Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
Flynn
I paced the perimeter of the spherical chamber, my boots scuffing against stone that was smoother than glass. It felt like walking inside a giant pearl that someone had taken a sledgehammer to.
"Thane, can you get us out of here?" I asked hopefully.
The disappointment in his eyes was answer enough as he stepped away from the wall. "It's not rock or any kind of stone I'm familiar with. It's not responding to my touch."
Kaelen wasn't wrong about us being trapped then, especially if Thane couldn't get whatever this room was made out of to cooperate.
I could smell the truth of it in the air.
The scent of the broken crystal was sharp and metallic, like licking a lightning bolt, but underneath that was the musk of enclosed fear.
Ours. It coated the back of my throat, bitter and thick.
Above us, the ceiling boomed. A dull, rhythmic thud. Thump. Thump. Thump.
It sounded like a heartbeat, if the heart belonged to a goddess who was currently dismantling a mountain to get at the marrow inside. Dust sifted down in fine, grey curtains, coating my bare shoulders and catching in my lashes.
"Stop pacing, Wolf," Kaelen snapped. He was standing by the cracked crystal structure in the center of the room, his hands glowing with a useless, agitated heat. "You are using up the air."
"I’m pacing because if I stand still, I’m going to climb the walls," I snarled back, spinning on my heel. "We’re in a dead end, Kaelen. A literal dead end."
I gestured violently at the crystalline walls.
It looked like a giant pipe organ carved from quartz, rising from the floor in jagged, hexagonal pillars.
But right down the center, a fissure leaked a black, oily substance that smelled of rot and old pennies.
The dark energy Marissa had been siphoning.
It hissed where it touched the pristine floor.
"Can it be fixed?" Thane asked. The Bear was standing near Aria, essentially using his massive body to block her from the sight of the leaking corruption. He looked grey, his endurance taxed to the limit.
Elias was running his hands over the unblemished sections of the crystal, his face pressed close to the stone. He looked like a physician trying to find a pulse on a corpse.
"The resonance chamber is shattered," Elias murmured, his voice lacking its usual musical lilt. "The harmonics won't align. If we try to play the song of the Void through this it will come out distorted. It won't sound like empty space. It will sound like a scream."
"And a scream attracts predators," I finished, running a hand through my hair. It was stiff with rock dust and sweat.
I looked at Aria.
She was sitting on the floor with the journal open in her lap, but she wasn't reading. She was staring at the black ooze leaking from the crystal with a look of utter, hollow defeat. Her shoulders were slumped, and the fire I’d seen in her eyes in the room above, the fire that had let her command a dead Titan, was banking low.
She smelled like rain that had stopped falling. Just damp, cold earth.
I hated it. I hated the smell of her giving up. It made the wolf inside me want to tear something apart just to prove we were still alive.
I walked over to her, crouching down so I was in her eyeline.
"Hey," I said softly.
She looked at me. Her eyes were dull, the gold and amber flecks swirling sluggishly in the amethyst. "We failed, Flynn. We got to the finish line, and the whole plan turned out to be pointless."
"Since when do we rely on a single plan?" I reached out, tucking a strand of dark hair behind her ear. My thumb grazed her jawline, and I felt the faint, thrumming pulse of her blood. It was slow. Too slow. "We aren't done, Pup. We're just taking a breather."
"Hera is digging us out," she whispered. "Listen to that."
BOOM.
A crack appeared in the smooth curve of the ceiling, a spiderweb of white against the dark stone. A chunk of rock the size of a fist fell, shattering near Elias.
"She’s using the Titan’s energy to unmake the rock," Elias noted, stepping back from the debris. "Efficient."
"We need to fix the crystal," Kaelen insisted, turning to glare at the broken machine. "Use the Dragon fire. Use the Phoenix restoration. Fuse it back together."
"It’s not just broken rock, Kaelen!" Elias snapped, his composure finally fraying. "You cannot fix a violin with a forest fire!"
Kaelen roared, a sound of pure frustration, and kicked the base of the structure. "Then what? We sit here and wait for the Queen to open the roof like a can of sardines?"
I looked from the broken crystal to Aria, and then to the golden veins still faintly visible on her neck.
An idea sparked in my brain. It was dangerous. It was insane. It was exactly the kind of thing that usually got me yelled at by Kaelen and sighed at by Thane.
"The book," I said, pointing at the journal in Aria's lap. "What exactly did it say? About the song?"
