Dawn smelled of iron and burnt ink. Myrren hadn’t slept because every breath still tangled with Corven’s through the tether, each heartbeat a ghostly echo in her ribs. When the Queen’s summons came before sunrise, commanding her to join him in the south laboratory, she almost laughed. There was no antidote for what already bound them.

The laboratory sat beneath the eastern courtyard with stone walls slick with condensation, air thick with the scent of crushed herbs and iron shavings. Lanterns burned low, their flames dulled by the mist that clung to the glass. Every table bore the marks of failed experiments: blackened scorch rings, cracked vials, ghostly stains where poisons had eaten through polish.

Myrren set her satchel down, unfastening the buckles with mechanical care. Her hands shook only once, when she caught the faint trace of cypress and shadow in the air. He was already here.

Corven stood at the far table, sleeves rolled, hands bare. The light bent around him, as if his shadows refused to leave his skin. He didn’t look up when she entered, only said, “The Queen wants a counteragent by nightfall.”

“She would ask that of you?” Myrren kept her voice level, arranging her vials. “Or of me?”

“Both,” he said. “She wants to see what the tether makes of us.”

That stilled her. The glass rim clicked against the stone as she set down a vial too sharply. “We’re not experiments.”

His mouth curved, humorless. “Everything in this court is an experiment. We just survive longer than most.”

Silence fell between them, dense as fog. Only the slow drip of condensation from the ceiling broke it. The tether hummed faintly, an invisible thread vibrating under her skin, drawn tight whenever he moved.

She tried to focus on the antidote: distillate of frostmint for clarity, trace silver to stabilize the poison’s reactive core. But the air felt heavier with every breath. Corven’s presence pressed close, even when he didn’t move.

He finally approached, slow and  careful, until their shadows nearly touched the floor. “The Queen believes the tether amplifies craft,” he murmured. “If she’s right, what you feel could double what I control.”

“And if she’s wrong?”

“Then we both burn.”

Her pulse skipped. She turned sharply to hide it, reaching for a flask of binding oil. His hand brushed hers before she could stop it. The tether flared with heat rippling through her arm, her breath catching like struck flame.

Their eyes met. For one suspended heartbeat, neither moved.

Then a glass cracked between them with a brittle sound.

She pulled back first. “Let’s just work.”

He nodded once, though the shadows at his feet trembled like something barely held at bay.

And the tether kept humming, steady as a pulse neither of them could silence.

The crack hissed faintly, releasing a curl of silver vapor. Myrren cursed under her breath and reached for a stopper. Corven moved at the same time. Their hands collided again, too hard this time like glass clinking, liquid sloshing over their skin.

“Don’t..” she started.

But the vapor had already mixed with the tincture of nightshade on the bench, turning the air a hazy violet. The scent was sharp, metallic, threaded with something wrong. Not poison but memory.

Myrren stumbled back, coughing. “That wasn’t in the formula.”

Corven covered the beaker with his palm. The smoke curled up his wrist, vanishing into his skin like ink drawn home. The mark there, the faint lattice of light and dark threads have flared once, pulsing in rhythm with her own heartbeat.

“You altered it,” she said hoarsely.

“I adjusted it.” He flexed his fingers, watching the glow fade. “You can’t build an antidote against the spiral without a trace of shadowbinding to stabilize it.”

Her stomach turned cold. “The Queen ordered a cure, not a curse.”

He met her eyes steady, gray and  unreadable. “You think she cares which it becomes? She wants to know if what ties us can be used. To control. To bind.”

Myrren’s pulse stumbled. The implications hit like poison spreading under her tongue. They weren’t making an antidote. They were making proof.

A sound from the door, soft as cloth shifting. Her gaze darted to the lattice window inset high in the stone. A shape lingered beyond the glass, just out of sight. Watching. The Queen’s spies, perhaps even Rue in fear’s service, watched unseen. Corven must have felt it too. His voice dropped, barely more than breath. “They’ll test it on you first.”

She laughed once, bitter. “They always do.”

He didn’t smile. “Then let me take the dose.”

The offer stunned her. “You’d..”

“Drink shadow or light, it ends the same.” He turned away before she could answer, grinding powdered silver into the mixture. “If I survive, she wins. If I die, she calls it proof that the tether killed me.”

The sound of the pestle against glass became rhythm, heartbeat, accusation. Myrren’s voice softened despite herself. “Why do you always sound like you’ve already lived this?”

“Because I have,” he said quietly. “And I keep failing you.”

The tether thrummed so sharply it made her knees weak. She steadied herself on the table, breathing through the ache blooming behind her ribs. “Then stop failing me now.”

Corven looked at her, the faintest flicker of emotion breaking through the composure, a hunger she didn’t dare name. His shadows shifted toward her across the stone, curling like smoke toward heat.

He forced them back with a visible effort. “We finished the antidote. Nothing more.”

But when their hands met again over the simmering flask, the mixture pulsed with dark light, alive and aware. A ripple of heat ran through the air.

“The ratio’s unstable,” she whispered.

“No,” Corven said, voice low, almost reverent. “It’s listening.”

The vapor rose, swirling between them like breath turned visible. It shimmered in alternating hues of gold and onyx, binding their reflections together in the glass.

Her heart kicked once with fear, wonder, and longingshe couldn’t tell which.

And through that living haze, she thought she heard her own voice, layered and distant, whispering from somewhere else in the spiral: “Don’t breathe.”

The warning came too late. Myrren gasped, instinct winning over reason, and the vapor slid down her throat like silk turned to ice.

Her vision fractured. The world tilted. The lab around her dissolved into shadow and light.

For a heartbeat, she saw two Corvens with one reaching for her through gold-lit smoke, the other through darkness so deep it swallowed the air. Both called her name. Both belonged to her.

The tether roared, dragging her between them. The shadows in the room stretched, lengthening like veins through glass. She felt her pulse split with one steady and one erratic as though two hearts beat inside her chest.

Corven’s shout broke through the hum. “Myrren! don’t fight it..!”

But she couldn’t stop. The vapor filled her lungs, her veins, her mind. She stood in another place entirely: a corridor burning, the ceiling collapsing in sparks; his hands on her face, his lips against hers. The taste of smoke. A kiss both desperate and doomed.

Then, another world, gentler: moonlight, rain, the same kiss again, but this time it felt like forgiveness.

She saw both at once. Fire and rain. Doom and devotion. Two spirals colliding.

A voice rippled through the smoke, hers and not hers, echoing from every direction:
“One shall bind… one shall break… and one shall wear the crown of ash.”

Her knees hit the floor. The table crashed beside her, vials bursting like shattering stars.

Corven caught her before she struck the stone. His shadows wrapped around them both, a shield trembling at its edges. “Breathe,” he ordered, though his own voice trembled. “Stay with me.”

She tried, but the tether was burning her from the inside, light and shadow twisting together in her veins. She saw flashes and banquets aflame, Thane’s golden fire collapsing into ruin, the Queen watching from behind a veil of smoke.

Then another image: herself, two of her reflected in a fragment of glass near the floor. One breathing, one still. Both staring back.

The reflection moved before she did.

The door slammed open. Ori’s gasp cut through the haze. “Saints! Myrren!”

Her friend froze, eyes wide. For an instant, the reflection in the glass showed two Myrrens, one reaching toward Corven, one fading into smoke.

Then the vision shattered.

Ori stumbled forward, but the smoke coiled away, hiding everything in shadow.

Corven’s voice rose out of the dark, raw and broken. “She’s in both spirals now.”

The tether gave one last pulse.. then silence.