Chapter 5
FIVE
Aria
The floor didn't just crack, it turned into a chasm of jagged white teeth that opened in the marble beneath us, breathing out a gust of air that smelled of wet clay, deep roots, and something terrifyingly alive.
The harpies, those shrieking nightmares of feathers and malice, didn't attack.
They didn't dive. They screamed, a collective sound of primitive, animalistic terror that scraped against the inside of my skull, and the ones that didn’t drop dead scattered into the burning sky like ash caught in an updraft.
They weren't afraid of us. They were afraid of what I had just rung like a dinner bell.
"Move!" Thane roared, his voice warring with the grinding tectonic groan rising from the deep.
He grabbed my waist, hauling me back from the lip of the widening fissure just as a slab of the Hall’s floor, large enough to hold a carriage, detached and tumbled into the dark. It didn't hit a bottom. I heard a wet, sucking sound, like a boot pulling out of thick mud, magnified a million times.
The mountain shifted. Not a tremor. A shrug, or a swallow, maybe, as the section of floor disappeared.
I stumbled, my feet heavy and clumsy on the tilting floor.
My skin felt wrong, tight, cold, and unyielding.
The transformation hadn't receded; it had merely paused, trapped in a horrific equilibrium by the red shockwave of the Titan’s heart.
I looked at my hand. The skin was a dull, matte grey, the color of raw iron.
"Aria." Kaelen was there, his hands hovering over me, afraid to touch, afraid to shatter. His golden eyes were wide, reflecting the magma-orange glow that was now bleeding from my own heavy irises. "You stopped the process. But you’re so cold."
"I feel heavy," I rasped. My voice sounded metallic, like a sword being drawn from a scabbard. "I feel dense."
"The heart anchored you. You just cracked it. I don’t think it was enough to immediately wake the titan, but with the energy still leaking from the heart, it will wake, sooner rather than later," Elias said, stepping through the dust of the ruined hall.
He looked shaken; his usually impeccable robes torn, his hair wild.
He stared at me not with relieved affection, but with a horrifying, clinical recognition.
"For now, though, the heart grounded the frequency. But it didn't fix the vessel."
"The vessel is cracking," Flynn snapped, appearing at my side, daggers drawn as if he could stab the structural instability to death. He looked at my grey skin and swore softly. "She looks like a statue, Elias. A statue that’s about to fall over."
"We need to leave," Thane rumbled, looking at the ceiling where dust sifted down, falling in sheer curtains. "The titan stirs; if he fully wakes? This entire mountain range becomes a fist, and we are inside it."
"I know," Elias whispered. He reached out, his long, slender fingers tracing the rigid line of my jaw. He didn't use magic; he just touched me, and the contact sent a shiver of longing through the strange numbness of my skin.
"I know why you are breaking, Aria," he said, his voice dropping to a confessional whisper that cut through the roar of the waking earth. "It isn't just because you held the power of four princes. It is because of the design."
Kaelen stepped closer, his presence a wall of heat. "What are you talking about, Phoenix? What design?"
Elias looked at Kaelen, then at me. The turquoise in his eyes swirled with a guilt so old it felt like it had its own gravity.
"The blueprints," Elias said softly. "For Pandora. For the original mold."
The ground lurched again, violently enough to knock Flynn to one knee, but nobody moved. We were frozen by the confession hovering in the air.
"I was a consultant," Elias admitted, the words tearing out of him like fishhooks. "Hephaestus... he is a master of metal and fire, but he does not understand the soul. When Zeus commissioned the 'gift,' the perfect trap to bind us, Hephaestus came to me."
He looked down at his hands, hands that had caressed me, healed me, and apparently helped engineer the cage of my ancestors.
"I didn't know what it was, not really, and I had no idea what it was for," Elias said, his voice pleading.
"I thought he was building a masterpiece.
A new form of life. He asked me how to weave a spirit that could hold contradictory imperatives, love and duty, freedom and binding.
I gave him the threads I saw in the tapestry of life and the future.
I helped him design the lattice of the soul. "
"You helped build the jailer," Kaelen growled, smoke curling from his nostrils.
"I helped build the vessel!" Elias snapped back, tears finally shining in his eyes, tears he couldn't shed. "Pandora was perfection, Kaelen! She was a masterpiece of divine engineering! She was built to hold the infinite!"
He turned back to me, his expression crumbling into devastation.
"But you, Aria, you’re not Pandora. You’re a copy of a copy, distantly removed from the original cast. Your biology is partly mortal, diluted by a thousand years of human breeding. You have the shape of the key, but the material? The material is too brittle."
He touched my cheek.
"You were never meant to hold this much power," Elias whispered.
"You are a clay cup trying to hold a star.
