Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
Flynn
The smell hit me before his feet even touched the wreckage of the stone canopy.
Apollo used to smell like summer. I remembered it from the Before, he was all citrus, hot sand, and the clean, sharp ozone of a lightning strike that missed just to scare you. He smelled like noon on a summer day.
This... thing descending through the black rain didn't smell like citrus or summer. It smelled like the bottom of a well that had been sealed for a thousand years. It smelled of stagnant water and the metallic tang of blood that had gone cold.
"That's not him," I snarled, the words ripping out of my throat. The hair on my arms stood up, not from the cold, but from the visceral, primal rejection of what I was looking at. "That is not our brother."
Apollo stood on the pile of broken obsidian Thane had shattered, the black oil rain slicking his grey skin.
He wore his golden armor, but it was tarnished, eaten away by acid-like pitting.
His laurel wreath was dead, the leaves brown and curled.
But it was the eyes that made my stomach roll.
There was no white, no iris, just pooling, infinite black that leaked smoke like a chimney.
"Look at you," Apollo said. His voice was wrong. It sounded like a choir screaming in a burning church, layered and dissonant. "Playing house. Playing smith. Do you really think you can fix what the Maker broke?"
He raised a hand. He didn't hold a bow. He held a lyre made of shadow and bone.
"Incoming!" I roared, my hands still locked toward the Anvil, pouring every ounce of kinetic energy I had into Aria’s failing heart.
Apollo plucked a string.
It wasn't a note. It was a shockwave of silence.
The sound cut through the roar of the bellows and the hiss of the magma. It hit us and I staggered, my boots slipping on the slick floor. The vibration rattled my skull, trying to separate my thoughts from my actions.
On the Anvil, Aria screamed.
I felt it through the bond, a sharp, jagged spike of terror. The silence was attacking her anchor. It was erasing her rhythm.
Thump... thump... silence.
"Don't you stop!" I shouted at her through the connection, practically vibrating with the effort to restart her pulse. "Beat, damn it! I am giving you the rhythm! Take it!"
"He is disrupting the frequency!" Elias yelled from the East, blood streaming from his nose again. "The discord! It’s unravelling the weave!"
"He's trying to stop the music," Kaelen snarled, the white fire around him flaring violently as he fought to keep the heat constant. "Hephaestus! Get him off us!"
The Smith God didn't look up from his work. He was swinging the hammer with a manic, rhythmic desperation, shaping the metal that was Aria’s soul. CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
"I am busy!" Hephaestus bellowed. "Guard dogs! Wake up! Target the intruder! Authorization pattern: Alpha-Zero-Kill!"
The response was mechanical and immediate.
From the shadows of the forge’s perimeter, the remaining clockwork hounds activated. We had scrapped a few of them on the way in, but this was the Master's workshop. He had spares.
Six massive, bronze automatons surged from the racks along the walls. Their ruby eyes flared to life, burning through the gloom. Gears whirred with the sound of angry hornets, and pistons hissed as they launched themselves at the fallen Sun God.
Apollo didn't even look at them. He plucked another string.
Ping.
The sound wave hit the lead hound in mid-air. The bronze didn't dent; it simply ceased to hold together. The automatons fell apart into a tumble of gears, springs, and oil that rained down onto the floor.
"He's unmaking the binding agents!" Elias analyzed, terror sharpening his voice. "He is resonant-matching the metal and shattering it! He will do the same to her!"
"Not if we're louder!" I growled.
"Wolf!" Kaelen’s voice was tight. "You have the friction! You have the noise! Counter him!"
"I'm a little busy keeping her alive!" I snapped back, sweat stinging my eyes.
Aria was thrashing on the slab. Through the bond, I felt her slipping. It wasn't just physical pain anymore; it was identity death. The Silvering was eating her memories to fuel the transformation.
Who...? The thought floated through the connection, fragile as smoke.
I saw flashes in her mind. A face. My face. But it was blurring, fading like an old painting left in the sun. She was forgetting the garden. She was forgetting the kiss against the crystal tree.
No. The growl started deep in my chest. You don't get to forget that. I won't let you.
"Thane!" I shouted across the circle. "Can you hold the beat for thirty seconds?"
Thane looked at me, his face a mask of stone-like concentration. He was holding the gravity well that kept her soul in the room. "If I shift focus, the pressure drops. She might float."
"If we don't shut him up, she shatters!" I argued. "Just thirty seconds! Keep her heavy!"
I didn't wait for permission. I ripped my hands away from the energy flow.
The loss of connection was physically painful, like tearing a leech off raw skin. Aria gasped on the slab, her heart stuttering.
I spun on my heel, drawing my daggers. They felt light in my hands, eager.
Three hounds were still active, circling Apollo. He was toying with them, blasts of black light erupting from his fingers to melt their legs or fuse their jaws.
I didn't run. I moved.
I pushed the Motion aspect into my own legs. I became a blur, a streak of shadow and violence cutting across the forge floor.
Apollo turned, sensing the rush. The black pits of his eyes locked onto me.
"Little Wolf," he crooned, raising the lyre. "Always biting at heels you cannot reach."
He swept his hand across the strings. A wave of force, thick and suffocating as a physical blow, hammered toward me.
I dropped.
I hit the floor in a slide, the oil-slicked metal carrying me under the blast. The silence roared over my head, shattering a stack of cooling ingots into dust behind me.
I came up from the slide inside his guard.
He smelled terrible. Up close, the rot was overwhelming, masking the faint, lingering scent of the brother I had sparred with a thousand years ago.
"Shut up," I snarled.
I drove my left dagger toward his gut.
He moved with supernatural speed, catching my wrist. His grip was ice-cold, dead weight.
