Chapter 7
SEVEN
Aria
The figure in the archway didn't attack. It didn't scream. It simply dissolved.
One moment, it was a rusted, hulking silhouette of an Olympian soldier; the next, it was a smudge of grey static on the lens of the world. It fell apart like wet ash, drifting away on a wind that didn't exist.
"Thane?" I asked, my voice tight.
The Bear Prince had stopped. His massive, stone-fused paws were buried deep in the shifting glass, but he wasn't looking at the ground anymore. He was staring at the empty archway with a recognition that turned the air in my lungs to ice.
I know this place, his thought rumbled into the bond. It wasn't the sturdy, tectonic thought of the protector I knew. It was fragile. It sounded like a crack running through granite.
"It's just glass, Thane," I said, stepping closer to his flank. The heat coming off him wasn't warm; it was feverish, a clammy, stifling humidity. "We're in the Underworld. It's just... geometry."
No, Kaelen cut in, moving up beside me. He had shifted back to his human form to conserve the supernova energy of his core, and he looked naked and terrifying in the grey light, his skin dusted with ash.
He squinted at the horizon. Look at the elevation, Aria.
The strategic choke point. The way the ridges funnel toward that central keep.
I looked. Really looked.
The jagged shards of void-glass were softening. The sharp, mathematical angles that Elias had been obsessing over were blurring, losing their definition. The ground wasn't obsidian anymore. It was mud. Grey, sucking, freezing mud that smelled of copper and latrines.
And the floating blocks of stone... they were arranging themselves. They stacked and fused until they weren't abstract art. They were walls. Shattered, blast-scarred battlements rising out of the mist.
"It's the Ridge," Kaelen whispered, the color draining from his face. "It's the fortress where the line broke."
The fog thickened. It rolled off the phantom battlements like steam from a cracked pipe, yellow-grey and heavy. It didn't swirl; it crawled. It moved over the ground with intent, seeking heat, seeking life.
And inside the fog, things were moving.
Contact, Flynn snarled. He backed up, pressing his haunches against my legs, his head whipping back and forth. Too many. Smell is wrong. Smell is... old.
Faces began to press out of the mist.
They weren't the spectral, translucent shades we had seen in Asphodel. These were… wet. They looked solid, carved from the grey muck of the landscape. Helmets dented by war hammers. Breastplates scarred by claws. Eyes that were wide, white, and terrified.
"Help us," a mouth formed. The sound was a hiss of static.
"General..." another whispered, the voice dripping like water.
Thane let out a sound that tore at my heart. It was a whimper, small and broken, coming from a throat built to roar at gods.
My men, Thane projected. The guilt hit me like a physical blow, staggering me. It was heavy, a suffocating blanket of lead. I told them to hold. I told them I was the wall.
"Thane, they aren't real," I shouted, grabbing a handful of his thick, matted fur. "It's the Devourer. It's using your memories!"
But Thane wasn't listening. He took a heavy, lumbering step toward the mist.
"No!" I yelled.
Or I tried to. The word died in my throat as the horror of the scene truly registered.
The soldier nearest to us, a young man with a spear broken in his chest, reached out toward Thane. His face was twisted in a plea, his mouth opening to beg for salvation.
But before the words could come out, the mist ate him.
It didn't swallow him whole. It unmade him.
I watched, paralyzed, as the soldier's jaw dissolved into grey mist. His eyes widened as his nose vanished, turning into smoke. He tried to scream, but he had no mouth. The sound of his plea turned into a high-pitched screech of static.
The soldier clawed at his own face, but his fingers turned to ash upon contact. In seconds, he was gone. Not dead. Erased.
Thane reared up.
The bear stood on his hind legs, towering into the gloom, a monolith of grief and stone. He roared, a sound of pure agony that shattered the silence of the Underworld.
DO NOT TAKE THEM!
His mental scream nearly deafened me.
He slammed his front paws down, intending to smash the earth, to fight the enemy.
