36. Max
Max
Max! Max! You returned!
The Coldiron lightning shouted it in a thousand voices, delighted.
Sheets of it walled the dark from the high sky down to where the lava burned at the bottom of the chasm, and more of it came rising out of the depths.
The dragon roared his defiance. At my warning, he slowed, and we hovered there among the shifting shadows, just out of the lightning’s reach.
Out of reach was a delusion. If the Coldiron decided to strike, it would cross that distance in under a second.
On my forearm, my own metal chirped and wriggled, giddy, coming home, its small voice drowned under all that kin.
What do we do? I had to think fast.
“We seek the passage!” I shouted from the dragon’s back. “To…to Hell.”
Lucifer was in Hell. Right?
“The realm of Hell,” I added. “Does such a place exist?”
Yes, yes! the Coldiron shouted back in amusement, from everywhere at once. Hell is real!
“Where is it?”
Should we do a riddle first? one group asked.
Just tell her. This is the true heir, another answered.
The way is through. The way is down. The Coldiron said it in one voice. We guard the path.
Oh joy. Through. Then down.
Joy! The metal chewed on the word.
I stared past the streaming lightning into the chasm, where the lava turned over far below. The metal was telling us to fly through it and then sink into that burning abyss.
That was fucking impossible.
Then Aelindor’s words came back from one of our training sessions. An ancient record said the Coldiron was part of a burning star that fell with Lucifer Morningstar.
My true surname was Morningstar. So that was why the metal obeyed me.
Birthright.
I’d come to claim it.
Dark Grace stirred in me.
Not a voice. It would never be a voice again. But an inheritance. And then the path lit up in me.
Blood called to blood.
“Dragon,” I said. “The chasm is the gate. Let’s go!”
A rumble rolled up through his body and into mine. He folded his wings and dove.
We went through the lightning first, and the lightning opened.
Strikes that could unmake an heir bent around us like reeds around a boat, blue-silver on every side, close enough that my hair lifted and my teeth buzzed, and not one thread of it touched us.
Inside the lightning, my mind went strange. Thoughts came fast and then faster, stacked and simultaneous, as if I could hold a thousand of them in a single second, and in that blur the truth of it arrived. The metal didn’t obey Earth’s reality.
It hadn’t originated on Earth.
Time bent around it and us.
Then the chasm took us, and the dive went on and on.
Down through heat that should have cooked us and didn’t. Down past walls sliding upward forever, lit red from below. The dragon poured his own fire ahead of us as we fell, a roaring red-gold column plunging into the deep like a herald, his flame going down to meet the hellfire coming up.
Wind and heat-scream and the drum of my own blood. I flattened myself to his neck and held on, and somewhere in the long fall the fear burned off me and left only the truth of what I was doing.
I was a miner. A decade underground. I’d once dug for three days straight into the cursed deep shaft after my foster parents and found only rocks and dirt and Coldiron.
That descent had ended at two markers with nothing under them.
This one was my whole identity going down the shaft at last, all the way, and this time I was digging toward a parent who was alive.
The lava closed over us, and it was light, not pain. Gold and orange everywhere, currents of liquid fire parting along the dragon’s scales and my skin like warm water, and none of it, not the lava, not the hellfire, not the lightning, did us the smallest harm.
And then the dragon hit bottom.
The impact rang up through his body, his legs taking it like siege pillars. I raised my head, and the lava was gone. The hellfire, gone. The Coldiron, gone. All of it swallowed behind us like a door discreetly closed.
This fire couldn’t burn me. I had the Morningstar blood.
We were in Hell, and Hell looked like the world’s first draft, inked in the dark.
A vast plain of black stone spread away from us under a sky the color of old worlds, lit by no sun I could find. In the distance, a ring of black mountains fenced the horizon, and the tallest of them was spewing lava, the only bright thing in all that dark.
Above the peaks flew a flock of dragons.
No. My eyes corrected themselves and my skin tightened. Dinosaurs. Winged, crested, riding the thermals over the mountains in lazy patrols.
On the far side, ahead of us, lay an ocean with fire raging beneath it.
Not on it.
The whole black sheet of water glowed from below, lava boiling at the ocean floor and lighting the surface in shifting amber panes.
At the center of that impossible water floated the Morningstar Palace.
Ebony crystal and black steel forged into each other, rising from the burning sea in spires and buttresses like a cathedral dreamed up by the dark. Facets caught the underwater fire and held it, so the whole structure glimmered from within, cold and lit at once.
