The shockwave from the fourth shattered chain tore through the false reality like parchment.
Lion plunged into the maelstrom of ancestral memory—and finally saw:
The Shadowkin had never been darkness's thralls. They were the world's balancers, born with the gift to temper chaos into life-giving elements. Until the Conclave discovered that a Shadowheart, harvested through cruel artifice, could grant ageless power...
"So they spun the lie of the Shadowkin's sin." Selene's voice reached him across the void. Lion opened his eyes to find himself kneeling in a star-strewn expanse, fractured memories orbiting like planets.
The true Selene stood before him, the Phoenix Ember in her chest casting jagged light across her hollowed features. "My mother was the first Archon to learn the truth... and the first they turned into a battery." She pointed to a memory-shard—young Marlena driving a silver needle into their mother's spine. "I stole the Ember for this single purpose: to burn their machine to ash."
Lion's Shadowheart pulsed violently, resonating with the flame in Selene's ribs. "Then why—"
"The deception?" Her smile was razor-thin. "Only a fully awakened Shadowblood can shatter the false Crown. And awakening requires rage—the kind only betrayal breeds."
The memory-shards suddenly converged, forming the final horror:
The first Archon stood atop a gore-slicked altar, cradling not a sacred relic—but a grotesque apparatus wrought from Shadowkin bones. She preached purification as she plunged the first energy siphon into her own spine.
"The Crown was never real."
The Shadow Prince's voice was Lion's own now.
"Its true name is the Heartchain."
Reality. The volcano's maw.
The fully unveiled Heartchain floated atop a magma pillar, Marlena and the Dragon Queen funneling stolen power into its core. The device twisted, sprouting vein-like tendrils that quested hungrily for the nearest Shadowheart—
Lion's.
"No time!" Calvin, missing an arm and half his blood, struggled against dragonkin guards. "That thing's waking!"
Yet Selene stood preternaturally calm. Her crystallized hand pressed to Lion's chest. "Now you see why the Ember chose me."
Before he could react—
She shoved him toward the Heartchain's yawning maw.