Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
Aria
The heat of the Forge should have been killing me.
It was a physical weight, pressing against my eardrums, smelling of sulfur and the copper tang of blood.
The magma river flowing ten feet away threw off enough heat alone to blister paint, and the air shimmered with the distortion of a blast furnace.
And yet, I was freezing to death.
It started in my fingertips, the ones on my left hand that were already solid, matte-grey metal. But it didn't stay there. A coldness, absolute and void-like, was creeping up my marrow, sliding past the elbow, seeking the soft, wet warmth of my heart. It felt like swallowing a glacier.
My teeth chattered, a sharp, staccato sound. Clack, clack, clack. It humiliated me.
"Stop it," I whispered to myself, wrapping my flesh arm around my metal one, trying to rub friction into the stillness.
It was like rubbing a statue in winter. There was no sensation, no giving of the skin. Just a hard, unyielding cold that sucked the heat right out of my good hand.
Kaelen was pacing the perimeter of the dais, his boots crunching on the soot-stained iron. He was watching Hephaestus wrestle with a massive set of bellows, but every three seconds, his head snapped back to me. His golden eyes narrowed.
He stopped pacing.
"You're turning blue," he said, the observation sharp, an accusation against the universe.
"I'm... f-fine," I stuttered, my jaw locking up. "Just... waiting for the h-hammer."
"You aren't fine. You are hypothermic in a volcano."
He covered the distance between us in two long strides. He didn't ask permission; he stripped off his gauntlets, letting them clang to the floor, and placed his bare hands on my cheeks.
His skin was burning. He ran naturally hot, a byproduct of the dragon fire circulating in his blood, but this was intense. It should have burned me. Instead, it felt like a drop of warm water in an endless desert.
"You feel like a corpse," he snarled, his voice dipping into that low, dangerous register that usually preceded something exploding.
"The metal," I gasped, leaning into his touch despite myself. "It pulls... the heat... inward."
"I don't care about the process, Aria. I care that you are vibrating apart before we even start."
He looked over his shoulder. Hephaestus was cursing at a jammed gear, his back to us. Thane was guarding the door. Flynn was sharpening a blade, distracted.
Kaelen made a noise in his throat, a frustrated, feral growl. He scooped me up.
The world tilted. I grabbed his shoulders for purchase.
"Kaelen?"
"Quiet," he ordered.
He carried me away from the open dais, toward a narrow, shadowed alcove set into the obsidian wall. A massive vent pipe ran vertically through the niche, hissing with escaping steam that smelled of hot metal and deep earth. It was a pocket of concentrated, suffocating heat.
He kicked a pile of chains out of the way and set me down, pinning me against the warm pipe.
"We have to go back," I chattered, though my body was screaming to stay right here, pressed against the heat source. "The ritual..."
"The ritual requires you to be alive, not a frozen slab of meat," he snapped.
He reached up and tore at the buckles of his breastplate. The heavy divine steel fell away with a heavy thud. He didn't stop there. He grabbed the hem of his linen undertunic, soaked with sweat and soot, and ripped it over his head.
Kaelen stood before me, stripped to the waist.
In the red glow of the vent, he looked like a god of war carved from living flame.
Scars crisscrossed his torso, some old and faded, some fresh and raw from the fight with the clockwork hounds.
Faint, iridescent scales shimmered along his collarbones and down his arms, pulsing with a rhythmic golden light.
He didn't give me time to stare. He stepped in, eliminating the space between us.
He pressed his bare chest against mine.
The shock was electric.
I gasped, my back arching against the steam pipe. His skin was a brand. It was searing, blistering heat that bypassed my skin and slammed straight into my freezing core.
"Take it," he commanded, wrapping his arms around me, locking me into a cage of muscle and fire. "Take the heat, Aria. Pull it from me."
"It... burns," I wheezed, my head falling back against the iron.
"Good. Burn." He buried his face in the crook of my neck, right where the Silvering was creeping up my throat. "I won't let you go cold. I refuse to let you fade out."
He rubbed his hands up and down my back, generating friction. It wasn't gentle. It was rough, desperate. He was trying to start a fire with dry wood.
"Focus on the sensation," he growled against my skin, his lips brushing the sensitive spot behind my ear. "Don't think about the transformation. Feel this."
He bit me.
