Chapter 3
The world shook. Roared. Clattered. Daemon froze in one second, threw himself to the ground in the next, flattened his palms against the cool basalt of the tunnel. The heat of the volcano called, answered, but with it came confusion.
The roar was not his mountain. Not the magma whose courses he knew like the path of his own blood. So why were the lava tubes trembling, cracking?
A scream echoed down the tunnel, the high pitch bringing him back to his feet as nothing else could. He ran, dodging the falling basalt rather than wasting any time or energy trying to stabilize it.
Elianne. Hers was the voice screaming its fear—or pain? He ran full out back toward the cavern the five of them called home, his feet not even registering the razor-sharp channels where magma had once flowed.
Ten more seconds, and then he skidded into the enormous chamber in the heart of the volcano, senses clamoring to make sense of everything.
The ceiling had collapsed—which meant the cavern should have been dark, his carefully hewn sconces obliterated. Yet it glowed brighter than usual, because the floor had collapsed too, on the north side, into the lava flow.
No. No, not the north, not all their stores—
Focus. The loss of their food would be disastrous, but they were more important. “Elianne?” Where was she? In her own room? He couldn’t see the entrance beyond the collapsed basalt.
“Down here!”
Daemon charged toward the collapsed northern end of the lava-made cavern, dropping to his knees as he neared the edge. “Speak to me.”
“A piece of the rock has me pinned.”
He’d misjudged where her voice was coming from before. He turned his head the other direction, spotted her, and scurried toward her. “Are you all right? Why didn’t you melt it?”
She must not have been too hurt, if she could spare the energy to glare at him as she was doing now. “I didn’t think to, Dae.”
Now wasn’t the time to lecture her, to point out that after all this time inside the lava flows of Mt. Helviti, she shouldn’t have to think, just to act. To remind her that if her heart weren’t still on the surface, she’d do a better job of surviving beneath it.
She didn’t want to hear his wisdom, such as it was. She just wanted her feet back on solid rock. So he leaned over the edge, arm extended, and first melted the slab of basalt trapping her. Then, once she could move freely, he drew up the lava flow beneath her feet, called the heat out.
New basalt formed, providing a ledge for her to stand on.
Elianne huffed out a breath that could have been either frustration or relief.
But she met his gaze. Nodded. When she was steady again, when her fears and frustrations and self-recriminations had all taken their turn, she would thank him with words.
And his heart, foolish as it was, would unfold like a flower in the heat-soaked sun of the surface domes.
He heaved her up and over the edge, back into the cavern that had been home for so long he’d begun to doubt the world of the surface even existed.
“What was that?” She sat on the smooth floor, rubbing a hand absently over her knee. No doubt she’d knocked it into rock as she fell. She’d need a dip in the lava baths to heal it, if it was more than a twist. “I didn’t sense anything in the lava?”
A question, not a statement. Daemon slid his eyes closed. The others had learned so quickly. But she…
It wasn’t her fault. She had no less skill, probably, but far less desire to make a life down here.
“You’re right. I didn’t either. Whatever it was, it was coming from Above.”
“Above.” She didn’t look up, toward the surface world none of them had seen since they were tossed down here, unwilling sacrifices.
No, she looked instead toward the west, where the lava tube would eventually end at the wall of ice, clear as glass.
Beyond which he would come, when it suited him. “What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know.” What could have? Rumblings and tremors were common inside Helviti, which groaned and breathed like a living thing.
But he knew his mountain. It never surprised him, not anymore—no more than his own body did.
He’d long ago learned to control her tempests, to route the magma to protect and solidify their home against any tremors.
When last he’d lived on the surface—how long had it been?
A century? A millennium?—there had been nothing powerful enough to cause a tremble like that down here, in the heart of Mt.
Helviti. But people were inventive, and he knew better than anyone that those who craved power often resorted to violence to achieve it.
Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he could still feel the slice of the flint blade into his finger. He could still hear the whispers of his father. He could still feel the soul-scorching burn of the fire that came to life in his veins moments later.
