Chapter 35 Bryx
Bryx
Earlier, I’d stood in the rebel camp, explaining my brilliant plan to Thrak while Kevin buzzed irritably beside me, his left wing still torn from our scouting mission.
We’d strategically positioned everyone, two hundred and fifty rebels across three attack points, sonic amplifiers I’d cobbled together from stolen Crown tech, and every bee Kevin could convince to join us.
Thrak had been skeptical, Vera had calculated our odds of survival at roughly twelve percent, but here we were anyway.
Now, watching it unfold, I wasn’t exactly sure how I’d convinced anyone this would work.
“NOW!” I screamed, my voice carrying on sonic waves that shattered every piece of glass within a hundred yards.
The main gates of the Heartspire exploded inward under the combined assault of our makeshift army and three hundred very angry bees.
Half the rebels had never ridden anything in their lives, much less giant insects with attitude problems. I’d watched some poor fae, Jareth, nearly get stung to death during the briefing when he’d grabbed Kevin’s thorax wrong.
Another rebel, Tam, had fallen off his bee twice before we even left camp.
But they were here now, clinging to fuzzy backs with white knuckles and screaming war cries that were half battle rage, half terror.
Kevin dove through the shattered gates first, his torn wing making him list sideways, but his war cry echoed off the walls with a fury that made even me shiver. Behind him, the swarm followed, a cloud of organized vengeance that darkened the sky.
“For Elle!” I shouted, leading the charge with more enthusiasm than sense. “For everyone who’s tired of living under a madman’s thumb! For decent interior decorating! Seriously, has anyone seen these walls? Corruption is not a design choice!”
The rebels roared behind me, taking up the cry. Well, most of it. They seemed less concerned about the interior decorating part.
The first wave of Bloomguard met us in the courtyard, and that’s when things got properly chaotic.
My sonic pulses bounced off the walls, multiplying and echoing until it sounded like a thousand of me were attacking from every direction.
Which would have been terrifying for anyone, really. One of me was usually more than enough.
“What is this?” a guard captain shouted, trying to rally his forces. “How many are there?”
“All of them!” I replied cheerfully, sending a pulse that knocked him off his feet. “Every rebel in the realm! We’ve come for tea and revolution! Mostly revolution!”
The truth was, we were outnumbered three to one.
But between the sonic echoes, the bee swarm, and the rebels’ hit-and-run tactics, the guards couldn’t tell where we actually were versus where we seemed to be.
Thrak had positioned our forces brilliantly—three groups attacking from different angles, retreating before the guards could engage, then attacking again from somewhere else.
It was chaos. It was mayhem. It was exactly what we needed.
As we pushed through the outer defenses, I spotted her—the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen.
She moved like water through the chaos, somehow both predator and prey, her simple serving dress torn and bloodied, but her stance speaking of hidden training.
Brown hair whipped around a face that was all sharp angles and fierce determination.
My compound eyes took in every detail at once: the grace in her movements, the fire in her eyes, the way she held a kitchen knife like she knew exactly where to put it. I was instantly, ridiculously smitten.
Then she screamed, and reality crashed back.
“Help!” The voice was terrified, lovely, desperate.
I spun fully to see her pressed against a wall as three Bloomguard advanced. This beautiful, terrifying girl was about to die, and something in my chest went absolutely feral at the thought.
“Well, well,” one of the guards said, reaching for her. “The regent’s little runaway serving girl. He’ll reward us well for bringing you back.”
A serving girl. That’s all I knew. But it didn’t matter who she was; she was about to die, and I couldn’t let that happen.
Something in me snapped. Not the usual Bryx snap of making inappropriate jokes at inappropriate times. Something deeper. Something that looked at this girl—alluring, fierce, about to die—and said absolutely fucking not.
The sonic pulse I unleashed wasn’t calculated or careful.
It was rage given sound, fury given frequency.
The guards flew backward, armor cracking, bones definitely breaking.
Kevin was on the nearest one before he could recover, stinger finding the gap between helmet and collar with vengeful precision.
I reached the woman in three strides, pulling her behind me. “Are you hurt?”
“I… I wanted to help,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “I couldn’t just hide while everyone else fought.”
“Brave and stupid,” I said, sending another pulse at an approaching guard. “My favorite combination. I’m Bryx, by the way. Hero, pest, occasional savior of beautiful women. And you are?”
“Mora,” she gasped, wiping blood from a cut on her cheek. “I work—worked—in the kitchens. I helped Elle when they had her.”
My compound eyes widened. “You know Elle?”
She nodded, and suddenly this gorgeous stranger became even more important. “She told me to run when things got bad. But I couldn’t leave her.”
“Can you run now?”
“Yes.”
“Then run with me. We’re going inside.”
“Inside? But that’s—”
“Where Elle is. Where this ends. Where we need to be.”
She looked at me with those too-old eyes, then nodded. “I’m with you.”
We ran through the chaos, Kevin limping beside us, his damaged wing dragging, but his spirit unbroken.
Around us, the battle raged. Tam, the rebel who’d fallen off his bee twice, went down under a guard’s blade.
