Chapter 21
“There are moments when the world narrows down to one heartbeat, one breath, one person. Everything else either survives it with you or burns away.” ~Nick
The foundations screamed. The sound tore through the mountain hard enough to knock Kara sideways, ripping across the chamber in a high, splintering wail that did not belong to anything living.
Nick caught her before she hit the stone, one arm locking around her waist, the other bracing against the trembling platform beneath them.
The entire chamber lurched violently. Cracks exploded across the massive circular platforms surrounding the abyss, jagged white lines racing outward like spider legs scrambling in every direction at once.
Troll warriors shouted in their harsh language, their voices breaking apart against the rumble.
Silver-gold light surged wildly through the fractures below, no longer pulsing in rhythm but thrashing, beating itself bloody against the dark like something wounded beneath the roots of the realms.
Dust thundered from the unseen ceiling overhead, falling in slow, heavy curtains that turned the air gritty against Nick’s tongue.
The black corruption spread faster now. No longer creeping. Hunting.
It shot through the fractured seams between the glowing foundation lines in jagged bursts, devouring silver light as it climbed upward toward the outer ledges, leaving smoking streaks of nothing in its wake.
Nick’s wolf slammed against his skin hard enough to ache. Danger. Mate. Protect.
“Kara.” His voice came out as a low growl he barely recognized as his own.
Her fingers dug into his forearm as another violent tremor shook the chamber, her nails biting through the fabric of his sleeve. “I noticed,” she snapped through clenched teeth, head tipping back to glare up at him. “Slightly hard to miss the apocalypse.”
The sarcasm would have reassured him more if her face had not gone pale beneath the flickering foundation light, the freckles across her nose suddenly sharp against skin gone the color of old parchment.
Verna appeared beside them seemingly out of nowhere, the hem of her cloak catching the light, her ancient eyes fixed not on the collapsing chamber, not on the shrieking creatures, not on the splitting stone.
But on Kara.
“It begins,” the elder female whispered.
Nick’s entire body locked. “No.”
Kara blinked rapidly, looking between them. “No to what?”
Then pain hit her. He felt it at the same time he watched it happen.
One second she stood upright, tense but steady, one hand braced on his chest. The next, her entire body folded around a sharp cry she clearly tried to bite back, her shoulders curling inward, her breath shoving out of her in a single broken sound.
Terror unlike anything Nick had ever known ripped through him, cold and electric, racing down his spine and pooling in his hands.
“Kara!”
Her hand flew to the underside of her stomach as she doubled forward against him, breathing hard through clenched teeth, forehead pressed against the center of his chest. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”
Verna’s expression sharpened instantly, every weathered line in her face hardening into purpose. “How far apart?”
Kara turned her head just enough to stare at her in disbelief, sweat already beading at her hairline.
“I don't know, for several reasons–the first being that I haven’t gotten to this part of the pregnancy book because I’m not supposed to be to this part yet, the second being that I was sort of distracted by the rotting supernatural root thingies, and the third being that I wasn’t timing the contractions because I was slightly distracted by reality collapsing. ”
Another quake split through the foundations beneath them. The stone bucked once, twice, and then a section of the outer ledge gave way completely, crashing into the abyss below in an explosion of shattered stone and shrieking dust.
Troll warriors roared warnings, their voices overlapping in a wall of sound.
The corruption surged higher, oil-black tendrils licking up over the broken edge.
And deep beneath the chamber, something answered it.
The sound rolled upward through the foundations like a giant exhaling beneath the roots of existence itself, low and slow and unbearably patient. It was not loud. It did not need to be. It was felt in the bone, in the teeth, in the place behind the heart where instinct lived.
Every troll in the chamber froze.
Torvik whimpered somewhere behind Wadim, the sound small and high and entirely too young.
Aphid muttered something that sounded deeply profane in at least three languages, his hands lighting with silver fae magic before the curse had finished leaving his mouth.
Nick barely heard any of it.