Not hard enough to break skin, but hard enough to send a jolt of sharp, stinging awareness through my nervous system.
My breath hitched. The shivering stopped, replaced by a sudden, violent tension.
"Kaelen," I breathed his name, my hands sliding up his bare back. His skin was slick with sweat, hot and smooth over the hard ridges of muscle.
"There you are," he murmured, lifting his head to look at me. His pupils were blown wide, swallowing the gold. "I feel you coming back, little fireheart."
He kissed me.
It was a collision. It tasted of smoke and desperation. He kissed me like he was trying to breathe his own life into my lungs. His tongue swept into my mouth, hot and demanding, and the fire inside him poured into me.
I moaned, the sound lost in the hissing of the steam vent. My body, which had been shutting down, numb and unresponsive, suddenly woke up with a vengeance.
My hips snapped forward, grinding against him.
He groaned, a low rumble that vibrated through his chest and into mine. One of his hands slid down my spine, gripping my waist, while the other tangled in my hair, pulling my head back to deepen the kiss.
"Mine," he whispered against my lips, fierce and possessive. "The metal doesn't get to have you. The silence doesn't get to have you. You belong to the fire."
He pressed me harder against the pipe. I could feel the hard ridge of him through his breeches, pressing against my stomach. The urge to wrap my legs around him was overwhelming, a primal need to be as close to the heat source as possible.
My left hand, the metal one, dug into his shoulder. I realized with a start that I was squeezing hard enough to bruise, hard enough to crush, but he didn't flinch. He leaned into it.
"That's it," he urged, breaking the kiss to trail hot, wet open-mouthed kisses down the column of my throat, right over the silver runes. "Use the strength. Don't fear it."
I looked down.
Through the haze of lust and heat, I saw my arm.
The matte grey of the star-metal wasn't grey anymore. Where Kaelen's skin touched mine, where his dragon fire beat against the infection, the metal was changing.
It was glowing. A soft, warm gold was bleeding into the silver, softening the harsh, industrial lines of the transformation. The metal didn't look dead; it looked... tempered.
"Kaelen," I gasped, pushing weakly at his chest. "Look."
He stopped, breathing heavily, his forehead resting against mine. He followed my gaze to my arm, still gripping his shoulder.
The gold runes were pulsing in time with his heartbeat.
He let out a shaky breath, running his thumb over the metal skin. It was warm to the touch now.
"Tempering," he whispered, awe softening the hard edges of his face. "Dragon fire softens the alloy. It makes it malleable."
"You're not just warming me up," I realized, the hope blooming in my chest painfully bright. "You're prepping the steel."
He looked at me, and the naked vulnerability in his eyes almost broke me.
"I told you," he said, his voice thick. "I won't let you freeze. Even if I have to burn myself out to keep you warm."
"Hey! Lovebirds!" Flynn’s voice cut through the heavy air, echoing off the cavern walls. "Unless you're practicing making little bitty metal babies, we need you on the slab! The big guy says the soup is ready!"
Kaelen squeezed his eyes shut for a second, a look of profound annoyance crossing his face, before he stepped back. The cold air of the forge rushed into the space between us, but it didn't bite this time. My whole body was humming.
He didn't bother putting his shirt back on. He grabbed his armor, holding it in one hand, and offered me the other.
"Are you ready?" he asked.
I flexed my metal fingers. They moved smoothly; the stiffness was gone.
"No," I answered honestly. "But I'm warm."
"That will have to be enough."
He took my hand, lacing his fingers through mine, flesh against metal, gold against silver, and led me back out into the light of the fire.
We walked toward the Anvil. Hephaestus was waiting, the hammer resting on his shoulder.
"About time," the Smith God grunted, eyeing Kaelen's bare torso and my flushed skin. He didn't comment, but his eyes dropped to my arm, seeing the golden hue. He nodded, a single, sharp jerk of approval.
"Get on the slab," Hephaestus ordered.
I looked at the dark iron block. I looked at Kaelen, his skin still glowing from our contact, and pushed myself onto the Anvil.
"Does it hurt?" I asked Hephaestus, my voice small in the vastness of the room.
Hephaestus positioned the tongs. He looked at me with those sad, ancient eyes.
"It is rebirth, child," he said softly. "Of course it hurts."
I lay back. The iron was hot against my spine. "Do it," I whispered.