"Predictable," he whispered, the myriad voices in his throat laughing.
"Am I?"
I headbutted him.
It was dirty. It was crude. It was exactly what he didn't expect from a divine duel.
My forehead slammed into the bridge of his nose. There was a wet crunch. He staggered back, his grip loosening just enough.
I spun, bringing my right dagger around in a slash aimed at the lyre strings.
The blade of the dagger bit into the shadow-stuff of the instrument. Three strings snapped with the sound of breaking violin cables. The resulting feedback screeched through the room, a backlash of chaotic magic.
Apollo howled, dropping the lyre as the energy burned his hand.
"Hounds!" I roared. "Take him!"
The two remaining automatons didn't need to be told twice. They lunged. One locked its bronze jaws onto Apollo’s leg, the piston-driven bite crushing through the greaves. The other tackled him from behind, slamming him onto the floor.
"Back!" Hephaestus yelled from the Anvil. "Wolf! The heart is failing!"
I felt it. The bond was screaming. Aria’s pulse was a flutter, a dying bird in a cage.
I abandoned Apollo to the dogs and sprinted back to the circle. I vaulted over the debris, sliding back into my position at the West point.
I slammed my hands toward her.
BEAT.
I pushed the command with everything I had. I jump-started her system, forcing the blood to surge.
Aria arched off the Anvil, a gasp tearing from her throat.
I remember, I whispered into her mind, shoving the memory of the garden back into place, forcing the neurons to re-fire. I remember for you. Hold on to me.
Apollo threw the hounds off with a blast of dark gravity. He stood up, his nose bleeding black ichor, his expression twisted from mockery into pure hate.
"Enough games," he hissed.
He raised his hands to the hole in the roof, to the swirling vortex of the Devourer.
"Feed!" he screamed.
The black rain didn't just fall; it twisted. The oil droplets coalesced in mid-air, forming spears of solidified void. Hundreds of them.
"Shields!" Thane bellowed.
"I can't shield and hold her!" Kaelen shouted, his fire blazing white-hot.
"I got it!"
I didn't have a shield. I had speed.
I poured more energy into the bond, ramping up the friction in Aria’s body until she was glowing like a newborn star, then I split my focus. I kept one hand aimed at her, maintaining the rhythm, and drew a dagger with the other.
The spears fell.
I became a whirlwind.
I wasn't intercepting them all, that was impossible. I was intercepting the ones aimed at the Anvil. For every beat of Aria’s heart, I slashed the air.
Beat. Slash. Beat. Parry.
Metal rang against void-glass. My arm was a blur. A spear grazed my shoulder, slicing through the leather and burning like cold fire, but I didn't stop.
"Left!" Elias warned.
I spun, batting a projectile away inches from Aria’s face.
"He's overwhelming the perimeter!" Hephaestus roared. "I need one minute! Just one minute to fuse the star-metal!"
"We don't have a minute!" Kaelen yelled. "He's charging a breaker wave!"
Apollo was gathering the darkness in his hands, compressing it into a singularity of pure entropy. He was going to drop a bomb on us.
"Thane!" I yelled. "Throw the hammer!"
"I am the Gravity!" Thane argued, sweat pouring down his face. "If I let go..."
"If you don't, we're ash!" I countered. “She held on before, she can do it again.”
Thane growled, a sound deep enough to crack the floor. He didn't let go of the magic, but he shifted his stance. He grabbed his massive war hammer from the floor with one hand, keeping the other locked in the channeling gesture.
It was impossible leverage. He shouldn't be able to lift it one-handed while anchoring a soul.
But he was the Bear.
"Catch," Thane roared.
He hurled the hammer.
It flew across the forge, a missile of divine iron.
Apollo saw it coming. He sneered, raising a hand to stop it with a void shield.
But he forgot about the hounds.
The one with the broken leg dragged itself forward and clamped its jaws onto Apollo’s ankle, jerking him off balance at the last second.
The hammer missed his center mass but clipped his shoulder.
The impact spun him around like a ragdoll. The ball of entropy in his hands destabilized. It exploded prematurely, blasting Apollo backward into the wall of the forge with a boom that shook the stalactites loose from the ceiling.
He hit the stone and slid down, buried under a pile of rubble.
"Now!" Hephaestus screamed. "Final phase! The memory graft!"
"The what?" I yelled, wiping black blood from my eyes.
"The vessel needs a blueprint of self!" Elias explained, his hands weaving frantically. "You have to remind the metal who it is protecting!"
"How?" Kaelen demanded.
"Show her!" Elias cried. "Show her why she wants to live!"
I looked at Aria. She was vibrating on the slab, her skin swirling with gold and grey and red. She looked terrifying. She looked beautiful.
Show her.
I closed my eyes. I reached into the deepest, most guarded part of my mind. The part I didn't let anyone see. The part that wasn't the Wolf or the Prince.
You give me peace, I projected into her burning mind. You are the quiet place where the Wolf sleeps.
I felt Kaelen do the same. I felt his fire change, softening into warmth. He showed her the first time she stood up to him, the spark in her eyes that made him realize he wasn't looking at a victim, but a queen.
You make me worthy, his thought burned.
Thane showed her the feeling of standing behind her, of knowing that for once, he wasn't shielding a burden, but a treasure.
You make me strong.
Elias showed her the pattern of the future, not as a tragedy, but as a possibility.
You make me see.
Aria gasped.
The sound sucked the air out of the room.
The grey metal on her body flashed blinding white. The runes fixed into place with an audible click, like a lock falling into alignment.
"It holds!" Hephaestus shouted, raising the hammer for the final strike. "The lattice is fused!"
But Apollo wasn't done.