Chapter 3
THREE
Flynn
If the Underworld had a scent, it wouldn't be brimstone or rot. Those are smells of life ending, of biology breaking down. There is comfort in rot; it means something was there.
This place? It smelled of absolute zero.
It was an olfactory vacuum that sucked the moisture right out of my nose.
I kept sneezing, violent, full-body convulsions that rattled my massive frame, trying to clear a blockage that didn't exist. My ears swiveled like radar dishes, twitching at the ghost-echoes of sounds that might have been footsteps or might have been the neurons in my brain misfiring from sensory deprivation.
Scritch. Scritch.
To my left.
I snapped my jaws at the empty grey air, my teeth meeting with a clack that vibrated through my skull. Nothing. Just the taste of iron dust and disappointment.
Stop it, I told myself, digging my claws into the pitted metal floor. You’re chasing ghosts. Focus on the pack.
But the pack was dying.
We were walking north, or what Elias claimed was north, though I suspected 'north' here was just a suggestion made by a dying bird, across a landscape that felt like the skin of a metallic corpse.
The silence was heavy. It wasn't peaceful; it was a weight, pressing down on my shoulders, trying to flatten me against the ground until I became just another uneven ridge in the iron plain.
I trotted back toward the center of our formation, my gait uneven. My back left leg had a hitch in it, a phantom pain from a tendon I might have pulled in the fall, or maybe it was just the Titan magic in my blood arguing with the physics of the Underworld.
I fell in beside Kaelen.
The Dragon looked terrible. His scales, usually a terrifying, light-drinking obsidian that shimmered with an inner petroleum sheen, were dull.
They looked like slate. He was rapidly losing heat.
The air around him, which usually rippled with thermal distortion, was stagnant.
He walked with his head low, his massive, horned snout nearly scraping the ground, his tail dragging behind him like a dead weight.
Cold, his mind projected into the bond. It wasn't a thought; it was a sensation. A shivering, reptilian lethargy. The fire is sleeping.
"Wake it up, lizard," I muttered, though it came out as a series of low, chirping whines. I nudged his flank with my shoulder. He felt like cold stone and didn't even growl at me. He just kept trudging, one heavy foot in front of the other, eyes glazed over with a milky film.
Kaelen was forgetting that he was a Prince. He was just becoming a big lizard looking for a rock to die under.
I looked back at Thane.
If Kaelen was cold, Thane was heavy. The Bear Prince was sinking. With every step, his massive paws punched through the surface of the iron plain, plunging ankle-deep into the material as if it were mud. He had to physically wrench his limbs free with a wet sucking sound that made my hackles rise.
Thump. Squelch. Drag.
He was crying. Great, silent tears tracked through the fur on his face, matting it down.
He wasn't sobbing; he was just leaking grief. The gravity in his soul, amplified by the Titan-blood we’d absorbed, was reacting to the density of the Underworld.
He wanted to be the floor. He wanted to stop moving and let the sediment settle over him.
And Elias... Elias was a flickering candle in a hurricane. He rode on Kaelen’s back, a huddled mass of feathers that sparked and sputtered. Sometimes he was a bird. Sometimes he was a geometric shape of light that hurt to look at. Sometimes he was just a pile of ash that sneezed.
We were devolving. The sophisticated, complex consciousness of the "Princes" was being stripped away by the environment, leaving only the raw, elemental animal underneath. And the animal was terrified.
Come here, Wolf.
The voice cut through the static in my head. Smooth. Metallic. Solid.
Aria.
I looked at her.
She was the only thing in this grey wasteland that looked real. She walked in the center of us, her gait slightly uneven because of the metal leg, but relentless. The light of her markings cut through the gloom, pulsing with a rhythm that was faster, sharper, than any of ours.
She reached out a hand, the flesh one, toward me.
I moved to her instantly. I didn't think about it; I was a magnet, and she was the North Pole. I pressed my massive head into her palm.
The contact was electric.
It wasn't magic, exactly. It was memory.
Her skin smelled of sulfur from the forge, but underneath that, it smelled of her. When she touched me, the static in my brain cleared. I remembered that my name was Flynn. I remembered that I liked knives, and bad jokes, and the way the light hit her hair in the morning.