He could still see the hatred and fear on the face of the tyrant, right before he renamed him and cast him into the throat of the volcano. Hear the word spat at him as he stood amidst the lava, unburned. Unconsumed. “Daemon!”
He’d had another name, once. He could remember it, if he cast his mind back far enough, into those time-softened shadows of the past. Sig, they’d called him then.
Short for Sigmann. A farmer, like all the rest. No one worth noting.
He’d had no special way with plants like some of his friends.
No desire to understand the chemistry of soil and air and minerals like his older brother.
Half-brother? No compulsion to apply for relocation to a community that mined instead—the only adventure open to a thane. He’d simply been Sig. One among many.
But that man had burned away long ago, with every surge of lava he called up, with every flame he conjured, with every year he lived without changing, when surely he ought to have withered and died four times over by now.
Or perhaps time worked differently in the underworld. The tyrant had changed, once—a new man had begun coming to the ice wall, though he bore enough resemblance to the previous one that Daemon assumed he was his son. But otherwise, even those routine visits gave him no indication of time.
The Blessed didn’t age, not like normal people.
Neither did they, the Cursed. The daemons. Perhaps the five of them would be down here for all of eternity, singing to the mountain, keeping the lava in its courses, defending their land from Below.
What would happen if they stopped? Or, more, if they sought to destroy rather than protect? If they escaped these tubes and caverns?
Useless. The royals of Fjordlandi had been stopping the volcanoes’ destruction for centuries with the power of their ice, freezing flows and hardening them before they could do damage, building walls of basalt and obsidian and pumice around their domes and outcasts’ villages.
“Even a daemon cannot overcome the might of the Ice King,” the old tyrant had said. And the new one echoed it, every time he arrived with supplies of food, water, and heat-resistant clothing for them. “Remember that. Try, and it’s your people, your precious thanes, who will suffer for it.”
As if he could forget. As if it hadn’t been hammered home every time a new sacrifice was made, a new person tossed into the mouth of the mountain, to prove their innocence by burning or their guilt by standing up, ankle-deep in molten rock, unsinged.
Small fingers covered the ones he’d curled into a fist. His blood responded, as it always did when Elianne emerged from the shell of her own pain long enough to try to soothe his. His gaze flew up from the rock, to her face.
Beautiful. So beautiful, as beautiful as a Blessed. “Evil is alluring,” that was what the dominie in his village had always said. “The Great Betrayer was the most beautiful of the hosts before he sought power instead of service to the Giver and rebelled.”
If the old dominie were here, Daemon knew what he would say. Knew he’d take one look at the lot of them, with their perfect forms and flawless faces, and hiss the same word as the tyrants. Daemons.
He’d been the only one for so long. Then came Logi. Eldrid. Brandr. A brotherhood, a family. Men to bring laughter to Helviti.
How could laughter exist in the underworld?
Then Ember, the first female daemon, and she had shaken their world, their order. Brandr and Logi had both fallen for her. The rivalry had ended with Brandr dead.
That was when Daemon had learned that even the Cursed could die, just like the Blessed. So then, they were not pure spirit, like the beings the old dominie had taught them about. They were something else. Something less.
He’d never told the tyrant that Brandr was gone, fed into the lava, that in death his body burned like any man’s. It was information he didn’t want anyone else to have.
It was extra provisions, for the first time. Food and water and leathers they could stash away and store up, bit by bit.
When Elianne had come, he and Eldrid had sworn neither of them would pursue her. They would not sacrifice brotherhood for this creature, no matter how lovely her face, how fetching her form. It had been easy to resist the tug, at first. She was so distraught. So angry. So confused.
But of course, they’d come to know her well in the eternity that she’d been here. She’d become a friend, a sister. Her laughter had joined theirs, she and Ember had taken up the care of their miniature village.
She didn’t often reach out to soothe him though. She didn’t often bend her head to catch his gaze as she did now, her rare red hair gleaming like the lava. She didn’t often force him to remember that he was still a man simply by being a woman.