Chapter 28
TWENTY-EIGHT
Aria
The impact didn’t break my bones, but it could have shaken the soul right out of my body with how violent it was.
We hit the earth with the force of a falling star, a collision of divine weight and mortal soil that sent a shockwave tearing through the landscape. The sound was deafening, a crunch of bedrock and a scream of displaced air that popped my ears and left a high-pitched whine drilling into my skull.
I was thrown from Kaelen’s back, tumbling across ground that felt wrong. It was too soft, then too hard, then slick like oil. I slammed into a ridge of dirt, my metal arm gouging a deep trench through the soil as I tried to slow myself down, sparks flying where metal met stone.
When I stopped, I lay there for a heartbeat, staring up at a sky that was bleeding.
The clouds were torn open, leaking a viscous, purple fluid that defied gravity, dripping upward into the hungry maw of the Devourer.
I spat out a mouthful of grit. It tasted of pine needles, ozone, and sulfur.
I pushed myself up. My left arm, the star-metal one, hummed with a low, vibrating frequency, annoyed by the impact but undamaged. My flesh side ached, a blooming bruise forming on my hip, but the pain felt distant, muffled by the adrenaline flooding my system.
As I looked around my stomach dropped.
We had carved a crater the size of a small city into... a forest? A mountain? It was hard to tell. The mortal realm was here. I saw crushed oak trees and the distant outline of a tower, but it was churning together with the debris of Olympus that had come down with us.
A massive, white marble column from the Citadel was speared through the roof of a building that reminded me of the Hall of Muses. A fountain of nectar bubbled up from a crack in a road, turning the dirt into gold sludge.
Physics was broken. Gravity pools shimmered in the air, lifting rocks and buildings alike into slow, orbiting spirals.
And in the center of the crater, the monsters were rising.
Kaelen roared, a sound like tectonic plates grinding together.
He hauled himself up, shaking a head crowned with obsidian horns.
He was colossal. His scales absorbed the light, matte black and terrifying, heat radiating off him in waves that distorted the air.
He smelled of sulfur and pure, unrefined power.
Stuck, his voice roared in my head, a mental shout layered with panic. The form... it’s locked. I can’t compress.
I looked to my left. A mound of earth and fur shifted.
Thane, the Bear, shook himself off, sending boulders flying from his coat like fleas.
He was the size of a steep hill, his eyes glowing with a soft, earthen brown light that struck a stark contrast to his terrifying bulk.
He huffed, the sound vibrating in my chest.
Above us, a screech tore the air. Elias, a Phoenix of turquoise and gold flame, circled erratically, his wingspan trailing embers that didn't burn the trees but turned the leaves to crystal upon contact.
Aria. A voice resonated in my mind.
I turned.
A wolf, massive enough to swallow a horse whole, stood ten feet away. His fur was a tapestry of browns and greys, bristling with static. Amber eyes, intelligent and terrified, locked onto mine. He smelled of wet musk, old blood, and the sharp tang of wild fear.
I can’t change, Flynn’s voice whined in the bond, high and jagged. The Old Magic has bound me, Pup. I’m stuck in the fur.
I reached out with my flesh hand, burying it in the coarse ruff of his neck. He leaned into my touch, trembling.
"You're not stuck," I soothed, though my own heart was hammering against my reinforced ribs. "The world is just... confused. We need to find a way to calibrate."
Calibrate? Kaelen snarled, his tail lashing out and slicing through a sturdy oak tree as if it were grass. We are beasts, Aria. The Titan’s pulse stripped the glamours. This is what we are.
He spread his wings. They were terrified spans of shadow that blotted out the broken sky, dripping liquid darkness onto the grass.
"We move," I commanded, my voice ringing with that new, metallic harmonic that sounded like a sword being drawn. "We find high ground. We assess."
I started walking, climbing up the lip of the crater. The terrain was a nightmare, a patchwork quilt of realities stitched together by violence. I stepped from soft meadow grass onto polished Olympian marble in a single stride.
We crested the ridge, and I saw it.
The remains of the Sanctorum. The sacred heart of the Citadel, where I had first met them, where they had been chained for millennia... It lay shattered across a valley, ruins draped over the landscape like dead snakes.
And standing in the shadow of a broken archway was Athena.
She looked small amidst the wreckage. Her armor of woven starlight was cracked, leaking faint luminescence like blood. Her helmet was gone. Her dark hair was plastered to her skull with sweat.
She was staring up at the sky, at the Devourer.
But as the ground shook under Thane’s massive paws, she snapped her head toward us.
