6. Kaelor #2
She shuts her eyes and tries to told the tears back but they peel down her cheeks anyway. “It was… so painful, Kaelor. I’ve never felt pain like that before. The magma. The heat… ”
She doesn’t need to say more. I can tell from her face, from the slight set of her jaw, from the way she's watching me out the corner of her eye with an expression that is both defiant and careful at the same time. Like she's trying to read how I'm going to take this.
I know because I told her — I told her come back to me and the only way to come back was to reset, and the only way to reset without mating and claiming the relic was to?—
She threw herself into the magma.
She removed her crown and threw herself into it. And she burned.
The thought arrives complete and hits me all at once, the full sequence of it — what it means, what it would have felt like, the absolute horror of what she chose to do just to be with me again.
Something happens in my chest that I don't have a word for, that isn't one single thing but is instead everything at once: fury and grief and a devotion so intense it feels like it should have its own word and meaning.
She chose that.
She chose that rather than give herself to Varketh.
She chose to burn rather than betray me.
She stood in the magma and screamed and died a terrible death.
Just to return to me. And she’s been running through this arena without her crown, without saying a single word about it because she didn't want to slow us down.
"Kaelor," she says, reading my face. “Don’t be angry at me. Please.”
"Angry?" I say. “How could I ever be angry at you?”
I step toward her and she doesn't step back. She tilts her head up and holds my gaze with the full force of that grey stare .
"It worked," she says, thumbing a tear out the corner of her eye.
"Olivia—"
" It worked, " she says again, and this time there's something underneath the calm.
Something that isn't calm at all. "I’m standing here. I am fine. We are moving toward the next relic. You are alive and I am alive, and everything I did to make that happen I would do again. I would do it a thousand times if I had to.”
She raises her chin at me in defiance. This brave little human.
“I would die a thousand deaths if it meant it brought me back to you. Nothing is as painful as never seeing you again. Or seeing you as less than I should be. Shared. With some other male.”
I look at her for a long moment.
The arena breathes — heat and ash and the distant, building roar of the volcano reminding us that patience is not a resource we can afford to spend.
The sounds of pursuit resumed in the passages behind us. Not close yet. Not close enough. But not absent.
I take her face in my hands.
She goes still.
I hold her face carefully and look at her — at this small, complicated, completely impossible creature who jumped into magma for me — and I try to find the words for what I'm feeling.
But they're not there in my language, likely not in any language in the known universe, so I press my forehead against hers instead, and burn the most valuable resource we have in this place: time.
We stand there for three seconds in the middle of the arena with ash sailing down and the volcano building below, and I breathe her in.
"I've got you," I say, against her forehead .
Her hands come up and find my wrists, and she holds them.
"I know," she says. Quiet. Certain. "I know you do."
I pull back. I look at her once more — at the bare skin of her temples where the crown should be, at the heat flush on her cheeks that has nothing to do with embarrassment — and I bend down to pick her up.
"Oh!" She grabs my shoulders reflexively. "What are you?—"
"Carrying you through the high heat sections." I settle her against my chest. Her feet dangle. She weighs nothing to me, or close to nothing — there's no effort in it, just the logistics of managing one more variable with both hands occupied. "It will be faster."
She stares at me. "Will it actually be faster or is this a you thing?"
I can’t help but smile. "Can’t it be both?"
A pause. Then, against her better judgment, her arms settle around my neck. "Fine," she says. "But I'm navigating."
The second arena section is designed, I think, to punish the unprepared.
The platforms are still there, but the magma channels have narrowed and deepened. The heat that rises from them is more concentrated, vertical columns that you either step through or go around. And going around costs time the eruption cycle is not interested in giving you.
The ash fall has thickened. It comes down in curtains rather than flurries, grey-white and dense, coating every surface measured in inches, and cutting visibility to less than forty yards .
Syrox would be in his element. Gas vents and ash density are his domain, after all.
As if on cue, the first vent erupts.
