Chapter 8
Chapter
Eight
MELODY
T he world finally stops shaking. For a heartbeat, even the wind forgets itself.
Only our horses move—steam rising from their flanks, breath ghosting white against the night. The rest of the range has gone still, as if the mountain itself is holding its breath.
My pulse won’t settle. I can still feel him through the bond, faint but there—like a second heartbeat under my skin. Every few moments it flickers, a reminder that the cabin still echoes through us both.
Maveryk slides from his saddle first, boots crunching over frost. “Here,” he says, voice low, scanning the shadows. “We can’t stay in the open.”
I dismount clumsily, legs trembling, and stroke Sunshine’s neck to steady us both. The bracelet on my wrist gives one last weak shimmer before fading to silver. The air tastes of snow and iron.
“They stopped following?” I whisper.
He looks back toward the ridge, eyes narrowing. “For now.”
The way he says it makes me glance over my shoulder, too. The sky is empty, but the silence feels unnatural … like the pause between thunder and lightning strike.
He nods toward a narrow slit in the cliffside. “There’s shelter in there.”
We lead the horses through the gap, rock scraping the stirrups, every sound amplified by the hush. The air cools further, carrying the scent of iron and wet stone. My breath fogs in front of me. His doesn’t.
When the passage opens at last, I almost stumble forward. The cavern is small but luminous, a pocket of blue light spilling from a crack above. The walls glitter with frozen veins, like stars caught in ice.
“It’s beautiful,” I murmur. My voice trembles.
“Old mining tunnels,” he says, tethering the horses near a frozen pool. “The Sentinels can’t track resonance through this much ore. Least I don’t think so.” His mind is a swirl, dancing over forgotten family remembrances. Finding new weight and meaning in superstition and folk wisdom.
I kneel beside a deep-cut vein. It hums faintly beneath my palm, answering something deep in my chest. “It’s singing,” I whisper.
“Everything that hums is alive,” he says. His voice softens, almost reverent.
The glow from the pool touches his face—half light, half shadow—and for a heartbeat he looks unreal again, like something the stars forgot to reclaim. My throat tightens. “You knew this place was here.”
“My father called them the Silent Hollows,” he says, crouching beside me. “Said they were made when the mountain wept fire.”
The idea feels right somehow, grief carved into shelter. I press my hand to the minerals again, watching light travel outward from my fingers in soft ripples. “Maybe it remembers.”
He glances at me, something unreadable moving behind his eyes. “Maybe it does.”
Silence settles again, but it isn’t empty this time. It’s full … of breath, of shared warmth, of everything we haven’t dared to say.
He sits back, pulls me tightly into his arms, his warmth shrouding me. His hot breath warms the shell of my ear, and he murmurs, “Rest, Starlight. We’ll move north at dawn.”
“And if they find us?”
His gaze flicks upward, toward the dark crack in the ceiling letting stars through. Somewhere, the hum deepens like a sleeping heartbeat. “Then, the mountain won’t be the only thing waking.”
The words linger in the cold air—half promise, half omen—as the light flickers across the heat between us.
His skin vibrates low, a sound more inside me than out, like a lullaby urging me to sleep. I yawn, press my head to his chest, melting in his warmth. It feels like completeness, destiny, despite everything.
“Those things at the cabin…” A shiver slides down my spine, memory seizing me. They moved like machines built from memory. Too fluid, too human. The kind of precision no heart should manage.
“The Hollowed. Ironfolk. Forged Ones. The stuff of legends until now.”
“Like robots?”
“Like things that don’t dream. Don’t bleed, just hum the orders of ghosts. Don’t worry, Starlight. You’re safe now.”
I fight sleep, blinking against the pull of his frequency, wanting to memorize the sound of him before the dark takes me. “But Grandpa and Grandma…”
His big hand strokes my cheek. “They know you’re with me?” he asks, rugged and dark.
