Chapter 9
NINE
Thane
I watched them return from the clearing, observing the way Flynn held her hand, loose enough to allow movement, tight enough to anchor.
The red flush on Aria’s neck was fading, replaced by the encroaching, metallic pallor of the Silvering.
It was creeping up her throat now, past the collarbone, seeking the soft skin beneath her jaw.
"She’s back," Elias murmured beside me, his voice a low hum that vibrated against my shoulder. "But the timeline has not corrected itself. The fog remains."
"The fog is the least of our concerns," I rumbled.
I didn't look at Flynn’s triumphant grin or the way Kaelen’s shoulders dropped an inch in relief.
I looked at Aria’s left leg. She was favoring it heavily.
When she placed her weight on it, there was no flexion in the knee.
It hit the ground with a solid, jarring thud that vibrated through the mossy floor.
Structural failure was imminent.
"We move," I announced, my voice cutting through the lingering atmosphere of their intimacy. I hefted my war hammer, the weight of it familiar and grounding. "The garden is a maze, but the air current pulls east. That is where the ventilation feeds into the Forge."
Kaelen stepped toward her, his hand reaching out to brush her cheek, likely to offer comfort or to reclaim his place in her orbit.
"Don't," I said.
Kaelen froze, his golden eyes snapping to mine, narrowing into slits. "Excuse me, brother?"
"Do not stop," I corrected, stepping past them. I refused to look at the hurt and confusion in Aria's eyes. I focused on the path ahead, a tangle of silver vines and razor-leafed ferns. "Every second we spend indulging in sentiment is a second the transmutation speeds up. Look at her leg, Kaelen."
Kaelen looked. He saw the stiffness, the unnatural angle. He paled beneath the soot on his face, but I was already moving.
I took point, not bothering to dodge the crystalline flora, instead I smashed through it.
My hammer swung in efficient, brutal arcs, shattering branches that chimed like bells and vines that bled glowing blue sap.
The destruction was necessary. A clear path meant speed.
Speed meant the Forge. The Forge meant, potentially, survival.
But as I walked, listening to the stumbling, uneven rhythm of Aria’s footsteps behind me, step, step, clack, I felt a coldness settling over my heart.
It was a numbness I hadn't felt since the first century of our imprisonment.
It was the anesthesia of the earth. To endure the weight of the mountain, one must become stone.
To watch the woman I loved turn into a statue, I had to become one first.
If I felt the horror of it, if I let the grief of what was happening to her frail, mortal body permeate my mind, I would stop functioning. And if I stopped, we all died.
"The air is changing," Flynn called out from the rear guard. "Smell that? It’s lost the rot."
He was right. The cloying, sweet stench of the garden’s decay was thinning, replaced by something sterile. Something sharp.
It smelled of nothing.
"The void," I said to myself.
The garden ended abruptly, severed by a clean line where the mossy floor simply stopped. Beyond lay a tunnel of smooth, dark basalt. The transition was jarring. We stepped from a riot of impossible life into a vacuum of absolute geometry.
"This isn't a natural formation," Elias whispered, his footsteps silent on the smooth floor. "This tunnel, it feels scraped. Hollowed out."
"It leads down," I noted. "Toward the heat."
But it wasn't hot yet. It was freezing. A chill draft blew up from the depths, carrying with it the scent of non-existence. It bit through my armor, seeking the warmth of my blood.
Behind me, Aria stumbled.
I heard the sound, the scrape of boot leather losing traction, the sharp intake of breath, the metallic clink of her knee hitting the stone.
"I’ve got you," Kaelen said instantly, the sound of fabric rustling as he moved to help her.
"Let her walk," I commanded without turning around.
"Thane!" Kaelen’s voice sparked with dragon fire. "She fell."
"And she needs to get up," I said, my voice flat, devoid of the rumble that usually colored it.
I stared into the darkness ahead, counting the seconds.
"If you carry her, her circulation slows.
The stagnation encourages the transformation to lock.
Movement creates heat. Heat delays the freeze. Get up, Aria."
There was a silence, heavy and shocked. I knew how I sounded. Cruel. Distant. Like the beast I had been accused of being.
"He's right," Aria grimaced. I heard the grit in her voice, the stubbornness that made her who she was. There was also the scraping sound as she forced her rigid leg to cooperate, hauling herself upright. "I can walk. I have to walk."
"Good," I said. I started walking again.
