Chapter 5
FIVE
Aria
The cold was different here.
Up on the iron plains, the cold had been a physical thing, an absence of heat that numbed the skin, but as we descended toward the scar where the Phlegethon River was supposed to flow, the cold became something spiritual.
It was a parasite. It didn't just sit on your skin; it hooked unseen claws into your chest and pulled, dragging the warmth out of your blood, the memories out of your head, the will out of your bones.
We were walking down a ravine that looked like a throat slit in the world's crust. The walls were jagged obsidian, slick with a frost that shouldn't exist this close to a volcanic artery.
But the Phlegethon wasn’t flowing.
Below us, the river of fire that legend said circled the Underworld was nothing but a sluggish, grey sludge. It moved like cooling tar, crusting over with black scabs. The heat that should have been radiating from it was being eaten before it could reach us.
And Kaelen was dying.
The Dragon Prince had stopped walking ten minutes ago.
He had collapsed onto a shelf of black rock, his massive body heaving.
His scales, usually a brilliant, light-eating black that shimmered with an internal furnace, were dull.
They looked like slate. Frost, actual, white frost, was webbed across his wings.
For a creature of fire, this environment wasn't just hostile. It was poison.
"Kaelen," I rasped, sliding down to reach him. My boots sparked against the stone.
He didn't lift his head. A low, rattling wheeze escaped his jaws, followed by a puff of smoke that was thin and grey, smelling of wet ash instead of sulfur.
Cold, his mind projected. The thought was faint, a whisper across a bad connection. The pilot light... is out.
"Thane!" I yelled, looking back up the slope. "We need shelter. Now."
The Bear Prince was already moving. He pointed a massive paw toward a fissure in the cliff face, a volcanic vent that was emitting a faint, sickly heat. It wasn't much, but it was warmer than the open ravine.
"Move him," I ordered.
It took all of us. Thane shoved from the back, his stone muscles straining against Kaelen’s immense bulk. Flynn pulled at the dragon’s forelegs. Elias fluttered nervously around Kaelen's head, trying to use his own dimming light to guide the way.
We dragged him into the vent. It was a small cavern, barely big enough to contain the dragon, smelling of rotten eggs and old earth. The heat here was palpable, but weak, like the inside of an oven that had recently been used but left open.
Kaelen slumped against the back wall, his tail curling loosely around him. His golden eyes were half-closed, the slit pupils blown wide and unseeing. He was shivering, a terrifying, tectonic shaking that scraped his scales against the stone floor.
"If his core temperature drops below the ignition point, he won't wake up," Elias warned, his voice vibrating with panic. "The Dragon is a fusion reaction, Aria. If the reaction stops, the star dies."
I placed my flesh hand on Kaelen’s snout. It was freezing.
My heart hammered a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I looked at the others. Thane was exhausted, barely holding his form. Flynn was pacing, snapping at invisible flies. We were all running on fumes, but Kaelen was the fire. If we lost the fire, the darkness wins.
"Get out," I said.
Flynn stopped pacing. What?
"Guard the entrance," I commanded, my voice hard, vibrating with the harmonic metallic resonance of my new throat. "I need to jumpstart him. And I don't think he'd want me to do it with an audience."
Thane looked at me, his brown eyes deep and knowing. He saw the desperation in my stance, the way my star-metal arm was beginning to glow.
Hold the line, Thane rumbled to the others. He grabbed Flynn by the scruff of his neck and dragged him toward the tunnel mouth. Elias hovered for a second, looking from me to Kaelen, then bowed his head and followed.
Silence descended on the cave, heavy and suffocating, broken only by Kaelen’s ragged, wet breathing.
I turned back to the dragon.
"Kaelen," I said, stepping closer. "Shift."
His eye opened a fraction. Too... cold. Can't...
"You have to," I said, stripping off my heavy outer coat. The air in the cave was biting, raising gooseflesh on my human arm immediately. "I can't warm a dragon. There’s too much mass. You need to be small. Tou need to be human."
He groaned, a sound of heavy stones grinding together. Pain. Magic says no.
"I know," I whispered, pressing my forehead against his cold scales. "I know it hurts. I know the magic doesn't want you to. Do it anyway."
He shifted.
Suddenly, bones began to audibly snap and rearrange themselves. Muscles tore and re-knit. He screamed, a raw, guttural sound that tore at my heart, as his mass compressed.
When the smoke cleared, he was human. Mostly.
He lay curled on the black rock, naked and shivering violently. His skin was pale, almost translucent, the blue veins standing out starkly. He looked smaller than I had ever seen him. Not the imperious Prince, not the General of armies. Just a man freezing to death in the dark.
