Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
Aria
I woke to a silence so absolute it felt like a pressure against my eardrums.
The steady, rhythmic drip-drop of water into the black pool was gone. The low, comforting hum of the obsidian amplifier had been cut. Even the sound of breathing, the collective, life-affirming respiratory symphony of four men and one nightmare crustacean, had vanished.
I was still propped against Kaelen’s chest, his arm heavy across my ribs, his warmth seeping into my back through the layers of scavenged wool. But something was wrong. The rise and fall of his chest, that slow, tectonic movement I had fallen asleep to, had stopped.
Panic, cold and sharp, spiked in my chest.
"Kaelen?" I whispered.
My voice didn't echo. It fell flat, absorbed instantly by the dead air.
I shifted, turning in his embrace. Kaelen’s eyes were closed, his face relaxed in a sleep that looked deceptively peaceful. But he was unnaturally still. Not the stillness of a predator waiting to strike, but the stillness of a statue carved from marble.
I reached up, pressing my hand to his cheek. It was warm, but the skin didn't yield under my touch as it should have. It felt dense. Fixed.
"Kaelen!" I shoved against him, scrambling out from under his arm.
The movement sent me sprawling onto the cavern floor. I pulled myself onto my hands and knees, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm that seemed to be the only sound in the universe.
I looked around the campsite.
Flynn was curled on his side, his hand outstretched toward where I had been sleeping. His hair was a mess, his mouth slightly open. A bead of saliva hung suspended from his lip, refusing to fall.
He was frozen.
Panic clawed at my throat. I crawled over to him, grabbing his shoulders and shaking him. It was like trying to shake a boulder. He didn't flop; he moved as a solid unit, rigid and unyielding.
"Flynn! Wake up!"
Nothing. No grunt of annoyance, no sleepy quip about needing five more minutes. Just that terrifying, suspended animation.
I rushed over to Elias. The Phoenix Prince was curled in a ball, looking impossibly small. I checked for a pulse. His skin was hot, feverishly so, but there was no beat beneath the surface. It was as if time itself had snagged on a nail and stopped.
Thane was a silent mountain by the tunnel entrance, his eyes open, staring unblinkingly at the dark. Even the dust motes in the air were suspended, glittering like trapped stars.
"No," I breathed, backing away toward the center of the cavern. "No, no, no. Not this. Not now."
Had the Council found us? Was this the doing of a Sentinel? A suppression field so powerful it halted biology?
Or was it me? Had I broken reality again? Had my attempt to bind the Skal, to rewrite the laws of the universe with a sharpie marker, finally caused the whole system to crash?
I spun around, looking for the monster.
Steve the Skal was coiled near the water's edge. He, too, was frozen in place, mandible mid-twitch...
No.
One of the Skal’s eyes, the central one on the left side of its armored head, blinked.
It was a slow, deliberate movement, utterly out of sync with the frozen tableau of the cavern.
I froze, breath catching in my throat. "Steve?"
The creature didn’t move its body. It couldn’t. But that single green eye swiveled, locking onto me with a terrifying intelligence that had nothing to do with the simple, distinct hunger I had experienced earlier.
The vessel is awake, a voice said in my mind.
It wasn't the wet, gurgling thought-voice of the Skal. It wasn't the briny, primitive urge to consume. This voice was dry as old parchment, layered and resonant, sounding like three women speaking in perfect unison. It smelled of dust and torch smoke.
Come closer, Aria Pandoros.
I took a step back, my hand dropping to the hilt of the dagger Flynn had given me, though I knew it would be useless here. "Who are you? What have you done to them?"
I have done nothing but pause the clock, the voice resonated, bypassing my ears to vibrate directly in my skull. Time is a river. I have simply built a dam. Step forward. The beast is merely a way to communicate.
"A way to communicate?" I repeated, the absurdity of the idea nearly making me laugh hysterically.
A conduit, the voice corrected, sounding mildly annoyed. Communication across the realms requires... infrastructure. Your pet abomination has a flexible architecture. Now, come here. We do not have long before the Weaver notices the snag in her tapestry.
I looked at Kaelen, frozen and helpless. If this entity could stop time for four demigods, I doubted running would do much good.
I walked toward the Skal.
As I approached, the air around the monster shimmered. The darkness of the cavern seemed to bleed away, replaced by a grey, misty twilight. The obsidian tomb faded. The black water of the pool became a flat, silver mirror.
