Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
Aria
I didn't fall. Falling implies gravity, a submission to the laws of physics that determined mass must accelerate downward. This was an invitation.
I stepped into the white-hot throat of the world, and the world swallowed me whole.
The scream from the bond was immediate and deafening.
It wasn't sound; it was a psychic shockwave of pure, unadulterated terror. Kaelen’s roar of denial tore at the edges of my mind, a frantic, clawing desperate attempt to grab my soul before it incinerated.
I felt Flynn’s heart stop, a stuttering, horrified pause in his kinetic rhythm.
Thane’s grief was a collapsing mountain, heavy and suffocating, and Elias…
Elias didn't scream. He simply unraveled, his logic shattering into a thousand terrified variables.
Let me go, I whispered into the roaring silence of the fire. I have to stretch.
The heat hit me.
It should have vaporized me. This was the Primordial Flame. It was the substance of stars, hot enough to turn matter into soup.
But I wasn't matter anymore. I was a circuit.
My metal skin didn't melt. It drank.
The sensation was excruciating, but not in the way a burn is.
It was the pain of a deep inhale after being underwater for too long.
My lungs expanded, cracking the crystalized calcification that had plagued me for hours.
The star-metal alloy fused to my left side hummed, vibrating at a frequency so high it whined like a dying engine.
The gold veins beneath my skin flared, opening wide, gulping down the thermal energy like a starving man offered a feast.
I sank deeper. The red glare of the cavern above faded. The faces of the Princes, terrified, soot-stained, beautiful, vanished.
I was floating in a void of absolute, blinding white.
It smelled of clean linen and rain. Not what I expected of the Primordial Flame.
"You are loud," a voice said.
It didn't come from the fire. It came from the silence between the roar.
I turned in the suspension of light. I had no body here, or perhaps I was all body, magnified.
She was standing in the center of the flame.
She didn't look like the reflection I had seen in the Hall of Muses.
That had been a ghost, a sad echo trapped in glass and sorrow.
This woman was solid. She was made of the same bioluminescent material I was becoming, translucent flesh that glowed with inner starlight, veins of liquid gold pulsing rhythmically beneath the surface.
Her hair was floating around her face, strands of black ink writing calligraphy in the air.
Pandora. Not the myth. The prototype.
"Ancestor," I projected, the word tasting of metal and ash.
"Don't call me that," she said, her voice sounding like wind whistling through a canyon. “It makes me feel ancient."
She stepped closer. The fire parted around her like water. She looked at me, her eyes, mismatched, one brown, one a blinding vortex of nebulas, scanning my form.
"They finally figured out the mixture," she mused, reaching out a hand. Her fingers brushed my cheek. They were cool, soothing against the inferno raging inside me. "Hephaestus always did use too much copper. He forgot that to conduct the divine, you need iron. You need blood."
"I thought I was dying," I said. My voice was steady here, stripped of the pain. "The Silvering. It felt like a disease that was eating away at me."
"It is a defense mechanism," Pandora corrected gently. "The body knows it is too small for the sky. So it builds a bigger house. You aren't calcifying, Aria. You are evolving. You are becoming the bridge."
"A bridge," I repeated. The word resonated in my chest, settling deep in the new, heavy architecture of my ribs. "First I was a door, then Elias said I was a cage. A trap for the Princes. Will I always be changing?"
Pandora laughed. It was a bitter, sharp sound, like glass breaking under a boot.
"Elias is a genius, but he listened to Zeus too much," she said, her face hardening.
The golden runes etched into her skin flared brighter.
"Zeus is a coward. The King of Gods looked at the humans, at the mud-people below, and he was terrified.
He saw that we, yes, I count myself as a human.
Anyway, he saw that we had something he didn't. We had the ability to change.
We could grow. Gods are static; they are concepts frozen in amber. But mortals? We are fluid."
She waved a hand at the white void surrounding us.
"He wanted a wall," she whispered. "He told Hephaestus to build a beautiful, perfect wall to keep the divine separated from the mortal, to keep his power pure and untouched by the dirt. He commissioned a jailer to hold his enemies."
She looked at me, her gaze fierce.
"But Hephaestus didn't build a wall. He built a door."
The realization hit me harder than the hammer had.
"The jar," I breathed.
"Was never meant to keep the evils in," Pandora hissed.
"It was meant to let them out. To let the divine filter down to the earth, to act as a transforming step-down so the power wouldn't burn the world.
I was designed to be the handshake between heaven and earth.
To let the gods walk among men without crushing them. "
She touched her chest, right over her heart, where a complex knot of scarred runes pulsed.
"But they panicked," she said sadly. "The Keepers.
The Council. They saw the door opening, saw the power flowing, and they called it a leak.
They called it a curse. They forced me to close the lid.
They forced me to become a dam instead of a river.
They called the princes evil and spread rumors that they were being sent to take over when we both know that was the furthest thing from the truth.
The truth was so much worse given that we were all bait for the Devourer. "
She looked at me, her expression full of an ancient, grieving rage.
