The rusted knife glinted like a serpent's fang in Jaren's mother's hand. Her amber eyes—now Gideon's eyes—locked onto him, unblinking. "You planted this rot," she whispered, her voice layered with the god's gravelly timbre. "Now you'll harvest it."
She lunged.
Jaren sidestepped, decay surging through his veins. The blade grazed his arm, and a vision erupted: the golden-scarred man from his nightmares knelt in a wasteland, hacking at his own ribs with a rusted blade. "Forge it from my bones," Kael snarled to a shadowy smith. "Let it cut through time." The smith hammered Kael's bones into a knife, its edge weeping black rust. Jaren recoiled. The knife wasn't just a weapon—it was Kael's legacy, a relic of his decay.
His mother attacked again, her movements jerky, as if Gideon puppeteered her joints. "You think you're saving her?" she taunted, nodding at Lyra's twitching body. "She's already his." Lyra's chest cracked open, thorns spiraling from her ribs like a grotesque bloom.
The forest convulsed. Trees melted into rivers of sap. Varyn's ashes swirled into a cyclone, his laughter echoing. The air thickened, each breath tasting of iron and rot. Jaren's veins blackened further. One more use of the rot, he thought, and I'll become Gideon's canvas.
He seized his mother's wrist, decay spreading up her arm. She screamed—a raw, human sound—as her flesh petrified into ash. The knife clattered to the ground. "I'm sorry," Jaren choked, tears blurring his vision. "I'm so sorry—" Her amber eyes dimmed. "Find the second bud…" she rasped—her own voice, fleeting—before disintegrating.
Lyra rose behind him, thorns knitting her chest shut. "Sentiment," Gideon purred through her lips. "How quaint." She snatched the rusted knife, its edge now glowing with Kael's golden scars. The forest floor split, revealing a chasm of writhing roots and fractured mirrors.
"Run, little thief," she said, her voice a harmony of Lyra and Gideon. "The hourglass is empty." The chasm's mirrors reflect endless versions of Jaren—some rotted, some hollow-eyed puppets. Lyra steps toward him, the knife humming with Kael's stolen time.