This transformation, Silvering... it isn't a spell. It’s your atoms trying to reinforce themselves into something stronger to survive the pressure.
You are changing because flesh isn't strong enough. "
"So I'm dying," I stated. It wasn't a question. It was a calculation. My body was trying to contain the magic the best way it knew how, and soon the process would be complete. I would be a statue. A monument to hubris.
"No," Kaelen snarled. He grabbed my shoulders, his grip bruising through the stiffness. "We’ll fix it. Unmake the magic. We drain her."
"You can't drain it," Elias said. "As I said, it has fused with her. If you pull the magic out, you pull her life out with it."
"Then we change the cup," Flynn said.
We all looked at him. The Wolf Prince was standing near a shattered pillar, wiping dust from his face. He looked terrified, but his eyes were sharp.
"If the cup is too small," Flynn said, gesturing to me, "get a bigger cup. Or stretch the one you have."
Elias went still. His eyes widened, fixing on a point in the distance.
"The Forge," Elias breathed.
"What?" Thane asked.
"The Olympian Forge," Elias said, the words tumbling out faster now. "Hephaestus's workshop. It lies deep in the inner city, near the vents of the eternal fire. There is an anvil there. The Primal Anvil."
"The place where the stars are hammered flat," Kaelen realized, his gaze snapping to the burning skyline outside the shattered windows.
"It can reshape anything," Elias said, looking at me with desperate hope. "Metal. Magic. Souls. If we get her to the Anvil and Hephaestus's tools, then we can expand the vessel. We can reforge her body to withstand the power. We can stop the Silvering."
"Reforge her?" Thane asked, his voice thick with worry. "That sounds painful."
"Agony," Elias confirmed. "But the alternative is becoming a lawn ornament for Hera's garden."
The floor beneath us groaned again, a deep, resonant thrum that vibrated my bones. A chunk of the ceiling fell, smashing into the mirror where Kaelen and I had spoken to Pandora's ghost.
"The titan is waking up," I said, feeling the pulse of the mountain through the soles of my boots. "We don't have time for a debate. Where is the forge?"
"East," Elias said, pointing through the shattered wall toward the smoking heart of the city. "Past the market district. Under the red tower."
Kaelen squeezed my shoulders, his heat seeking to penetrate the cold shell I was becoming. "Can you run?"
I tried to flex my knees. They moved, but with a grinding sensation, like rusty hinges. "I can run. But I might be slow."
"Then we'll carry you," Flynn said, sheathing his daggers.
"No," I argued, shrugging off Kaelen's hands. "I need to move. If I stop moving, I think I'll freeze solid."
"Then we run," Kaelen commanded. He drew his sword, the black flames roaring to life, illuminating the ruin of the Hall. "To the forge. And if the Smith God is there, we will make him fix his mistake."
I wanted to tell Kaelen that it wasn't the god's mistake, that Pandora had been the one that had been made, but he was too angry to listen. I didn't blame him; I was angry too, but I hadn't just had a thousand year old secret dropped on me either.
We burst out of the Hall of Muses into a nightmare.
The storm had swallowed the horizon. The black vortex of the Devourer was a colossal wall of nothingness eating the sky, churning silently as it slowly erased districts whole. But the immediate threat wasn't the sky; it was the ground.
The plaza streets were buckling. The waking Titan was stretching, his movements ripping the city apart from below. Marble avenues rippled like water. Buildings folded in on themselves.
"Stick to the high ground!" Thane shouted over the roar of collapsing masonry.
We sprinted along the aqueduct ridges and the tops of reinforced walls.
I ran, my heavy, metallic limbs feeling alien, slamming against the stone with too much force.
Every step sent a jolt through my spine, but I pushed through it.
I focused on the heat of Kaelen ahead of me, the reassuring bulk of Thane behind.
"Hera!" Elias shouted, pointing upward.
I looked up. High above the chaos, a figure floated on a disk of white light. Even at this distance, I could feel her rage. Specifically, I could feel her looking for me.
She was blasting the ruins, white fire arcing from her hands, hunting the rats in her walls.
"She doesn't see us yet," Flynn panted, leaping a gap in the aqueduct. "The smoke is hiding us."
"The Titan is hiding us," I corrected, my voice booming strangely. "His wake-up call is masking our signal."
We reached the edge of the market district. It was a shambles of overturned stalls, scattered ambrosia carts, and fleeing minor gods who looked more like panicked sheep than deities.
"Through there," Elias pointed to a massive, squat structure made of bronze and dark iron that squatted amidst the white marble like a toad. Heat rolled off it in visible waves. Smokestacks belched fire into the darkening sky. "It's not the Olympian Forge, but it will connect to it."
It might not be exactly what we were aiming for, but it got us out of sight and away from where Hera was searching for us, which was all we could hope for at that moment.