I didn't offer a hand or words of encouragement. The only thing I could think of to do was to lead, to help us get where we needed to be as fast as possible.
We descended for twenty minutes. The tunnel widened, the basalt walls growing slick with condensation that wasn't water. It was an oily, iridescent sheen that didn't reflect our lights.
Then, we hit an obstruction.
The tunnel opened into a large, circular chamber, but the path forward was blocked. Not by rubble, and not by a door.
A waterfall blocked it.
But water didn't move like that.
A cascade of liquid light poured from a fissure in the ceiling, crashing down into a chasm that split the floor in two. It wasn't water, and it wasn't magma. It was pure, concentrated magical runoff, iridescent and white, glowing with a blinding intensity.
But as it fell, it changed.
Mid-air, the liquid light seemed to hit an invisible barrier of cold. It froze instantly, crystallizing into jagged, chaotic shards of black material before shattering against the bottom of the chasm.
"Void-glass," Elias breathed, shielding his eyes from the glare of the source. "The Devourer’s influence must be leaking into the Forge’s ventilation."
The shards piled up, creating a treacherous, shifting bridge across the chasm. It looked like a drift of black diamonds and sharper than obsidian, not to mention more than a little unstable.
"We have to cross that?" Flynn asked, eyeing the lethal glass. "One slip and we’re shredded."
"It is the only way," I said, analyzing the structure of the chamber. The walls were smooth, unclimbable, and the chasm was too wide to jump, especially for Aria in her current state. The pile of void-glass was the only bridge.
"It will cut us to ribbons," Kaelen said, stepping up beside me. He looked at me, his brow furrowed, searching for the brother he knew inside the stone facade I was presenting. "Thane?"
"My armor will hold," I said. "Yours is divine alloy; it will suffice. Flynn is fast enough not to break the surface tension. Elias can manipulate his own gravity."
"And Aria?" Kaelen challenged, his voice low.
I turned to look at her. She was leaning against the wall, clutching her left leg. The grey had swallowed her hand on that side, turning her fingers into iron claws. Her face was pale, sweat beading on her forehead from the effort of simply existing.
"She is hardening," I stated simply. "Her skin is becoming metallic. The glass will not cut her as easily as it would flesh."
Kaelen looked as though I had punched him. "That is your tactical assessment? That she is turning into a monster, so we should use it?"
"It is the reality," I said. I walked to the edge of the chasm. "I will go first. I will compact the path. Step where I step. Do not deviate."
I stepped onto the pile of void-glass.
Crunch.
The sound was sickening, like stepping on a thousand bones. Shards shifted under my weight, sliding and grinding; the edges were razor-sharp. They bit into the thick soles of my boots, scoring the leather.
I focused. I pushed my will into my feet, into the unstable ground. Solidify.
The earth magic struggled to find purchase on material that was essentially frozen nothingness, but I forced it. I mashed the shards together, creating flat, compressed footprints.
"Come," I ordered without looking back.
I heard Flynn move first, light and quick, dancing over the spots I had flattened. Then pure silence, which was probably Elias floating.
Then the heavy, rhythmic movement of Aria.
She stepped onto the glass. I heard a sharp intake of breath, not from pain, but from the vertigo of the shifting surface.
"Keep your eyes on my back," I said. "Do not look down."
We moved across the chasm. It was a nightmare of balance. The void-glass hummed with a low, dissonant frequency. Every movement sent cascades of black shards tumbling into the darkness below.
Halfway across, the flow of liquid light from the ceiling sputtered. An erratic pulse of energy shot through the solidified pile.
The bridge lurched.
Aria cried out.
I spun around.
She had slipped. Her good leg, the flesh one, had lost traction on a particularly slick piece of glass. She had fallen awkwardly, catching herself on her hands while her bad leg stuck out behind her at an angle that looked painful.
The impact against the razor-sharp glass should have flayed her skin to the bone.
Instead, there was a bright metallic ping.
Aria propped herself up in the shards, breathing hard. She looked back at her leg. Her leather trousers were shredded, revealing the skin beneath.
It wasn't bleeding. It wasn't cut.
It was scratched, but in the same way metal scratches.
A jagged piece of black glass was pressed against her kneecap, unable to pierce the iron-grey surface of her transformation.
She stared at it, horror dawning in her eyes. She wasn't relieved that she wasn't hurt. She was terrified that she couldn't be hurt.
"It didn't cut me," she whispered, her voice trembling. "Thane... it didn't cut me."
"Stand up," I said.
