Chapter 5 #2
"You miss licking yourself in public," Elias countered, pulling a grey scholar’s robe over his head. Somehow, he adjusted the folds with such elegance that the moth-eaten wool looked like royal silk draped for a portrait.
Thane struggled with a tunic that was three sizes too small, the seams stretching dangerously across his massive shoulders.
He eventually abandoned it with a soft sigh of defeat, settling for wrapping a heavy, dark cloak around his waist and shoulders like a toga, leaving one immense arm bare. It suited him, ancient and formidable.
Kaelen dressed quickly, his movements sharp and efficient. He found a black tunic that fit reasonably well and strapped a sword belt around his waist, testing the balance of a blade taken from the armory chest. He turned to me, the gold in his eyes flashing in the dark.
"Where do we go?" he asked. "The villages are vulnerable. If Olympus descends, they will burn the countryside to flush us out."
"We don't go to the villages," I said, clutching the leather-bound journal that Master Theron had died to protect.
My fingers traced the scorched leather cover, feeling the phantom heat of the spell that had killed him.
"We go to the one place Natalia never looked.
The place that no one will go to because they are too afraid of the old magic. "
"Where?" Thane asked, his deep voice rolling through the tunnel like distant thunder.
"The Cradle," I said, the name tasting forbidden on my tongue. "The place where the first stone of the Citadel was cut. There’s a crypt beneath the mountain. Theron told me about it once when he was drunk on winter wine. He said the foundation of the world is different there."
"The Heart of the Titan," Kaelen murmured, recognition flashing in his eyes along with a grim sort of respect. "Yes. The earth magic there would be chaotic. Ancient. It would hide our signatures."
"Lead on," Flynn said, testing the weight of a dagger he'd found for a brief moment before snatching me up again. He almost seemed to rub his cheek against my shoulder, like he needed tactile reassurance that I was there. "You smell like ozone and fear, Aria. Let's fix at least one of those."
I couldn't deny that I needed the reassurance as well. Everything seemed to be happening too fast, blurring together. I just needed a moment to breathe, to make sure that we were all okay.
But we weren't all okay.
Master Theron was dead. The image of his body, slumped over his beloved scrolls, flashed behind my eyes.
Not to mention all the other Keepers and cultists that had died in the chaos before I manipulated the gate.
Was High Keeper Natalia still alive? She was powerless, Kaelen had seen to that, stripping her of her command with a single word, but the last thing I remembered was her unconscious form on the Sanctorum floor.
Had she still been there when the Sentinel attacked?
Or had one of her loyalists spirited her away while I was drowning in the magic of the Gate?
We moved deeper, descending into the crushing dark of the earth. The air grew cold and stale, thick with the weight of the stone above us. We walked for what felt like hours, putting miles of rock between us and the sky.
Eventually, the tunnel opened into a cavern so vast that even with my enhanced eyesight I couldn't identify the ceiling.
In the center lay a pool of water as black as ink, perfectly still, reflecting nothing.
On the far side, a structure carved from obsidian rose from the gloom, a tomb for something that should not have been forgotten.
We set up a rudimentary camp near the water's edge. The princes settled into the shadows, the adrenaline fading into a heavy, quiet wariness. Thane sat near the entrance we had come through, carving a piece of driftwood he’d found, his large hands moving with delicate precision.
I sat apart from them, my back against a stalagmite, opening the journal.
My hands were shaking uncontrollably now.
Whatever Theron had wanted me to see, whatever was worth dying for, was in these pages.
I didn't even know when Kaelen had given it back to me. It must have been sometime after the world exploded and before he fought the Sentinel, but I’d been too out of it to realize.
There were details about what was happening around me that were passing me by, drifting like smoke. I couldn't understand why the timeline felt disjointed. I'd had that weird 360-degree vision in the Gate, and now it was like I was blinking for longer than necessary, missing seconds of time.
Kaelen sat down beside me. He didn't speak; he just rested his feverish hand on the back of my neck, his thumb rubbing soothing circles against my tense muscles. The contact grounded me, pulling me back from the edge of disassociation.
I turned the page, flipping past the entry about the nature of the Gate and the lineage of the Keepers.
The next page was chaotic. It was covered in frantic scribbles, drawings of constellations that didn't exist in our sky, stars arranged in spirals rather than clusters. And in the center, a single sentence written in heavy, black ink, underlined so hard the quill had torn the paper.
The Princes were not imprisoned to punish them. Nor to protect humanity. They were imprisoned to hide them, for they were designed to be bait.
I frowned, reading it again, my brow furrowing. "That makes no sense. Hide you? Bait for what?"
"Keep reading," Kaelen said softly, leaning over my shoulder. His breath ghosted against my ear, smelling of spice and smoke.
I scanned the next paragraph, Theron’s handwriting becoming spidery and rushed.
Olympus is not just a kingdom, nor a divine realm. It is a lifeboat. One that is sinking.
My blood ran cold.
"We weren't gods, we weren't born naturally of Olympians," Elias's voice drifted from the darkness, sounding hollow and stripped of its usual poetic lilt.
He was standing behind us, looking at the book with wide, turquoise eyes that seemed to be seeing an ancient nightmare.
"We were an experiment. An augmentation. A stopgap against the dark."
"Sinking how?" I whispered.
Kaelen took the book from my numb hands. His jaw was set hard as granite. He turned the page.
There was no text on the other side. Just a drawing.
It depicted a maw, a great, spiraling darkness consuming a star. It wasn't just a black hole; it looked alive, possessing teeth made of void. And beneath it, a name written in a language that I didn't recognize, sharp and angular runes that seemed to hurt the eyes.
The Devourer.
The name whispered in my head, alien and terrible, but I had no idea how I knew it. It felt like a memory that didn't belong to me.
Kaelen closed the book with a snap, the sound echoing like a gunshot in the cavern. His face was pale, the golden fire in his eyes dimmed to a flicker of dread. He looked at me, and for the first time since I met him, I saw true fear in the Dragon Prince's eyes.
"All magic, all power comes with a price, little fireheart," he said, his voice low and dangerous.