"Stay with me," she whispered. Her voice had that strange double-tone now, human and harmonic. "Don't chase the shadows, Flynn. They aren't real."
They sound real, I projected back, feeling the shame curl in my gut. I was the scout. I was supposed to be the eyes and ears. Instead, I was jumping at dust motes.
"They're just echoes," she said, scratching behind my ear, right in the spot that made my hind leg twitch. "Look at me. I'm real."
She didn't stop walking. She couldn't. We realized hours ago, or maybe minutes, time seemed broken here, that if we stopped, the floor started to eat us.
Aria moved from me to Kaelen, but she didn't coddle the Dragon, instead she smacked his flank with her metal hand. CLANG.
Kaelen jerked, his head snapping up, his nostrils flaring.
"Eyes up, Kaelen," she ordered. "You are the Vanguard. If you drag your tail, I'm going to step on it."
Kaelen huffed, a puff of weak grey smoke escaping his jaws. But his eyes cleared. The milky film receded, revealing the golden slit-pupil. He grumbled, a low vibration that traveled through the floor, but he lifted his tail.
She moved to the rear, dropping back to walk beside Thane.
The Bear was struggling. He had sunk to his knees in a patch of particularly soft iron. He had stopped trying to pull himself out. He was just staring at the horizon, waiting to become geology.
Aria grabbed a handful of his fur. She didn't try to pull him out; she wasn't strong enough to move a Titan-Bear. Instead, she leaned her forehead against his massive shoulder.
"I need a wall, Thane," she said softly. I could hear her because my ears were tuned to her frequency like a homing beacon. "The wind is cold here. I need you to block it."
There was no wind. The air was dead.
But Thane blinked. The concept of protection was etched deeper into him than gravity.
He grunted, a sound of immense effort. Muscles bunched under his fur, rolling like boulders under a tarp.
He ripped his legs free of the iron muck, shattering the crust, and took a step.
Then another. He positioned himself on her left, blocking the non-existent draft.
She was herding us. She was a sheepdog moving four monsters across a wasteland, keeping us from wandering off into oblivion.
And it was killing her.
I could smell it.
Under the scent of the forge and the sweat, there was something new. Something sharp and acidic. It smelled like ozone leaking from the sky before a storm. It smelled like stress fractures.
I fell back a few paces, letting Kaelen take the lead, and watched her.
Every time she touched us, every time she shoved a memory into our feral brains to keep us human, the light in her metal arm flared blindingly bright, then dimmed to a dull, throbbing purple. She stumbled more often. Her breath hitched in her chest, a rattling sound that scared the hell out of me.
She wasn't just guiding us. She was holding us. That low violet hum from the iron plain, the tether she'd thrown around our minds, she hadn't dropped it. Not for a second. She'd been carrying it for hours. Maybe days. However long this place measured time.
We were massive engines of destruction running on empty, and she was siphoning her own soul into our tanks to keep us turning over.
Aria, I whined, trotting up to nudge her hip with my nose. Rest. You need to stop.
"Can't," she said, not looking at me. She kept her eyes fixed on the bone map she held in her metal hand. "If we stop, Thane sinks. If we stop, Kaelen goes dormant. We walk."
You smell like burning metal, I told her.
"I'm fine," she lied.
She wasn't fine. She was losing color. Her flesh side was pale, the veins standing out in stark blue relief, while her metal side looked... stretched.
We marched.
The landscape didn't change, but the feeling of it did. The silence grew heavier, denser. It felt less like an empty room and more like a mouth closing.
My instincts were screaming. The sensory deprivation was making my brain manufacture threats. I saw shapes in the peripheral vision, things made of smoke that vanished when I turned my head. I heard the click-click-click of claws on metal that weren't ours.
I started to drift. I ranged out to the left, following a scent that smelled like rain. It wasn't real, it couldn't be, but I needed it to be real. I needed something clean to fill my lungs.
I trotted faster, moving away from the group. The grey fog swallowed them up terrifyingly fast. Just twenty feet away, and Kaelen’s massive bulk was just a shadow.