I dropped to my knees beside him and pulled him into my arms.
It was like hugging a glacier. The cold radiating off him burned my skin. I wrapped my limbs around him, my flesh leg over his, my human arm around his shoulders, trying to encompass him, to share what little warmth I had.
"Kaelen," I murmured, rubbing his back frantically. "Wake up. Ignite."
He shuddered, his teeth chattering with a sound like dice in a cup. "A-Aria... leave... you'll freeze."
"Shut up," I said, pressing my face into the crook of his neck. "I'm not going anywhere."
But it wasn't working.
I could feel my own body heat being sucked into him and vanishing, swallowed by the void inside his chest. He wasn't just cold; he was empty. The Underworld's atmosphere had siphoned his essence. Physical heat wasn't enough. Biology was too weak a weapon for this war.
I pulled back, looking at him. His lips were blue. His eyes were rolling back in his head.
I looked at my left arm. Star-metal was conductive. It was designed to channel energy. It had held the Titan's heartbeat. It had channeled the Anvil's strike.
I realized then what I had to do. I didn't need to warm him. I need to strike him. I needed to become a live wire.
"Kaelen," I said, my voice changing, dropping into that command register that resonated with the metal in my blood. "Look at me."
I straddled his hips, ignoring the biting cold of his skin against my thighs. I grabbed his face with both hands, one flesh, one metal.
The metal hand hissed when it touched his frozen cheek.
"I'm going to give it back to you," I said.
He blinked, confusion warring with the torpor. "Give... what?"
"The fire," I said. "I'm the conductor, Kaelen. I'm the bridge."
I didn't wait for permission. I closed my eyes and reached inward, past the exhaustion, past the fear, down to the molten core of magic I had absorbed from the Titan, from the Forge, from the bond itself.
I pushed it into my arm.
The runes etched into my silver skin flared. First a dull red, then a bright orange. Searing heat flooded my veins.
I pressed my metal palm flat against the center of his chest, right over his heart.
Kaelen gasped, his back arching off the stone.
"Feel it," I commanded.
I wasn't gentle. I couldn't be. This wasn't a caress; it was a shock. I pushed the energy out of my lattice and into his flesh. I felt resistance, the cold density of his void-poisoned soul trying to block the current.
I pushed harder.
"Take it!" I screamed.
Kaelen’s hands flew up, gripping my waist. His fingers dug into my hips, bruisingly hard. He wasn't pushing me away; he was anchoring himself.
His eyes snapped open, locking onto mine. The gold was swirling, panicked.
"I've been holding back," he choked out, his voice scraping like sandpaper. "Afraid that if I gave you all of me, the dragon would consume you."
I leaned down, pressing my chest against his, heart to heart. The heat between us began to rise, turning the sweat on our bodies into steam. I looked deep into those terrified, ancient eyes.
"Then let it consume me," I whispered fiercely. I grabbed his hair, pulling his head back, forcing him to bare his throat. "Let it burn me. Hephaestus himself reforged me, I can take your fire."
I kissed him.
It wasn't a kiss of affection. It was a seal. A closed circuit.
The moment our lips met, the dam broke.
Pain exploded through me. It wasn't the dull ache of a wound; it was the searing, purifying agony of the furnace. Kaelen gasped into my mouth, and the dragon woke up.
He didn't maintain the human facade. He couldn't.
The psychic weight of the Dragon slammed into my mind. I felt the urge to hoard, to burn, to fly, to destroy. I felt the millennia of rage and the crushing loneliness of the Gate. It poured into me through the connection, hot and heavy and overwhelming.
My star-metal skin began to glow white-hot.
Clothes became unbearable. I tore at my armor, needing skin-to-skin contact everywhere. I needed to maximize the surface area of the conduction. I pressed my metal leg between his, wrapping myself around him like a coil around a magnet.
He surged up to meet me, his movements sudden and violent with renewed life. His hands roamed over me, one hand on my soft flesh, one on the hard metal plating of my back. Where he touched the metal, smoke rose.
It hurt. Gods, it hurt. It felt like I was being welded to him.
"More," I gasped against his mouth, tasting blood where I’d bitten his lip. "Don't hold back. Fill the lattice."
Kaelen groaned, a sound that started human and ended as a roar. He flipped us, pinning me to the hard, cold stone floor. His weight was crushing, but the cold was gone. He was burning up.
He entered me with a desperate, unified thrust, and the circuit closed completely.
White light exploded behind my eyelids.
The cave disappeared. I wasn't on the blackened rock of the Underworld anymore. I was floating in the center of a star.