I wasn't in the cavern anymore. I was in a place that felt like the space between breaths. A liminal void where paths crossed and diverged in the fog.
Standing over the frozen form of the Skal was a woman.
She was tall, draped in robes that shifted color like oil on water, saffron, charcoal, and violet. She held two torches that burned with a silent, pale fire. Her face was hidden by a veil, but I could feel her gaze on me, heavy and ancient.
"You aren't Hera," I whispered.
The woman laughed, a sound like dry leaves skittering on pavement. "No, child. I am not the Queen. I am the one who holds the keys to the doors you are so fond of kicking down."
She lowered one torch; the light illuminating the lower half of her face. Her lips were pale, curved in a knowing smile.
"I am Hecate."
My knees nearly gave out. The Goddess of Magic. The Titaness of Crossroads. The Keeper of the Keys. Master Theron had barely spoken of her and when he did, it was in hushed tones, claiming she was the only deity to be truly feared because she owed allegiance to no one.
"Why are you here?" I asked, forcing my spine to straighten. "If you're here to punish me for breaking the Gate..."
"The Gate was a boring piece of architecture," Hecate dismissed with a wave of her torch. Sparks drifted into the fog and vanished. "You made it interesting. I appreciate interesting things."
She walked around the frozen Skal, trailing a hand over its carapace. The monster didn't react.
"I am here because you are running blindly toward a cliff," Hecate said. "And while I enjoy a good tragedy, I prefer it when the heroine knows why she is falling."
"We're going to Olympus," I said, defensive heat rising in my chest. "To stop them from killing us, to stop the Devourer."
"You are going to Olympus to interrogate a drowning woman about why she is getting the carpet wet," Hecate corrected.
She stopped in front of me. Even through the veil, her eyes felt like searchlights.
"You saw her," Hecate said softly. "In the tunnel. You saw the Queen wearing the Healer’s skin."
"Hera," I confirmed, shivering at the memory of that cold, possessive gaze. "She's evil. She's breeding monsters. She's been manipulating my bloodline for centuries. She abused me and stole from me."
"Evil is a mortal word," Hecate mused. "It lacks nuance. Hera is not evil, Aria. She is panicked."
Hecate raised her torches, and the fog around us swirled, coalescing into images. It was like looking into the Gate, but clearer. Sharper.
"Look," Hecate commanded.
I looked.
I saw a city of gold and white marble floating in a sky of lavender. Olympus. It was more beautiful than any description, a testament to divine perfection.
But then I saw the edges.
The perimeter of the realm wasn't a shoreline or a cloud bank. It was a crumbling precipice. Great chunks of white marble, entire temples, were sliding off the edge of the world, tumbling silently into a swirling, hungry darkness below.
"It is not a metaphor," Hecate’s voice was somber. "The 'sinking lifeboat' your historian wrote of... it is literal. The foundation of the High Seat is rotting as the magic that sustains the realm is being siphoned away."
I watched as a beautiful garden withered in seconds; the trees turning to ash; the ground cracking open to reveal the void beneath. Figures of light, gods, lesser spirits, and other things I couldn't name, they all scrambled away from the fissures, terror etched on their immortal faces.
"The Devourer," I whispered.
"It is not a beast you can fight with a sword," Hecate stood beside me, watching the vision of destruction. "It is a storm. An entropy field. It eats magic and potential. It has been gnawing at the roots of Olympus for an aeon."
The vision shifted. I saw a throne room. A woman sat on a throne, Hera, in her true form, looking both radiant and devastatingly tired. Below her, the floor was cracking. She was pouring her own power into the fissures, trying to hold the stone together with will alone.
"She isn't power-hungry," Hecate said. "She is the mother of a dying house. All she is doing is trying to save her family."
"By sacrificing us," I said, my sympathy hardening back into anger. "By creating the princes as bait to lure the storm here. To feed it this world instead of hers."
"Survival is the ugliest instinct," Hecate agreed. "But it is the strongest. Hera believes that if she can lure the Devourer to the mortal realm, it will gorge itself on the raw, chaotic magic of the Princes and become sluggish. Sated. It will stop eating Olympus."
"So she destroys one world to save another."
"Yes."
I turned away from the vision, looking back at the veiled goddess. "Why are you showing me this? To make me feel sorry for her? She wants to hollow me out and use me as a broodmare."
"I show you this so you understand the stakes of the choice you are about to make," Hecate said. "Hera's new plan... the gestation circle you found..."
"The god-killer," I said.