Another bee deflected what would have been a killing blow to Jareth—apparently, the bee-riding lessons had paid off after all. The rebels were holding, but barely.
“I know where the convergence chamber is,” Mora said suddenly, surprising me. “I was with Elle when they dragged her there. They knocked me out and locked me in a side room, but I woke up when I heard the explosions. The guard at my door ran to see what was happening, and I slipped out.”
“Then lead the way,” I said, trusting this brave, brilliant woman who’d already risked everything.
“The sound,” I said, realizing something else.
“Everything here has a resonance, a frequency. And there’s something deep below that’s screaming at a pitch that makes my antennae want to crawl off my head. ”
We plunged into the Heartspire proper, and immediately I knew we were walking into something worse than a trap.
The walls pulsed with that sick mixture of Root and Bloom, the corruption so thick I could taste it with every breath.
My compound eyes picked up movement in every shadow—not guards, but the building itself, aware and hungry.
The walls themselves pulsed with that sickening mixture I’d seen before—Root and Bloom twisted together in the rot channels, creating something completely unnatural.
During my scouting mission, I’d watched guards coat their weapons in it, seen it dissolve a training dummy like acid through flesh.
The science of it nagged at me even now, even in the middle of a battle for our lives.
Root and Bloom weren’t supposed to mix—that’s what made marked ones so rare, what made convergence so dangerous.
But here they were, deliberately combined, weaponized.
My mind churned through the implications even as my body fought to survive.
If you could mix them artificially… if corruption could be combined with purity…
what happened to that mixture when you distributed it?
Spread it thin enough, across enough vessels, would it still be lethal?
Or would it become something else entirely? Something manageable?
The thought slipped away as another section of wall tried to eat Mora, but it lingered in the back of my mind. Distribution. Dispersal. Dilution across multiple points instead of concentration in one.
“Stay close,” I told Mora, then louder, to the rebels who’d followed us in: “The building’s alive! Don’t touch the walls!”
Too late for some. I watched in horror as a rebel brushed against a seemingly innocent piece of stonework and immediately began transforming, his skin becoming bark, his screams becoming the rustle of leaves. Another stepped on the wrong floor stone and sank into it like it was quicksand.
“This way!” Thrak’s voice cut through the chaos. He’d fought his way inside, Vera beside him, both covered in blood that wasn’t all theirs. “The main chamber’s below!”
We fought our way deeper, every step a battle against both guards and architecture.
The Heartspire’s defenses were awakening—thorns erupting from walls, floors becoming acid, air turning poison.
But we pushed through, because what else could we do?
Elle was down there. Our people were dying up here. Stopping wasn’t an option.
Then something changed.
A wave of wrongness rolled through the Heartspire that made even the corrupted walls recoil. It wasn’t the building’s sickness—I’d been feeling that since we entered. This was something else. Something colder. Something that felt like death.
Kevin buzzed nervously on my shoulder, his usual bravado replaced by something I’d never felt from him before: genuine fear. Not the healthy fear of fighting guards or dodging corruption. The primal terror of prey sensing an apex predator.
“What was that?” Thrak asked, his scarred face going pale.
“I don’t know,” I lied, because I did know. I’d felt this kind of power once before, weeks ago, when Kaelren had been standing at the edge of giving in completely to his corruption. But this was worse. This was that moment fully realized. Whatever Kaelren had become, it was beyond corrupted.
“Something just changed,” Vera said quietly, her tactical mind already working. “Something big.”
“Kaelren or Elle,” I said. “Maybe both. The convergence is close—reality’s thin enough that I can practically taste it. Whatever’s happening in that chamber, we’re running out of time.”
We moved faster after that, driven by the certainty that somewhere below us, things had gone to shit.
Part of me hoped that was a good thing. The rest of me worried it meant we were all about to die.
A massive guard blocked our path to the lower levels, wearing armor that gleamed with that sick Root-Bloom mixture. His blade was less sword and more portable apocalypse, humming with wrongness.
“You go no further, rebels.”
“That’s what you think,” I said, gathering sonic energy. “Kevin, you remember that move we practiced?”
Kevin buzzed agreement, then did something I’d never seen him do before—he started vibrating at a frequency that matched my sonic pulse.
When I released the energy, he amplified it, creating a wave of sound so powerful it didn’t just knock the guard down—it liquefied his armor, leaving him gasping on the floor in his underclothes.
“That’s embarrassing,” I noted, stepping over him. “Maybe invest in better underwear next time.”
We descended stairs that spiraled into darkness, the chanting growing louder with each step. My extra joints ached with every movement, and I could feel blood still seeping from my wounds, but stopping wasn’t an option.
“There,” Mora whispered, pointing ahead.
Massive doors stood before us, and I knew that there was no coming back from what was on the other side.
“Together,” I said, looking at the rebels who’d made it this far. Maybe thirty of us, all wounded, all exhausted, all determined.
“Together,” they echoed.
I gathered every bit of sonic energy I had left, Kevin adding his harmony to mine. The others prepared their weapons, their magic, their desperate hope.
“For Elle,” I whispered.
Then we hit the doors with everything we had.