8. Kaelor
KAELOR
I wake in the pod and cannot look at her.
The countdown is already running. The reset chill is already there. I look at the floor.
I lost the relics.
In the moment she reached the relic — the moment everything was finally, actually within reach — in that one half-second when I lost focus…
We lost everything.
I lost everything.
My window. The gap I left.
I press my fist against the pod wall. Not hammering — just pressure, just the need to push against something solid. I breathe.
I've been in the Games before. I know what they ask. I've survived arenas that should have killed the calculation permanently, and I kept going, because there was nothing in any previous cycle that made stopping feel like the worse option.
I love Olivia.
Not the bond mechanics. Not the relic amplification or the proximity or the Malquaran engineering of attachment — those things are real, and I'm not dismissing them, but they are not the full explanation for the weight of this.
For what it costs me right now not to turn my head.
For the difference between failing in an arena and failing her.
I love her. And she is one reset from an arena running out of platforms. And I am the reason I don't have my relic powers any longer.
The countdown hits three.
Finally, I look up.
Across the chamber, through the glass — I see Olivia.
Already looking at me. Direct and without performance, and when my eyes find hers, she doesn't look away.
“Two.”
She offers me a smile. A small smile. It’s okay, it says. We’re okay.
I turn my head away before the emotions overwhelm me as I wonder what I did to deserve someone like her. Someone so magnificent as her.
She’s better than I deserve. She’s everything I always wanted.
Then she puts her tiny hand flat against the glass.
“One.”
I put my hand against the glass opposite hers.
“Launch.”
The pod door opens.
She's already stepping out. She comes straight to me, I take her hand, and we run.
The route to Arena Three is the one our feet know best now. Every reset, every attempt — the same corridor, the same heat building as we near the threshold, the same ash thickening the air. Our bodies know it. We don't have to think about it anymore.
But this time, I turn left before we reach the threshold.
Olivia matches the direction, a question curling her brows. But she doesn’t give it voice. Her fingers tighten around mine and she runs with me.
We press into a side passage, shallow, barely an alcove. I pull her against the inner wall and put myself between her and the corridor.
The rivals come through.
Syrox first. Then the others. Moving fast, toward Arena Three, toward the shrinking platforms and the fixed eruption cycle.
We stand still in the dark until the last footfall fades.
“Kaelor, what are you?—”
I put a finger to my lips for quiet before leading her away toward Arena One.
She doesn't say anything at first.
She likely assumes I have a plan. That this is tactical — a route, a strategy, something I've worked out in the pod that requires this detour before we loop back.
She walks beside me through the threshold.
She recognizes it, of course, reading the environment, scanning, looking for the reason that brought us here.
Then she looks at me. "Kaelor?"
“Not here,” I tell her, and lead her deeper into the arena.
The Ashfall Ruins spread before us like the welcoming arms of a corpse.
There are the same buildings we moved through in the first round, now deeper under their grey coat, more collapsed, the ash accumulated in drifts against the broken walls.
A chair, half-buried. The remnant of a table.
The sadness of ordinary objects in a place where ordinary life stopped happening a very long time ago.
Lava veins crawl through the gutters, slow and glowing. Ash drifts down in lazy curtains.
These ruins smell like home.
It’s the ash, I realize. The mineral bite of it. The weight of it floating in the air, identical to what fell on Kael'Rath the day the mountain awoke. My mother's hands on my shoulders. The evca pods. The grey snow of it falling while she pushed me forward and told me not to look back.
I find a hollow — the space between two collapsed sections near the inner wall, sheltered, sightlines clear — settle against the stone.
After a moment, Olivia sits beside me.
She doesn't speak immediately. She's looking at the ruins. At the buildings frozen mid-collapse, the walls caught in the moment of their destruction. She has the expression of someone who has realized something and is waiting to find out if she's right.
"You're not planning anything, are you?" she says.
I look to the rubble at my feet.
"Kaelor?"
