Otto Looked Down at Kiana: "Only You Can Release Me from This Shell"

On the screen, Otto lowered his head and looked toward the ground beneath the temple, sealed beneath white light. Kiana and Durandal were still trapped there. Flamescion churned behind the transparent barrier, like a lion imprisoned in amber. Otto watched that blaze, and the phantom branches in his eyes suddenly faded a little, as though that flicker of fire had forced them back an inch.

"Only you remain," he said softly. For the first time, there was the faintest tremor in his voice, like the final ripple at the bottom of an ancient well. "The key I raised with my own hands. Now, you have to open the door for me. Not a door leading to Kallen, but one leading to me. Release me from this shell."

"Is he begging her?" A'Dai asked, his voice muffled.

"Not begging," Lie Yan said quietly. "Taking. Even now, he cannot bear to say the word 'please.' Even when handing his life over to someone else, he has to speak in the tone of an order. But he has no other choice. Over these five hundred years, the one thing he never accounted for was becoming the sacrifice himself. Now he sits upon the divine throne, unable to move. And the only person who can drag him down from it is the girl he has always treated as firewood."

"So Kiana still has to save him?" Ji Dong's anger flared again. "He ruined her like that, and now he expects her to save him? What is that supposed to be? He does not even know how to be human, yet he expects someone else to catch him when he falls?"

"She might not know," Huo Yuhao said. "Otto will not tell her everything. He will keep using that face, those arguments, even the fate