Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
Aria
The hammer strike didn't hurt. Pain requires nerves to transmit a signal to the brain, and in that split second, I didn't have either. I was just sound. I was a vibration ringing through the iron of the Anvil, a purely resonant frequency of being.
Then the echo faded, and the nerve endings grew back. And with them came the fire.
It wasn't a flame I could shy away from. It wasn't licking at my skin; it was blooming in my marrow. I gasped, a ragged, wet sound that tasted of copper and ash, my back arching off the dark metal slab.
"Stay down!" Hephaestus roared, his voice a landslide of gravel.
CLANG.
He hit me again. Right on the sternum.
This time, I felt it. I felt my ribcage shatter, not into bone fragments, but into dust. And then I felt it knit back together, not as calcium, but as something denser. Something hotter.
"She is rejecting the heat!" the Smith God bellowed, swinging the massive tongs to grip my left arm, the metal one. "The alloy is cooling too fast! It’s brittle! Dragon, you have to push harder!"
"I am burning her alive!" Kaelen’s voice came from the north, a raw, terrified scream that tore through the white noise in my head.
Through the bond, I felt his hesitation. He was pulling his punches. He was trying to warm me like a hearth when I needed to be thrown into a kiln. He saw the woman he loved writhing on a butcher’s block, smoke curling from her lips, and his instinct was to pull the fire back, to spare me.
Don't you dare, I projected, forcing the thought through the molten sludge of my mind. Don't you dare save me, Kaelen.
I opened my eyes. The world was a blur of aggressive reds and blinding whites, but I found his gaze. His golden eyes were wide, brimming with tears that evaporated before they could fall. He looked destroyed.
"Burn it," I rasped, the words scraping my throat like sandpaper. "Burn it all away, Kaelen. The fear. The weakness. Do it!"
He flinched, then his jaw hardened. The dragon surfaced.
The white fire hitting me intensified. It wasn't just temperature anymore; it was pressure.
It was the weight of a star collapsing on my chest. My blood boiled.
I could physically feel the oxygen bubbles in my veins expanding, sizzling.
It was agony so absolute it both made sense and seemed completely ridiculous.
I was being unmade. I was ash. I was smoke.
I started to drift. The pain was too much, so my soul decided to leave. It pulled at the seams, looking for an exit, a quiet, dark place where the hammer couldn't reach.
Going up, I thought, feeling lighter. Just let go.
Then the mountain fell on me.
Thane.
"No," his voice rumbled, not in my ears, but in the tectonic plates of my new skeleton. "You stay here. You stay with us."
Gravity slammed into me. It wasn't the gentle pull of the earth; it was the crushing density of a black hole. Thane may as well have grabbed my wandering spirit with hands made of bedrock and shoved it violently back into the body on the slab.
I slammed back onto the Anvil with a thud that knocked the wind out of me.
Heavy, I whimpered in the dark of my mind. Thane, it’s too heavy.
I have you, his presence was a fortress wall built around my panic. I am the anchor. You cannot drift if I hold you. Endure the weight, Aria. Be the stone.
I couldn't be stone. Stone didn't hurt like this. Stone didn't scream.
And gods, I wanted to scream. I wanted to open my mouth and let out the sound of every atom splitting, but my lungs weren't working. They were crystallized, frozen in a silent gasp. The air was there, but the mechanism to pump it was fused.
Thump... thump...
My heart stuttered. A long pause. Too long.
Kick-start, a feral voice whispered.
Flynn hit me with a jolt of pure kinetic energy. It felt like being electrocuted.
My heart didn't just beat; it convulsed. It slammed against my ribs, a frantic, rabbit-fast rhythm that forced the blood through veins that were trying to turn to glass.
Run, Flynn snarled through the bond, his mind a blur of motion and teeth. Don't stop. Friction creates heat, Pup. Move the blood or it freezes. Move!
He was abrasive. He was vibrating my very cells, forcing them to violently crash against each other. It felt like he was scrubbing my insides with steel wool.
"She is convulsing!" Kaelen yelled, panic rising again as my body jackknifed on the slab.
"She is circulating!" Hephaestus corrected, bringing the hammer down on my hip. CLANG. "Good! Keep the tempo! Don't let the metal settle!"
"It’s chaotic!" Elias’s voice cut through the din, high and thin with strain. "The energy is omnipresent, but it has no shape! She is a storm in a bottle, and the bottle is shattering!"