It comes from a seam in the platform stone twenty yards ahead — a sudden pressurized release, yellow-tinged gas and superheated air that shoots upward and begins to spread.
Syrox's work, or his natural territory triggering in his vicinity. Either way, the result is the same: a chemical fog drifting across our path that would, for a human without a crown's protection, be an immediate problem.
I turn my shoulder into it and shield her face against my chest and move fast, holding my breath, cutting through the outer edge of the vent cloud rather than routing around it.
My species processes heat differently. My respiratory system can handle short exposures that would compromise hers.
Eleven seconds through the worst of it, moving at pace, and we're through.
I breathe again as she lifts her head and coughs once, sharp, and clears it.
"Ow," she says.
"Twelve more yards," I tell her. "Then the platform drops. I'm going to?—"
"Jump," she says. "I know. I felt the angle change."
She felt the angle. Through my body, through the way I was carrying her, she read the change in my stride and extrapolated the jump. I look at her face, which is turned toward the terrain ahead with an expression of calm tactical assessment, and I think: this creature is extraordinary.
I jump.
We land on the far platform and I take two running steps to bleed the momentum. Then we're moving again, full pace, and the sounds of pursuit behind us are getting louder as the competitors clear whatever was slowing them .
I hear Thren first — his footsteps are, as always, unmistakable, the ground speaking his name clearly — and then a sound I've been waiting for: two of them fighting. Not running. Not navigating the platforms. Fighting each other, apparently over something as simple as who takes the lead.
"It’ll buy us some time," Olivia says.
I glance at her. No way she could have heard them fighting with her puny human ears.
"Your shoulders changed," she says with a shrug. "They do that when the threat downshifts."
I grind my teeth, mildly annoyed. No one could ever read me. It was how I managed to survive in the military so long.
The passage to the third arena appears ahead: a narrow corridor of stone between two columns of volcanic rock, barely wide enough for one at a time.
I put Olivia down.
She lands on her feet immediately, already looking at the corridor. Already assessing.
“We need more time if we’re going to claim the relic before they cross the boundary like they did last time.” She purses her lips. "How many can come through the tunnel at once?"
"One," I say. "Maybe one and a half, depending on the species."
She turns slowly and looks back toward the sounds of pursuit — at the platforms, at the layout of the terrain between us and them.
"What's on this platform?" she says. "Around us. What can you see?"
I look.
The platform is broad and rough, scattered with the debris of previous arena cycles — pieces of volcanic rock in various sizes, one section of what appears to be collapsed bridging material, the dark, heavy stone used in the Games' infrastructure.
Dense. Load-bearing. The chunk of it nearest to us is roughly a yard long and half a yard across, irregular-edged.
"Grab one," she says. “Big enough to fit in the tunnel but not in the narrower sections.”
I shake my head. "It will cost us time."
She turns and looks at me with an expression I'm beginning to recognize as her I'm about to be very correct about something expression. "We don't have time not to do this."
I sigh and grab a piece of the bridging material. “Go!” I bellow.
She runs into the narrow corridor as I drag the lump behind me.
The other males are closing on our position now. I hiss through my teeth. This was a mistake. We should have just tried to bolt through the final level.
I back up into the tunnel as far as I can before I hear the angry howls and shrieks of the rampaging creatures, already entering the tunnel.
I growl and let the material go, assuming a fighting stance.
“Run!” I shout.
I turn and follow her, ducking to keep my head from banging on the overhangs.
The material grinds, sliding down the tunnel as the rivals hammer at it. Then — it stops. Glancing back, I notice the material is wedged in a narrow section, forced tighter in the space as the creatures hammer and beat at it.
And then the sound of two of them turning on each other in their frustration, which is, frankly, the most predictable thing that has happened in this arena .
Olivia glances at me.
"You're welcome," she says with a grin.
"My effort," I grunt.
"My idea," she says, poking out her tongue.
The third arena section arrives in stages.