It was the most magnificent thing I’d ever seen with waking eyes.
Even Xander’s palace was a market stall beside it.
Then the shift took the dragon. Forced him. Scale and wing collapsed inward in a rush of heat, the back beneath me gave way, and I dropped onto the black stone in a crouch. Where the dragon had stood, Drakken straightened up beside me.
Butt naked.
I looked away one full second too late. The general had long slabs of muscle under scarred golden skin, and the firelight off the ocean did him favors I had no time to catalog. Heat climbed my face that had nothing to do with Hell.
Shit. Not now. Stop.
I fixed my eyes on the mountains with military discipline, but Drakken had caught it anyway, the corner of his mouth curling up.
“First, we need to get you clothes,” I said, looking anywhere but at him. “Maybe we kill a couple of demons. Easiest way to clothe you.”
“You don’t like me being naked?”
He knew exactly what that cost. He said it anyway. The geas sat on my skin and watched like a vulture, but it couldn’t do a damn thing about a flirt.
And Drakken had just flirted with me, unfiltered and for the first time, ever.
I didn’t get this man. One season he was hellbent on burning me the fuck out of his academy, and the next he was another person entirely in that infuriating, gorgeous body, and the turns came without warning.
“Seriously, Drakken? Now?” I spread my arms at the burning ocean, the black mountains, the entire underworld.
That sobered him. His gaze went cool and professional, sweeping the terrain. “The dinosaurs are sentinels,” he said. “They’ll spot us soon and come to investigate.”
They weren’t the only problem. Now that my eyes had adjusted to the bruised light, the plain gave up its details.
Giant demons walked patrols along the far shore beneath the palace walls.
Nearer, on our side of the ocean, an army of them held the ground.
Campfires without fire, ranked spears, hundreds upon hundreds of shapes between us and the water.
Blood to blood. Something pulled me toward that floating cathedral like a compass needle.
“We need to get to the palace,” I said.
“No shit, cadet.”
“It’s Spartan,” I reminded him.
“Don’t worry. I’ll shift back and fly us there.” He rolled his shoulders, reached for the dragon, and nothing came. He tried again, and again, his jaw setting harder each time, and the dragon stayed wherever this realm had locked him. “This realm really is cursed.”
“Then we go stealthy. Find a way to infiltrate the palace.” I scanned for cover as I said it and found the flaw in my own plan. Flat black stone to the horizon in every direction. Nothing to hide behind, under, or inside.
You could not sneak across a table.
In the end, the choice made itself, because on our side of the ocean the patrolling demons had stopped. All of them. Every demonic head on that plain had turned our way.
“Fuck,” Drakken said. “We fight through. You stay in my shadow.”
“You have no shadow here, General.” I nodded at the ground, where the sourceless light cast nothing at all. “Even if you did, I don’t stay in anyone’s shadow. And we have another problem: say we fight through, then what? How do we cross an ocean with lava boiling under it?”
“We wing it, Spartan Max. There’s always a way.”
“Sure, that’s your plan: wing it.”
“Here they come,” Drakken warned, and we set ourselves, battle ready.
A platoon detached from the army and advanced, the largest demons on the field, in armor a full grade better than the rabble’s, black plate chased with red. Elite, then. The biggest of them locked eyes on me from two hundred yards, raised one fist, and his whole platoon halted where it stood.
An archdemon with dark ember skin and ram-curled horns sweeping back from his skull.
He came on alone. He didn’t draw the ax across his back.
The closer he came, the heavier his power sat on my senses, deep and old and pressing.
My companion was naked, but the Coldiron armguard had stayed on his forearm, and the sight of it steadied me.
He flexed his fingers, reached out his hand, and his ebony broadsword came into his grip out of nothing.
Relief moved through his face. The summoning worked here.
My own armguard was already flowing, and I gripped my twin chakrams tight.
The archdemon stopped a dozen feet away.
And took a knee.
Behind him, across the whole plain, his platoon knelt with him, and then the army beyond them, rank after rank going down like wheat under wind, hundreds of demon heads bowing toward me.
What the fuck?
Drakken and I traded a look.
“Welcome home, Princess Heir,” the archdemon said.
“Who the fuck are you?” Drakken demanded.
The archdemon rose and set a cracked-iron fist over his chest. “Asteroth, general of the Third Host.” His fiery orange eyes never left me. “Your father has been waiting for you, Princess. I am honored to be your escort.”
He did not glance at Drakken once. Drakken might as well have been a statue.