"The arena three platform is almost gone," I say.
"We have a few more attempts left. Two. Three. Maybe four. It’s hard to know for sure.
" I turn the words over before I say them, the way you turn something over when you know you only get to say it once.
"I've been in the Games before, Olivia. I know what it looks like when the countdown runs out.
" I pause. "I want to be somewhere else when it finally does. "
She's very still. I pull her hands close, hug her tight.
"With you. "
There’s a deep silence after I say it. I hear the distant note of the volcano, the settling of ash on stone, the faint deep rhythm of lava moving somewhere below us. The Games, doing what they do. Totally indifferent to our suffering.
"You've given up," she says.
"I'm being realistic."
"No, you've given up." Her voice has something in it I haven't heard before — not anger, not yet. Something that precedes anger. "After everything we've done. After everything we've been through." She stops. Starts again. "We won two relics. And almost had the third."
"Varketh has the my relics now. Botht he armor and the crown. And the platform is almost gone. We’ve tried to cross the lake so many times. And we both know we can’t do it again. Not without the relics."
"So we find another way."
"Olivia."
"We find another way, Kaelor." She's glaring at me now with those perfect brown eyes. "That's what we do. That's what we've done every single time this arena has closed a door on us. We find another way."
"There isn't one!" I snap with more heat than I intended. "We’ve tried every possible way to cross the platforms together. And we failed. We can’t get across in time. It’s impossible.
" I look at her, wishing she would see reason.
"I'm not saying this to hurt you, Olivia. You know it’s what I want.
To escape this place. This hell. To be with you.
I'm saying it because it's true and because you deserve to know it from me rather than discover it yourself when the volcano erupts for the last time and… "
I turn away from her.
“And what? ”
“And they split us up. They’ll put you in another Mating Games. With other males. And they’ll do the same with me.”
She puts a hand to my back and it makes my scales shiver. “So maybe they’ll put us together again.”
I snort. “That requires the Malquarans to have mercy and they have none.”
“You don’t know that?—”
“I do!” I say, turning back to her. “The most entertaining thing that can happen is always the one that does. And that means you and me, pining after each other, wishing we could be together again. To have another chance. Another Mating Game with other rules. Instead, they will make up ways to torture us. To being us close… but never quite together. I’ve seen it happen before.
I won’t let you go through something like that. I won’t.”
She looks at me for a long moment.
Then she looks away.
I watch the movement of her face. From resistance to something more fragile. She presses her lips together. Her jaw tightens. She blinks once, hard.
"We were so close…" she says.
"I know."
"We were right there." Her voice drops. "I had it in my hands."
"So did I."
She pulls her knees up to her chest and wraps her arms around them.
She stares at the ruined buildings across the hollow and I watch her do the thing I watched her not do across every reset, every arena, every pod — I watch her let it land.
The weight of it. The real possibility that this is how it ends .
It’s the bravest thing I've seen her do in these Games and that is saying something.
I put my arm around her. She doesn't resist. She leans into it, her shoulder against my chest. We sit in the ash-quiet of the first arena and let it be what it is.
The ground shakes but it’s nothing compared to the third arena’s rumbles.
A slow Arena One tremor. Diminished. the echo of an arena that has already done its worst. It passes in three seconds. Ash shifts from the broken walls around us and settles.
"I keep thinking about the armor," I say.
She's quiet.
"You burned yourself alive for it. You removed it from your own head and threw it onto the platform so you could reset." I look at my hands. "And I lost it in thirty seconds."
"You didn’t lose it. Varketh stole it."
"I should have seen him. I should have seen him come up behind me."
"You were focused on the final relic. Focused on winning." She just leans slightly harder into my side.
We sit.
The bond runs between us at its resting frequency. Not as strong as when I had the relic powers but still there. It’ll be what tortures me the most when we’re forced to restart on another platform.
I love her. Olivia. I realize I always have. From the very first moment I set eyes on her.