Kaelen started to move toward her, reaching out. "Aria—"
"I said stand up," I repeated, my voice booming over the roar of the waterfall. I locked eyes with her. "We are in the middle of a collapse zone. Stop looking at it. Stand. Up."
She looked at me. The betrayal in her eyes was sharp, a distinct wound in my chest, but I walled it off. I shoved it down into the bedrock of my resolve. If I softened, if I let her dwell on the horror of her own body, she would freeze. And if she froze here, in the void entropy, we would lose her.
"Now, soldier," I barked.
She flinched. Her jaw tightened. The amethyst fire in her eyes flared, replacing the fear with anger. Good. Anger was fuel.
She grabbed a jagged spire of glass with her gray hand, using it as a crutch, and hauled herself to her feet. The sound of her joints grinding was audible.
"I'm up," she spat at me.
"Move," I turned my back on her and continued to stomp the path flat.
We reached the far side. I stepped onto solid basalt and immediately turned to guard the landing. Flynn hopped past me, his face pale. Elias drifted down, looking nauseous from the magical dissonance.
Aria stepped off the bridge. She didn't stumble this time. No, she marched past me, her head high, though her gait was an agonizing limp as she refused to look at me.
Kaelen came last. He stepped onto the stone and immediately grabbed the front of my armor, shoving me back against the tunnel wall.
"What is wrong with you?" he hissed, his face inches from mine. Dragon scales rippled across his cheeks, gold and dangerous. "She is terrified. She is turning into stone, and you are treating her like a pack mule."
"I am treating her like a survivor," I said calmly, removing his hand from my chest plate with slow, deliberate force. "You offer her pity, Kaelen. Pity makes her weak. It makes her focus on the pain. I offer her orders. Orders give her something to do besides panic."
"She needs to know we are with her! That we love her!"
"She knows," I said. "But right now, she does not need lovers. She needs a way to the Anvil before her heart turns to metal."
I looked over Kaelen’s shoulder. Aria was standing a few yards away, leaning against the wall. She was glaring at her own leg, her expression fierce and hateful. She wasn't crying. She was strategizing.
"Look at her," I told Kaelen. "She is angry at me. Good. Anger beats despair. Anger keeps the blood moving."
Kaelen looked at her. He saw the set of her jaw. The fire in her eyes. His shoulders slumped, the dragon receding.
"You are a bastard, Thane," he whispered.
"I am the earth," I said, adjusting my grip on my hammer. "The earth is hard. But it holds you up."
I walked past him toward Aria. She stiffened as I approached, bracing herself for another command.
I didn't give one. The truth was that I was trying to help in the only way I knew how, so I reached into the pouch at my belt and pulled out a small, smooth river stone I had carried from the Cradle. I held it out to her.
"Squeeze this," I said quietly. "In your left hand. The resistance will help recalibrate the grip strength so you do not crush things by accident."
She looked at the stone, then at my face. She snatched the stone from my hand.
"I hate you right now," she whispered.
"I know," I said. "We are close. Can you smell the sulfur?"
She sniffed the air. The faint, rot-smell of the void was fading, replaced by a deep, intense heat.
"Yes," she said.
"That is the Primal Anvil," I said. "Let's go break it."
We moved forward; the tunnel sloping sharply downward. The air grew hot again, a blistering, dry heat that felt like walking into an oven.
But as we rounded the last bend, the tunnel didn't open into a workshop.
It opened into an arena.
And standing in the center, hammering a piece of celestial bronze on a massive, glowing anvil, was a giant. He stopped mid-swing as we entered, his single eye, a cyclopean orb of burning red, fixing on us.
He wasn't Hephaestus.
"Intruders," the Cyclops bellowed, raising his hammer. "The Master said no visitors."
Behind him, chained to the wall with fetters of gold light, sat a man with a beard of tangled wire and sad eyes.
Hephaestus.
The Smith God was a prisoner in his own forge.
And sitting on a throne of gears, watching us with a bored expression, was a man in winged sandals.
"You took the long way," Hermes said, tossing an apple into the air. "I was starting to get worried."
"Hermes," Kaelen growled, stepping forward.
"Ah, ah," Hermes waved a finger. "Don't look at me. I'm just watching the show. But the big guy?" He pointed at the Cyclops. "He has instructions to pulverize anything that isn't on the guest list."
He looked at Aria, his gaze lingering on her grey skin.
"And you, my dear," Hermes said softy. "You look like you're running out of time."