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“It isn’t yours to fix.” She pressed the blade tighter against her throat, fresh blood welling beneath the edge. Her eyes found mine. “I’m sorry, Helion.”

The apology broke something in me.

“No!” Rythos roared.

I was going to die to the hands of the woman I loved. But I would follow her into death without hesitation regardless of our lives being linked. Perhaps we would find each other in whatever afterlife would await a god.

My heart ached horribly in my chest, as if it were being cleaved in two by the blade of hopelessness.

“I love you both,” she sobbed.

Love.

That fucking word stole the breath from my lungs.

But I didn’t care, I would have lived another thousand years on those words alone. I was a god who had once held the sun in his hands, and still, nothing had ever felt as powerful as being loved by her.

Searing pain burnt through my chest, cutting through my complete awe.

I gritted my teeth together and my back arched from the pain.

She’d activated the fucking locket.

My flesh ripped apart, the locket burst out of me in a spray of gore. It surged forwards, flying towards Lyra and snapping around her neck.

My hands slapped against the marble as I caught myself, breaths heaving as my flesh mended back together.

The knife clattered against the marble.

Her eyes widened, that beautiful mouth parting on a silent breath. Light bloomed behind her irises slowly, a pale, unnatural glow that spread until there was almost nothing human left in them. Power shimmered beneath her skin, tracing the delicate lines of her face in faint, luminous veins as memories older than kingdoms poured into her mind. I watched recognition sharpen her expression piece by piece—grief, fury, hunger, things no Mortal woman should have known.

Maraveth’s memories were becoming hers.

“You…” Lyra gasped, her eyes snapping back to me as horror slowly consumed whatever recognition had first flickered across her face. “You killed him.”

The hate reflecting at me was the exact reason I didn’t want her to get those memories back, and I swallowed the guilt clawing its way up my throat at how cruel I had once been to her.

Then something else shifted behind her expression, another memory dragging itself free, and her lips parted around a trembling breath as though the truth had lodged somewhere inside her chest, and she could no longer force it back down.

“And I…” Her hand pressed against her sternum, fingers curling into the fabric there. “And I⁠—”

A strangled sound broke from the temple steps behind us.

Cerilla stood between the towering marble pillars, one hand braced against the stone while the other covered her mouth, her entire body trembling as though every secret she had carried for the last thousand years had finally become too heavy to hold.

“Please,” she whispered, tears already slipping over her flushed cheeks as she stumbled towards us. “Please, Lyra, don’t say any more.”

She barely made it another step before the two Sirens guarding the temple entrance surged forward, catching her by the arms and dragging her down onto the marble despite the broken sound that tore from her throat.

Cerilla fought against their grip, not with any real strength. No, Rythos had drained every drop of magic from her to sail us here.

There was no fear in the way she looked at Lyra, only grief for a past she had spent a thousand years trying to bury.

“Please,” she begged again.

“What did we do?” Lyra gasped, her arms wrapping around her middle as though she could somehow hold herself together while everything she had forgotten tore its way back through her.

“What we had to!” Cerilla cried, the words breaking from her with more anguish than anger.