Nerea's shriek sliced through the catacomb walls. Iker lunged forward, boots hammering the flagstones as he tore through the low archway, Maialen drifting like pale fog at his shoulder. The corridor blurred past him in damp masonry and jagged mortar. Nerea. Always Nerea. And now Maialen, bound to this cursed house while he held the key. They erupted into the manor’s main hall, the silence here more chilling than the shriek that had drawn them. It wasn’t empty. Tendrils of shadow, thick as rope, snaked across the polished timber floor, coalescing around the grand staircase. They pulsed with an obscene hunger, reaching, stretching, towards the upper floor, towards Nerea’s room. The Lurking Sorrow. It wasn't waiting. It was actively feeding. “It’s trying to sever her connection,” Maialen’s voice was strained, distorted, her form wavering like smoke in a strong current. “To break the warding gem… to break me.” Iker took the stairs three risers at a stride, timber groaning beneath his boots. Maialen ghosted straight through the carved balustrade, her silhouette fraying into silver thread with each rhythmic pulse from above. Nerea's thin gasps leaked under the bedchamber door, brittle and raw. He slammed his shoulder through the doorway, splintering the ebony latch. Nerea lay sprawled across the mattress, the black jewel fused into her palm glowing with an oily purple luster. Her skin had gone the hue of curdled milk, gray soot seeping out of her wrists and pooling directly into the core of the rock. The creature was siphoning her marrow to unpick the seal. Maialen drifted beside the mattress, her translucent outline shuddering. Through her chest flashed phantom impressions of her death: a mossy slab, iron spikes, rough hands pinning her shoulders down, the raw agony of severance as the ritual tore away her mortal skin. The beast was dredging up that final murder to shatter her spirit from within. “Iker!” Maialen cried, a sound that was half a scream, half a plea. Her form fragmented further, a thousand tiny sparks threatening to extinguish. “It’s too strong! The bind… it’s failing!” The ancestral grimoire left no alternatives. He had to reinforce the anchor. He had to knot her cord tighter to this cell, sealing her into the foundations anew. “Maialen, forgive me,” he said under his breath. He dropped to his knees beside the bed, ignoring the frost coating the sheets. He closed his hand over Nerea's tiny fingers around the stone, anchoring her shaking palm as the draft pulled heat straight from his skin. He drew on the wellspring that had made him a prodigy before it broke his rank. He needed an alternate conduit. Pressing his thumb against the cut facets of the keystone, he let the barbed wards bite into his flesh, tracing the old sigils from memory as venomous cold bit into his nerve ends. He began to chant, the words a low, guttural murmur in the dead language of the Veil Wardens, a language reserved for their most forbidden and potent applications. His own blood pulsed, a rhythm echoing the slow, steady drum of a sacrifice. His own vitality surged down the circuit, pouring into the black core, then flooding through Nerea and anchoring into Maialen. A muffled shriek ripped through the floorboards as the Sorrow recoiled from the sudden flare of living blood. Maialen’s fragmented form began to coalesce, the twisting agony in her eyes softening, replaced by a profound sorrow. She knew. She understood the cost, the horrible necessity. As the words poured from Iker, each one a link in her strengthened chain, she reached out a spectral hand, not to push him away, but to rest it, for the briefest of moments, on his cheek. It was a touch that seared, a touch that promised a lifetime of shared burdens and whispered apologies. He was locking her down, yet tying his own breath to hers with the exact same thread. “*In spiritu et vita, animum meum ligabo*,” Iker’s voice deepened, resonating with a power that vibrated the very air. *“Per nexus aeterni, vos custodiam.”* (By spirit and life, I bind my soul. Through eternal nexus, I shall guard you.) Footsteps cracked against the threshold. Commander Zuriñe halted in the doorway, two uniformed Wardens flanking her with drawn steel. She took in the sight: Iker hunched over his sister, blood trickling from his split thumb across the dark jewel, chanting archaic verses while Maialen's ghostly frame solidified in the room's center. “Forbidden rites!” one of the Wardens shouted, raising a consecrated blade. “Commander, step in!” The second Warden hesitated, blade half-raised as she looked between the writhing child and Iker's locked posture. Zuriñe did not draw. She watched the circulation of blood and shadow, her brows leveling as she recognized the mechanics of the siphon. “Sheath your steel,” Zuriñe barked. Her hand rose, throwing a hard barrier of viridian light between Iker and her subordinates. The ward locked the two Wardens back in the hallway, cutting off their advance. She was defying every code of the Wardens to keep his hands unimpeded. The barrier hummed at Iker's back, shutting out the hall. The reinforcement caught hold. Nerea's shallow gasping leveled out, the black filaments retreating from her skin back into the core, which now thrummed with a steady cadence. Maialen's features settled into sharp clarity, her expression weighed down by the return of her bonds. He finished the chant, the last syllable dropping like a stone. The magic locked down through the Azabache Keystone, sealing shut. The Sorrow retreated entirely into the cellar depths, leaving only the stale stink of stagnant water. The cost struck at once. The circuit he had opened did not close. To maintain the anchor and keep her spirit from unraveling into the Gloom, the ward required a steady drain of living essence. It required *him*. He had reinforced her shackles, and now he felt the first cold link cinch around his own throat. Iker de Aranoa was no longer just guarding her captivity; he had forged himself into the lock.

A Prison of Two Souls