"Pressure builds behind a dam, Aria. If you don't let it flow, the structure cracks. That is what happened to me. I tried to hold it all. I tried to be the 'Good Keeper.' And it shattered my mind."
I looked down at my own hands. The metal and the flesh were fused now, indistinguishable.
I felt the thrumming power of the Princes, Kaelen’s heat, Thane’s mass, Flynn’s speed, Elias’s design, waiting at the edges of my consciousness.
I had been trying to hold them. To contain them.
To keep them safe inside me like trophies in a vault.
"I don't have to hold it," I whispered.
"No," Pandora agreed. She smiled, and this time it radiated warmth.
"You just have to let it pass through. I called you a bridge, but you were also right with your description.
You are the lens, Aria. You focus the light; you don't keep it.
Nor do you keep the power of a Titan's heart, but I sense it flowing through you just like the others. "
The white fire around us began to shift. It swirled, turning from blinding white to a spectrum of colors, violet, gold, turquoise, crushing black, and pulsing red.
"Going back is going to hurt," Pandora warned, her form beginning to dissolve into mist. "The world is not kind to things that change. Some will look at you and see a monster."
"Let them look, let them think I’m a monster if that’s what they choose," I said, feeling the Dragon’s fire ignite in my belly, not as a burden, but as an engine. "But I’m done hiding in the dark."
"Good," she faded, her voice lingering like the hum of a bell after it had been struck. "Then show them what a Titan's heart looks like when it beats. Show them what love looks like."
Everything around me collapsed in on itself, like the world was suddenly made of folded paper. I closed my eyes to try and make sense of it, but before I could, sensation returned with the violence of a head-on collision.
I gasped, sucking in air that tasted of sulfur and panic. My eyes snapped open.
I wasn't floating. I was standing in the center of the Primordial Flame.
But the fire wasn't burning me. It was weaving into me. The white tongues of flame were being sucked into the pores of my metal skin, fueling the bioluminescence.
I looked down at myself.
The matte grey of the star-metal was gone. The alloy had darkened, tempered by the Primordial heat into a sleek, obsidian-dark chrome that seemed to drink the light. But it wasn't dark.
It was etched.
Complex, living runes burned across every inch of my body, both the metal left side and the translucent, golden-hushed flesh of the right.
They weren't static scars. They were flowing.
They moved like liquid magma through channels cut into my skin, pulsing in time with a heartbeat that sounded like a war drum.
I felt... immense.
Not only that but I felt the Titan beneath the floor as if he were a pet waking from a nap. I felt the specific temperature of Kaelen’s despair as he watched the fire swallow me.
"Aria?"
The voice was Kaelen’s. It was broken and terrified.
I looked up.
I was deep in the pit, standing on a ledge of superheated rock amidst the updraft. The Princes were gathered at the edge of the rent in the floor, peering down into the blinding glare.
I didn't climb out. I simply decided to rise.
I flexed my will against the gravity of the earth. Thane’s gift, integrated and amplified.
Up.
I rose from the flame. I didn't fly; I ascended, carried by a localized inversion of weight. The fire clung to me for a moment, dripping off my boots like water, before snapping back into the pit.
Silent as a shadow, bright as a star, I rose until I hovered above the edge of the chasm.
The room went dead silent.
Kaelen fell to his knees. He reached out a hand, shaking, his fingers brushing the air as if testing for heat.
"You," he breathed. "You're..."
"Alive," I finished. My voice had changed again. The harmonic distortion was gone, replaced by a clarity that cut through the roar of the forge. It was resonant, the voice of the bell finding its true pitch.
I touched down on the iron floor. The plating hissed, retreating slightly from the intensity of my presence.
Flynn stared at me, his daggers hanging loosely in his hands. He sniffed the air, his amber eyes blowing wide.
"You smell like sunshine," he whispered.
Elias was weeping silently, his hands pressed over his mouth, staring at the runes flowing across my skin. He was reading them, I realized. He was seeing the logic of the universe written on my body, an equation that finally balanced.
"It circulates," he choked out. "The loop... it’s infinite. Energy in, energy out. No resistance."
I turned slowly.
Apollo stood by the ruined wall of the forge, half-buried in the rubble from fighting that had happened while I was in the fire. An assault from Thane would be my guess.
He pulled himself free, dusting off his tarnished golden armor. The black smoke leaking from his eyes had stalled. He stared at me with the blank, horrified expression of a man who realizes he has brought a knife to a nuclear detonation.
"What did you do?" Apollo asked. The layered, demonic distortion in his voice wavered, cracking to reveal fear. "That fire... it unmakes gods. You should be nothing."
I looked at my hand. The dark, chromed metal shone with an inner violet light. I took a step toward him.
"It tried," I said, feeling the power of the primal anvil coursing through me, no longer a burden to be carried, but a river to be directed. "But I made a deal with the heat."
I clenched my fist. The runes on my arm flared blinding white.
"You wanted to break the vessel, Apollo," I said, the corners of my mouth curving into a smile that felt sharp and dangerous. "Congratulations. The glass is broken."
I raised my hand, pointing my palm at his chest.
"Now you have to deal with the storm."