Chapter 7 #2
"I killed them," he whispered, pressing his forehead into my stomach. "Before I met you, before Pandora, I killed them all. Anyone. Everyone. I didn't even know why."
"You were a tool," I said, running my fingers through his hair. It was damp with sweat. "A tool doesn't have sin, Flynn. The hand that wields it does. And that hand?" I looked up toward the invisible sky where Hera watched. "That hand is going to pay."
Kaelen crouched beside us, his hand resting on Flynn’s shoulder. Thane and Elias crowded in, a wall of brothers protecting their own.
"She is trying to divide us," Elias said, his turquoise eyes glittering in the red dark. "She knows the binding makes us stronger. She is trying to sever the limb before it can strike."
"She’s scared," Thane rumbled. "She wouldn't be whispering nightmares if she thought she could just crush us."
"We need to move," Kaelen said, though his voice was gentle. "We are sitting ducks on these stairs."
Flynn took a deep, shuddering breath. He pulled back, looking at me. The shame was still there, burning in his eyes, but the panic had receded.
"You saw it," he said again, needing me to acknowledge the blood.
"I saw it," I agreed. "And I'm still here. I'm still yours. Now stand up, Wolf. We have a forge to find."
He nodded slowly, pulling himself upright. He looked shaky, but the steel was returning to his spine.
We continued the descent. The air grew hotter, drier, filled with the roar of forced induction and the clang of massive hammers. The light at the bottom of the shaft grew brighter, shifting from blood red to a blinding, molten orange.
The stairs ended abruptly on a catwalk suspended over a cavern that made the Cradle look like a broom closet.
The primary area of the Forge.
It was a city of fire and iron. Rivers of magma flowed through channels cut into the obsidian floor. Massive gears, large enough to crush a cathedral, turned slowly in the smoky haze. Automatons, bronze spiders and iron giants moved with jerky purpose along the walkways, tending to the machines.
The catwalk ended in a jagged, rusted maw of twisted iron.
Ten feet ahead, the metal walkway had simply snapped, the rest of the structure lying in a molten heap a thousand feet below in the rivers of magma.
The heat radiating upward seemed to drag the air from my lungs and dry my eyes instantly.
My silvered leg throbbed in time with the rhythmic crashing of the massive hammers below, a dull, metallic ache that felt like my marrow was freezing despite the inferno.
“Dead end,” Thane rumbled, peering over the edge. His face was bathed in the violent orange glow of the magma. “Unless we fly. Can you use your wings, brother?”
Kaelen shook his head, his hand tight on my waist to keep me steady. “Not in here. The ventilation is too tight. My wings would clip the support struts, and we’d tumble into the slag before I could get us airborne.”
“There,” Elias pointed, his slender finger indicating a dark, arched opening set into the cavern wall to our right, half-hidden by a curtain of heavy chains.
It looked less like a doorway and more like a wound in the stone.
“A ventilation shaft. Or perhaps service access for the automatons. The air current pulls inward.”
We didn't have a choice. With Hera’s voice still echoing in our minds and the heat searing our skin, we ducked through the heavy chains.
The noise of the forge cut out instantly, replaced by a damp, heavy silence that pressed against my eardrums. The tunnel was cool, smelling of wet minerals and something sweet and cloying, like lilies left too long on a grave.
We walked for minutes that felt like hours; the tunnel winding deeper into the earth, away from the fire.
Then, the floor leveled out, and the walls fell away.
I gasped, the sound loud in the quiet.
We had stepped into a cavern, but not one of rock and darkness. It was a garden. But it was a garden grown in the graveyard of the gods.
Ruins of white marble, styled like ancient gazebos and temples, lay scattered in heaps, their surfaces slick with moisture. And growing over them, through them, were plants that defied every botanical law I knew.
Vines of translucent silver spiraled up broken columns, pulsing with a faint blue bioluminescence like veins carrying moonlight.
Flowers the size of dinner plates bloomed from the stone itself, their petals black and velvety, weeping a thick, golden nectar that pooled on the floor.
There were trees with bark like hammered copper and leaves of glass that chimed softly in the stagnant air.
“I've never seen anything like these,” I whispered, reaching out toward a fern that looked like it was made of frosted lace. Flynn walked past me, and the rest of the group, his anxiety bleeding into my mind.
“Because they shouldn't exist,” Elias murmured, stepping up next to me, his eyes wide as he took in the impossible flora. “This isn't nature, Aria. This is runoff. This is what happens when divine magic leaks into the soil for a thousand years.”
I looked at the garden, beautiful and wrong, a paradise growing on poison. Was this what I was becoming? A thing both mortal and magic, trying to mimic life? The thought stopped me in my tracks.