But the earth didn't break. It liquefied.
The ground beneath Thane’s massive impact turned instantly into a slurry of grey quicksand. It wasn't natural mud; it was the physical manifestation of the Void's hunger. It rippled outward, hungry and sentient.
Thane! Elias shrieked from above, his phoenix fire sputtering as the air pressure dropped. The density! Moving mass is sinking!
Thane didn't try to pull free. He was staring into the fog, where a dozen more faces were manifesting.
"Orders, sir?" one face asked, half of its skull missing, leaking static instead of blood. "We can't hold..."
"Hold the line!" Thane bellowed back, his voice human and bear and earthquake intertwined. "I am coming!"
Crunch.
The sucking sound was loud and wet. The mud swallowed Thane’s legs up to the knees in a single gulp.
"He's too heavy," Kaelen shouted, lunging forward. He grabbed Thane’s flank, digging his fingers into the fur, planting his feet on a patch of semi-solid glass. "His soul is too heavy! The gravity is pulling him down!"
It wasn't physics. It was metaphysics. Thane carried the weight of the world, literally, since he commanded gravity, but he also carried the crushing weight of his failure at the Ridge. The Devourer had tuned the ground to the specific frequency of his guilt.
The more he grieved, the heavier he got. The heavier he got, the faster the Void ate him.
"Let me go," Thane rumbled, stopping his struggle. He looked at the dissolving faces of his men. "I belong with them. I am the captain."
He sank to his hips.
"No you don't!" I screamed.
I didn't think. I scrambled up the side of the sinking Titan-bear. My boots found purchase in his thick fur. I hauled myself up his mountainous back until I was perched behind his massive shoulders, right at the base of his neck.
The star-metal in my arm was screaming, burning hot against my skin, reacting to the sheer density of the void magic pooling around us.
"Thane, look at me!" I yelled, slamming my palms against the sides of his head. "They are gone! You can't save ghosts!"
He shook his head, a violent motion that nearly threw me off.
They are dying again, his thought was a sob. Look, Aria. Look at Sergeant Keller.
I looked. I couldn't help it. The bond forced my eyes to the specific patch of fog he was fixated on.
A grizzled warrior stood there. He looked solid. Real. He was looking right at Thane with eyes full of trust.
"We held them, sir," the Sergeant said. "Just like you said."
Then, the mist took him. It started at his feet. His legs simply stopped existing. The man looked down, surprised, as his torso began to flake away into grey smoke.
"Sir?" the Sergeant asked, his voice distorting, slowing down like a warping record. "Sir... I'm... f-fadddding..."
"KELLER!" Thane lunged.
The movement was catastrophic.
He threw his weight forward, trying to reach the dissolving phantom. The mud surged up, swallowing his chest. He was drowning in the earth. The grey sludge poured over his shoulders, coating my legs. It felt freezing. It burned like liquid nitrogen.
"Kaelen! Flynn!" I screamed.
Kaelen was there. The Dragon Prince didn't try to pull Thane out; he knew he couldn't move a mountain. Instead, Kaelen breathed fire.
He unleashed a torrent of white-hot flame directly onto the mud surrounding Thane.
The mud hissed and shrieked, an actual, vocal sound of pain. It crusted over, turning to fragile glass for a fleeting second before melting again.
Flynn was a blur of motion. He was running circles around us, snapping at the encroaching fog, biting the heads off the static-ghosts before they could speak, trying to silence the accusations before they reached Thane’s ears.
Shut up! Flynn snarled, tearing a phantom throat out. Shut up and leave him alone!
But Thane was gone. His eyes had rolled back. He was vibrating, a low frequency rumble that was destabilizing the very ground we stood on. He wasn't fighting the mud anymore; he was embracing it. He was accepting his punishment.
I could feel him slipping. Not just physically, but spiritually. The bond between us was stretching, thinning. His light, the warm, brown earth-tone of his soul, was dimming, being replaced by the same grey static that was eating his men.
