The dragon heart sat heavy in my palm.
Not crude weight—gravity had nothing to do with it. This was the heaviness of a life that had pressed against the ceiling of the world and almost broken through. I let my breath out slow and, for a blink, the room fell away.
The Gates were there again: platinum-silver, austere, patient. They didn't glow. They didn't speak. They just existed the way a mountain exists—indifferent to want. The Gates of Transcendence. The seam between mid and high Radiant. The seam my master had crossed with less muscle than I have now, and more being than I can yet carry.
"Not yet," I told them, and they did what they always do. They waited.
I opened my eyes to Avalon's light—clean, modern, a touch of warm gold that the Slatemark architects favored. The heart still pulsed faintly in my hand. Vaelrith's, Tiamat had said. Her husband. Second-strongest of their kind, close enough to Divine that the sky must have felt thinner when he flew.