I nod, yawning again, unable to fight the frequency pulling me under. His jaw muscle ticks. “Then, they know I’ll protect you to my last breath.”
My hand finds the back of his neck, fingers tangling in his silky hair. He kisses the tip of my nose, and I chuckle softly, drifting far away.
I startle, listening, frozen. I don’t know how long I’ve slept before the hum changes—no longer a song but a warning.
At first, it’s faint, tucked into the wind beyond the cave. Then, it sharpens, gaining teeth, rising through the stone like a bullet through bone.
I feel it before I hear it. A pressure. A presence.
Maveryk freezes. “That’s not the mountain,” he says quietly. “That’s them.”
The air in the cavern changes. The horses snort, muscles shuddering, hooves scraping against stone. My bracelet flares bright, a pulse of light that races up my arm. I grab it instinctively, skin sizzling, the air filling with the scent of burnt copper.
“Maveryk!”
He’s already moving, snatching up the illuminated dampener, thumb flying across its cracked surface. “They locked onto our signal … somehow,” he mutters. “It’s feeding them our position.”
“Then turn it off!”
“I can’t,” he growls, frustration bleeding into panic. “It’s syncing to your bracelet. The materials are resonating—feeding each other.”
The hum deepens. Static crawls through the air. Far above, through the split in the ceiling, I glimpse faint shapes in the clouds—three points of white light moving with impossible precision.
My breath catches. “They found us.”
“Not yet,” he says, but his voice betrays him. “The ore’s buying us time, but I don’t know for how long.”
The bracelet pulses again.
Once.
Twice.
Then steady, matching my heartbeat.
I can feel it pulling. Reaching for the dampener, answering its call. A tether made of sound.
“They’re talking to each other,” I whisper. “Like they know they belong.”
Maveryk meets my gaze. “Then one of them has to die.”
He steps closer, holding out his burned hand. “Give it to me.”
“No.” The word escapes before I think. The bond hums between us, amplifying my fear. “If you destroy it, you’ll destroy yourself.”
His expression softens, but his eyes stay fixed on mine. “Better me than you. You’re not meant to bear that kind of frequency.”
“I already am.” My voice shakes, but it’s true. I can feel it singing in my blood, ancient and familiar. The Songline families, the healers who hid his kind—it’s their echo, and it’s mine, too. “We can stop it together.”
He hesitates. “Melody?—”
“Trust me.”
The hum climbs higher, a shimmering chord, like the voices of the ancients rising through stone, my ancestors drawing close across the generations. The light above flares white. The Sentinels descend.
I grab the dampener with both hands, ignoring the burn that tears through my palms. Maveryk covers my hands with his own, his voice a low growl of pain and awe.
The two devices—mine and his—flare in unison, throwing wild light across the cavern.
I don’t think. I just feel . The bond threads through every nerve, his strength running into mine, my pulse answering his. We hold the devices together, their hums merging into a single, blinding frequency.
The cave screams.
The air splits.
For a moment, I think we’ve torn the world in two.
Then … silence.
Not absence, but relief.
The light dies. The hum fades.
Smoke curls from the ground where the bracelet and dampener once were. For a heartbeat I think I see them still—shapes made of light—then they crumble into ash.
My hands shake as I stare at the scorched skin of my wrist, a faint imprint of the bracelet burned into the flesh. Maveryk’s arm bears the same mark, higher up near his elbow.
The resonance scar . It syncs through both our minds, origin unknown. My knees buckle until I sit on the ground.
He exhales, voice ragged. “They can’t track us anymore.”
I nod, but my throat won’t work. The loss feels bigger than victory—like something sacred died to save us.
He crouches beside me, resting his forehead against mine. “You did it,” he whispers.
“No,” I breathe. “ We did.”
Somewhere in the silence between us, I understand: every ending hums with its beginning.
Outside, the first fingers of dawn brush the peaks. The aurora fades. But deep in the heart of the mountain, I swear I can still feel a pulse—soft, slow, waiting.