Her grey eyes went wide. She raised her spear, the tip glowing with a lethal, blinding white point of god-light.
"You," she breathed. The word carried across the distance, sharp as a blade.
She didn't see her brothers. She didn't see the tragic, broken princes. She saw a Dragon wreathed in black fire, a Wolf dripping shadow, a Bear made of bedrock, and a Phoenix burning the air.
And she saw me. A woman made of flesh and star-metal, glowing with violet veins, leading the apocalypse.
"Abominations," Athena spat, shifting her stance. The air around her hardened, bending to her tactical will. She was hurt, but she was a goddess. She adjusted her grip, calculating the trajectory to put a spear through Kaelen’s eye.
Kaelen roared, a blast of heat that turned the grass to ash in a ten-foot radius. He stepped in front of me, spreading his wings to create a wall of scales.
She is targeting the soft palate, Kaelen analyzed, his predatory instincts overriding his familial ones. I will burn her before she releases.
Flynn dropped low, a growl building in his throat that sounded like a chainsaw idling. Thane slammed his paws into the earth, shaking the ground, turning the soil into quicksand around the goddess.
"Stand down!" I shouted.
I didn't summon any of the powers of my men.
I pushed past Kaelen’s wing.
Aria! His mental voice was a frantic grip on my mind. Get back! She is not playing!
"Neither am I," I muttered.
I walked toward the Goddess of War.
The runes on my metal skin flared, pulsing with a gentle, rhythmic violet light. I kept my hands open, down at my sides. I walked with the heavy, inevitable cadence of the turning earth.
Athena tracked me. The spear tip wavered, moving from Kaelen to my chest.
"One more step, abomination, and I pin you to the ground," Athena warned. Her voice shook, but her hands were steady. "You brought the Devourer. You broke the seal. And now you bring your pets to pick the bones of the world."
I stopped ten feet from her. I could smell the ozone crackling off her spear. I could see the dilated pupils of her eyes, the sheer exhaustion etched into the lines of her face.
"I didn't bring the Devourer, Athena," I said. My voice was calm, resonant, vibrating in the metal wreckage around us. "It was already there. You know that. We just showed you what it was already doing."
I gestured behind me, to the massive, terrifying forms of the Princes.
"Look at them," I challenged her. "Don't look at the teeth. Look at the eyes."
Athena hesitated. She flicked her gaze to Kaelen.
The Dragon wasn't attacking. He was coiled tight, yes, but his wing was curved inward, sheltering Elias, who was shuddering in the air, his flame guttering.
Thane wasn't charging; he was standing solid, blocking the wind from blowing debris into the valley below where a human town sat probably just thinking they had experienced a geological disaster, not an Olympian-made one.
Flynn moved up beside me, not to hunt, but to flank. He whined low in his throat, a sound of distress, not aggression.
Athena blinked. The warrior's mask slipped, revealing the terrified sister beneath.
"They... they are afraid," she whispered, stunned.
"We all are," I said. I took another step. "The game has flipped, Athena. It's existence against nothing."
I pointed up.
We all looked.
The Devourer wasn't just a storm now. It was a face. A massive, shifting visage of smoke and emptiness pressing down on the atmosphere, mouth open to swallow the horizon. The purple bruise of the sky was spreading, eating the green of the mortal world.
Athena slowly, agonizingly, lowered the spear. The light on the tip faded.
She slumped against the broken archway, looking suddenly very young and very old all at once.
"Everything I fought for," she murmured, looking at the ruins of the Sanctorum and whatever Olympian bui. "It's all just... dust."
"Walls fall," I said, stepping up to her. I reached out with my metal hand, offering support. "But the foundation holds."
She looked at my hand. At the star-metal fused to my flesh. She looked at the monsters breathing heavily behind me.
"Is this the plan?" she asked, a hysterical edge to her laugh. "A dragon, a wolf, a bear, a bird, and a... whatever you are... against the end of everything?"
I looked at my men. They were terrified, trapped in bodies that were too big for this world, hunted by their own mother, and standing on the edge of extinction.
But they were standing.
"It's not a plan," I said, feeling the Dragon's fire burning steadily in my chest, the Bear's weight anchoring my feet. "It's a promise."
I turned back to the void eating the sky.
"We hold the line here," I declared. "Until the fire goes out."
Athena gripped her spear, straightening her spine. She looked at the Devourer, then at us.
"Then let's hope you burn bright, Aria Pandoros," she whispered. "Because it's getting very dark."
As the unnatural wind howled, smelling of nothingness, one question burned brighter than the runes on my skin, was there enough of us left to fight the dark?