers intertwined—searing heat that should have made him release me.
He didn't. His grip tightened until I felt his bones grinding against mine. "Stay with me! You hear me? Stay!"
Sirius howled. The sound erupted from Draven's chest, rising toward the waning moon like a prayer made of grief and fury and love.
The howl merged with the hum of the monoliths, and inside me, Hyde answered with a matching cry that fed strength into muscles that had nothing left.
"They're helping us," Hyde snarled through the pain. "The ancestors, they're targeting the sigils directly. I can feel them burning through the curse. Hold on, Atlas. Hold on just a little longer."
"Draven, your hand—" Ava's voice cracked with horror. "The energy is burning through your skin!"
"I don't care!" Draven roared, and the raw ferocity in his voice shook something loose in my chest. "I told him I'd hold on through every second of it, and that's exactly what I'm going to do!"
The curse made one final, desperate surge toward my heart. The black energy convulsed inside me, gathering itself into a concentrated lance of dark magic aimed at the center of everything I was—
"NOW!" Hyde thundered. "Push back NOW!"
I screamed again. But this time the sound carried silver fire with it, erupting from my throat in a blaze of light that merged with the ancestors' power.
The curse shattered. The explosion blew outward from my chest in a burst of black smoke and silver fire that sent shockwaves through the valley. The monoliths rang like struck bells, their vibrations harmonizing into a single sustained note.
The dark smoke was consumed instantly, and the parasitic sigils burned away to nothing beneath my skin.
My hand slid from the stone and I crumpled into the snow, every muscle spent, my vision narrowing to a tunnel of fading silver light.
Draven caught me before I hit the ground, his arms wrapping around my body, his burned hand pressing against my chest where my heart was still somehow beating.
"Atlas, open your eyes." His voice was shaking, cracked wide open. "Please, look at me."
I forced my eyes open. His face swam above me, devastated and hopeful and terrified all at once.
"Did it work?" I rasped.
"Your mark," Ava whispered, stumbling toward us, her voice caught between laughter and tears. "Atlas—Draven, look at his mark."
Draven's gaze lifted to my forehead and his breath stopped.
The crescent mark blazed brighter than it had ever been: a steady, fierce, incandescent silver that lit up the snow and threw sharp shadows from the monoliths.
Beneath it, Hyde burned like a furnace, fully restored, radiating a power deeper and wilder than anything I'd carried before.
"It worked," Kobe breathed. "Goddess above, it actually worked."
"The curse is gone," Axel confirmed, his voice trembling with something between relief and awe. "I can't sense a single trace of the sigils."
Draven pulled me against his chest and held me so tightly I could feel his heartbeat against my cheek. His burned hand cradled the back of my skull, and he pressed his lips to my blazing mark without flinching from the heat.
I was alive. The curse was broken. But deep inside me, beneath Hyde's triumphant roar, something else stirred.
A power vast and ancient and restless, coiling through my blood like a river just unblocked: surging, pressing against the boundaries of my body with a force that felt less like a gift and more like a flood searching for a way out.
"Atlas," Hyde's voice reached me, quieter now, edged with something I'd never heard from him before.
"The ancestors didn't just break the curse. They left something behind, and I don't know if we can contain it."