Flynn.
The voice wasn't Aria's. It was the rain scent.
Come here, little wolf. We have rabbits.
I stopped. My ears perked up. Rabbits? Warm, beating hearts? The hunger cramped my stomach, a sudden, violent ache. I hadn't eaten in... what? A thousand years? Three days?
I took a step toward the darkness.
Come hunt, the whisper promised. No cages here. Just teeth and meat.
It sounded so good. It sounded so easy. Just let go of the Prince. Let go of the guilt. Be the beast. Beasts don't have to save the world. Beasts just eat.
I lowered my head, a growl building in my throat. I could feel the change rippling through me, the simplifying of my thoughts. Run. Bite. Kill.
"Flynn!"
The shout was harmonic, metallic, and furious.
A rock bounced off my skull.
I yelped, spinning around, snarling.
Aria was standing ten yards away, her arm extended. She had thrown a chunk of loose iron ore at me.
"Get your furry ass back in formation!" she yelled. Her eyes were blazing, one violet and one amber and gold.
The spell broke. The scent of rain vanished, replaced by the sterile vacuum of the Underworld. The rabbits were gone. I was standing on the edge of a fissure that dropped away into absolute blackness. One more step, and I would have fallen forever.
I scrambled back, tail tucked between my legs, shivering violently.
I... I heard...
"I know," she said, her voice softening as I slunk back to her side. She didn't hit me again. She reached out and grabbed my ruff, twisting her fingers into the fur. She yanked me down until my giant snout was level with her face.
"Listen to me," she whispered, pressing her forehead against my nose. Her skin was fever-hot. "The Devourer wants you to leave the pack. It wants you alone. If you go into the dark, Flynn, I can't pull you back."
I'm sorry, I whined. It's loud in my head. The quiet is loud.
"I know," she repeated. She closed her eyes, and I felt a pulse of energy travel from her hand into my neck.
It was a memory. Not a big one. Just the two of us existing together, but it grounded me. It pushed the cold, hungry void out of my brain.
"Better?" she asked.
Better.
"Good. Now check on Elias. He looks like a dying fire."
I moved back into position, but I kept my shoulder pressed against her leg. I needed the friction, the proof that she was there.
But as I walked beside her, feeling her limp get worse, watching the way she winced every time she put weight on her flesh leg, I saw it.
It was subtle. You wouldn't see it if you weren't looking with wolf eyes, if you weren't hyper-attuned to the breaking point of things.
On her left shoulder, where the star-metal fused with her neck, there was a glow. Not the healthy pulse of her markings from the magic she carried within.
This was a jagged, white-hot line. A crack.
A hairline fracture in the divine alloy.
It ran from her collarbone up toward her ear. And every time she pushed energy into the bond, every time she woke Kaelen up, or pulled Thane out of the mud, or grounded me, the crack pulsed brighter.
She wasn't just tired. She was coming apart at the seams.
We were too heavy. We were Titan-blooded monsters dragging an anchor through the bedrock of hell, and the anchor was just a girl. One infused with magic and power, yes, but still just a girl.
She's breaking, I realized, the horror bubbling up in my throat like bile. It didn’t matter that she’d been remade, that she’d stepped into the Primordial Flame and come back out whole, whatever had happened, whatever power she was tapping into in order to keep us sane was destroying her.
I looked at Kaelen. He didn't see it. He was too busy fighting the cold. Thane was too busy fighting the gravity. And Elias could barely exist at all.
We were eating her alive, just by existing.
I wanted to tell her to stop. I wanted to tell her to drop the leash and let us go into the dark, because anything was better than watching her shatter.
But then she stumbled, and Kaelen’s wing shot out to catch her, and Thane moved his massive bulk to shield her, and she looked up at us with a fierce, terrifying love that said she would burn to ash before she let us go.
So I didn't say anything. I just pressed closer, offering my warmth, my strength, my motion, desperate to patch the cracks we were making.
Just a little further, Pup, I prayed to gods that weren't listening. Just get us to the Well before you break.
We walked on into the silence, and the crack on her shoulder glowed like a countdown in the dark.