"Thane!" I shouted, leaning over his ear. "I order you to stand up!"
He didn't respond. He sank lower, the mud touching his chin.
I realized then that commands wouldn't work. He was a soldier; he knew how to die for a cause. He was doing this because he believed he deserved it. He believed his weight was a burden to us, a danger to the mission, and a debt he owed to the dead.
I had to change the equation.
I let go of his head and wrapped my arms around his massive neck. I pressed my entire body against his burying fur. I engaged the star-metal lattice, pushing every ounce of my will into the connection.
I didn't pull. You can't pull a Titan.
I added weight.
I poured my own memories into him. Not the happy ones. I showed him the Citadel. I showed him the cold stone floor of my cell. I showed him the loneliness of the Gate. I showed him the terror I felt right now, the absolute, paralyzing fear of being left alone in the dark without him.
"You want to carry the weight?" I screamed into his mind, my voice cracking with desperation. "Then carry ME, you stubborn bastard! Don't you dare drop me!"
Thane froze. The mud rippled around his nose.
Aria?
"I am terrified, Thane!" I sobbed against his ear, letting the vulnerability bleed through the bond, raw and unfiltered. "The dark is too big. I can't do this without my wall. If you sink, I sink. If you die, I die right here with you."
The shudder that went through him was enough to crack the glass plains miles away.
He blinked. The grey film over his eyes cleared for a second, replaced by a flash of warm, frantic brown.
You... take the high ground, he mumbled, the thought confused.
"There is no high ground!" I yelled, slapping his snout. "You are the ground! Be the ground, Thane!"
The mud surged again, trying to cover his nose, to silence his breath.
A roar built in his chest. But it wasn't a roar of grief this time. It was a roar of rejection.
No.
The word was a tectonic plate snapping.
NO.
Thane slammed his front paws down, not onto where the ground should be, but onto the concept of the ground. He imposed his will on the liquefied reality. He used his Titan-blood not to sink, but to solidify.
Turn to stone, he commanded the Void.
A pulse of earth magic explosively expanded from his center.
CRACK.
The mud instantly calcified. It turned from soup to granite in a heartbeat, trapping him, but stopping the descent.
He heaved. A sound of tearing rock filled the air as he shattered the stone he had just created, ripping his massive body upward. He climbed out of his own grave, claw over claw, dragging the confusing reality of the Underworld with him.
He surged up, shaking the debris from his coat, and stumbled onto a patch of the ridge that Kaelen had scorched solid.
He collapsed there, panting, his breath coming in jagged gasps that steamed in the cold air.
I slid off his back, my legs shaking so hard I could barely stand. I fell against his side, burying my face in his flank.
"You idiot," I whispered, my voice trembling. "You absolute idiot."
The fog swirled angrily around us, the faces of the dead gibbering in static, furious that their meal had escaped.
Thane lifted his head. He looked at the dissolving face of Sergeant Keller.
"I failed you," Thane rumbled aloud, his voice rough with tears. "I failed all of you."
The Sergeant's face stuttered, half of it gone.
Thane lowered his head, his nose touching my hair.
"But I will not fail her," the Bear Prince growled. "Not today."
He turned his back on the ghosts. It was the hardest thing I had ever seen him do. He turned away from his penance and chose his present.
Move, Thane projected to the group. Before I change my mind.
"Go," I ordered Kaelen. "Get us out of the fog."
We ran. We scrambled over the phantom ruins of the fortress, slipping on the half-formed stones, running away from the static screams of the un-dead.
We didn't stop until the grey mist thinned and the crushing weight of the Ridge finally lifted, leaving us back on the silent, desolate plains of the void.
But as we walked, I noticed Thane kept his shoulder pressed against mine, harder than strictly necessary. He wasn't just guarding me. He was leaning on me.
And for the first time, the massive, unmovable Bear Prince felt trembling-light.