Aria blinked, looking down. "It said... 'To alter the song, one must strike the Chords of Silence located in the Throat.'"
"Right," I said, standing up. I started pacing again, the energy coiling in my legs. "Strike the chords. Play the music. But the instrument is broken."
"We established that," Kaelen growled.
"But the music," I pressed, looking at Elias. "The song. It's just magic, right? Potent, specific vibrations of magic?"
"Essentially," Elias agreed, watching me warily. "Elemental tones reconfigured to mimic the vacuum between realms."
"And the crystal is just a system to take the signal and broadcast it out to the cosmos so the Devourer hears it."
"Yes," Elias said slowly. "Flynn, where are you going with this?"
I stopped in front of Aria again, reaching down and pulling her to her feet. She swayed, but I steadied her, my hands on her waist.
"We have another amplifier," I said.
Silence.
They all looked at me.
"The obsidian tomb back in the Cradle?" Thane asked, confusion knitting his brow.
"Not that one," I said, rolling my eyes. I shook Aria gently. "Her. The Door. The Gate. Use whatever metaphor you want. She just told a dead Titan to scream and it did. She is a conduit."
Kaelen went still. The fire around him cooled instantly, sucked back into his skin as his focus narrowed to a laser point. "You want to use Aria as the instrument?"
"Why not?" I argued, the plan solidifying. "She merged with the Gate. She has the wiring. If the crystal down here is broken and we can’t fix it, then we bypass it. We channel the song through her."
"It will kill her," Thane said immediately. "To broadcast a signal strong enough to reach a cosmic entity? She is almost dead from the last stunt, Wolf."
"She’s almost dead because she’s empty!" I shouted, the frustration finally boiling over. "She’s running on fumes! But if we fill her up, if we do the binding, she won't be empty. She’ll be overflowing."
I looked at Aria. Her eyes had widened. The scent of her fear spiked, acidic and sharp, but beneath it was something else. A spark. The scent of ozone before a storm.
"The binding," she whispered.
"We talked about it," I said, my voice dropping, becoming rougher. "Back in the cave. We said we needed to do it to power the door to Olympus. Well, the plan has changed. We need to power the broadcast first."
"Flynn," Kaelen started, his voice warning.
"Don't 'Flynn' me," I snapped, turning on him. "Look at the ceiling, Kaelen! Look at the cracks! We can die here, holding our dicks and arguing about ethics, or we can do the one thing we were built for."
I gestured to the four of us. "We are high-density magic cores. She is the outlet. We plug in, we charge her up, and she sings the damn song."
"It– it could work," Elias murmured, his eyes unfocused as he did the mental arithmetic. "If the connection is absolute. If there is zero resistance. The human soul is resonant. If she amplifies the intent– yes. She could broadcast the Void sequence."
"But," Thane rumbled, stepping forward, "the binding requires surrender. From all of us. And from her." He looked at Aria, his face pained. "To do this under duress, to force this intimacy because of a collapsing roof..."
"It's not forced if she chooses it," I said. I looked back at her. "Do you? Do you choose this? Or do you want to wait for Hera?"
"You were the one who said we shouldn't force it!" Kaelen roared at me. "I wanted to do this earlier, and you said no. You said her first time shouldn't be out of desperation or because a goddess was breathing down our necks!"
I couldn't look at Kaelen at that moment, not when Aria was right in front of me. She looked at the ceiling, where a new fissure was spreading like lightning across the stone before her gaze flicked to the oozing, broken crystal. Then she looked at me.
Her scent shifted. The fear remained, but it was joined by something else. Something heavy, sweet, and primal.
Desire. And resolve.
"I choose you," she said. Her voice was steady.
"I choose this." She stepped slightly away from me, which made me want to scream.
But then she looked at Kaelen. "Before it felt forced because we weren't in immediate danger.
Yes, there was the beacon looking for us, but it hadn't found us yet.
But Mariss, Hera, whatever you want to call her, is literally standing above us trying to dig through this bone to get to us. Now we really don't have a choice."
I didn't wait for Kaelen’s permission. I didn't wait for a strategy meeting. I acted.
I reached out and pulled her against me, crushing her mouth to mine.
This wasn't like the kiss on the mountain with Thane, gentle and grounding.
This was hunger. I kissed her as if I wanted to devour her, like I wanted to breathe for her.
I bit her lower lip, tasting the copper of her blood, and the jolt of magic that surged between us was like sticking a fork in a socket.