I felt it. He was right. Kaelen was melting me, Thane was crushing me, and Flynn was shaking me apart. I was a soup of divine energy with no container. My thoughts were fragmenting.
Suddenly I couldn't remember why I was there. I couldn't remember my name. Was I Aria? Was I Pandora? Was I just a mistake made of clay?
I looked to the East.
Elias stood there, his hands weaving patterns in the air. His eyes were glowing turquoise, vast and deep and terrifyingly intelligent. He wasn't looking at my body; he was looking at the air above me, at the shimmering heat haze where my soul was trying to unravel.
Design, I pleaded. Weaver. Stitch me.
He grabbed the threads.
It felt cold. Clinical. It was the sensation of a needle piercing skin, precise and sharp. Elias took the fire, the gravity, and the motion, and he forced them into a grid. He imposed geometry on the chaos.
The femur is a lever, his mind whispered, sliding the concept into place. The ribcage is a vault. The heart is a pump.
He was rebuilding my blueprint in real-time, forcing the molten metal of my body to remember it was supposed to be a woman. It was intrusive. It was violating. He was digging around in the architecture of my self, rearranging the furniture of my soul.
This line is weak, he critiqued, tightening a mental screw in my spine that made me gasp. Reinforce.
"The lattice is holding!" Hephaestus grunted, dropping the tongs. He grabbed my jaw with a soot-stained hand, forcing my head back. "Look at me, girl."
I stared into his mismatched eyes, one brown, one blind white.
"You are not dying," the Smith God lied. "You are just molting. Now, scream. Let the pressure out before you crack a tooth."
I opened my mouth. And finally, the sound came.
It was a scream of pure, metallic resonance. It shattered the remaining glass dials on the far wall. It shook the dust from the ceiling.
It felt good.
"Again!" Hephaestus ordered, picking up the hammer. "We have to temper the spine!"
He swung.
CLANG.
White light exploded behind my eyes. I saw memories that weren't mine.
I saw a mountain rising from the sea. I saw a golden city falling from the sky. I saw a woman opening a jar, not out of malice, but because she couldn't stand the silence of the universe anymore, not after they had taken everything away from her.
Pandora, I thought. She wasn't a girl. She was a bridge.
"Hold the line!" Flynn shouted from somewhere distant, the sound of daggers hitting metal ringing out. "We got more leakers!"
The void was swarming again. I felt the cold creeping back in, nipping at the edges of Kaelen’s fire.
"Don't worry about the rats," Thane rumbled, his presence so heavy it made it hard to think. "Focus on the work."
The work. I was the work.
"My arm," I gagged, looking at my left side.
The grey metal was glowing now. It wasn't dull iron anymore. It was translucent, filled with swirling galaxies of gold and violet light. The runes that had been crawling up my neck were now etched deep into the casing, burning with a steady, constant light.
"It is integrating," Elias breathed, his voice filled with awe and horror. "The star-metal is fusing with the carbon. She is becoming a hybrid."
"She is becoming a weapon," Hephaestus corrected. He grabbed a bucket of something that smelled like oil and liquid starlight. "Quench!"
He dumped the liquid on me.
The thermal shock was worse than the fire. It hissed, steam exploding upward in a violent cloud. My skin tightened, snapping into place with a sound like a whip crack.
I arched my back, gasping, my fingers scrabbling against the Anvil. I found a hand.
Kaelen.
He had reached out, breaking the circle for just a fraction of a second to grab my hand. His skin was burning hot, his grip desperate.
"I've got you," he choked out, tears finally spilling over, sizzling on his cheeks. "I'm here, Aria. I'm right here."
"Don't stop," I whispered, squeezing his hand until I felt his bones creak. "Make me strong, Dragon. Make me strong enough to hold you."
He let out a sob that turned into a roar. The fire doubled.
The heat consumed me. I lost the feeling of the Anvil beneath me. I lost the smell of the sulfur. I was just a point of consciousness suspended in agony fueled by four broken gods.
And for the first time in my life, I wasn't just keeping the power out.
I was the power.
"Heart strike!" Hephaestus yelled, raising the hammer high with both hands.
He didn't hold back. He aimed for the center of my chest, right where the creeping metal met the frantic flesh.
I looked at the hammer falling. I looked at the ceiling where the Titan’s dust was falling like snow. I looked at my Princes, sweating, bleeding, burning for me.
Break me, I challenged the iron. And see what climbs out.
The hammer fell.