His world had narrowed to Kara, to her breathing, ragged and uneven against his chest. To the pain tightening her fingers against his arm until he could feel the press of every individual fingertip.
To the scent of fear beginning to sharpen beneath everything else, threading through the familiar warmth of her skin.
Not terror. Kara was too stubborn for terror. But enough fear that his wolf wanted blood for it.
“She’s too early,” Nick growled, his free hand sliding up to cup the back of her head, fingers threading into damp hair.
Verna’s gaze flicked sharply toward him, her mouth a hard line. “Time moves differently near the foundations now. I told you that. And I think the power below us has accelerated the development of your baby.”
“That does not help me.”
“No,” Verna agreed grimly, glancing toward the widening fractures. “It does not.”
Kara sucked in another sharp breath and grabbed the front of Nick’s shirt, twisting the fabric in her fist hard enough to pull him down closer to her face. “Okay. I need everyone to stop saying ominous things around the pregnant woman.”
Nick wrapped both arms around her immediately as the foundations trembled again, shielding her with the curve of his body as another shower of dust came down around them.
“We’re leaving,” he said.
The Troll King appeared through the chaos, his massive sword already drawn, the blade catching streaks of silver-gold light along its edge. Behind him, troll warriors moved in a tight wedge to intercept dark shapes beginning to crawl upward from the widening fractures below.
“You cannot,” Verna snapped before the king could speak, one hand snapping out to brace Kara’s elbow.
Nick turned on her instantly, his teeth bared before he could stop them. “Watch me.”
The elder female did not flinch. She held his gaze with an awful, ancient calm.
“If she leaves the foundations now, the child will not survive the separation.”
Silence crashed through him.
It was not silence in the chamber. The chamber was still screaming, still cracking, still lit with the strobing fury of magic at war with itself.
But inside Nick, every sound dropped away at once, leaving only the hammer of his own heart and the small, panted breaths of his female pressed against him.
Kara went still against his chest; even her trembling stilled.
Nick stared at Verna as though she had started speaking another language entirely. “What?”
Verna stepped closer, her lined face illuminated by the violent silver-gold light surging through the chamber, every wrinkle thrown into stark relief.
“The foundations recognize the child now. They are responding to her life.” Her gaze shifted briefly toward Kara’s stomach, softening for just a heartbeat before turning iron again.
“The realms are trying to stabilize around her presence.”
Kara gasped sharply as another contraction hit, the sound tearing free before she could catch it, and buried her face briefly against Nick’s chest. Her whole body seized in his arms, shoulders rounding, breath hissing through her teeth, while his entire soul tried to tear itself apart from helplessness.
“Do something,” he snarled at Verna, the words half human, half wolf.
Verna’s eyes softened slightly. Her hand moved to rest gently against the side of Kara’s face.
“I am trying.”
The corruption exploded upward suddenly from the nearest fracture.
Not smoke. Creatures.
Shadowed forms dragged themselves from the blackness between the broken foundation lines, claws first, scraping against stone with a sound like bone on bone.
Humanoid only in the loosest sense. Too many limbs.
Hollow eyes that drank the silver light without reflecting it.
Bodies that seemed stitched together from darkness and old grief, every movement wrong in ways the mind refused to accept.
The troll warriors charged instantly, their war cries rattling the broken air.
Steel crashed against shadow.
The chamber erupted into war.
Wadim shifted first. The massive gray wolf burst out of his skin in a single liquid motion, fur streaked with foundation light, and slammed into one of the creatures hard enough to send it flying backward through silver fire.
Zara shouted something furious from his other side, before she too shifted, the mated pair moving in a brutal, practiced rhythm.
Rachel’s healing magic burst bright gold across the lower ledges where injured trolls staggered back from the spreading corruption, the warm glow racing along their wounds and pushing the dark back inch by hard inch.
Gavril remained directly in front of her, claws extended, body coiled, ripping through anything that got too close to his mate.
Aphid stood near Torvik and several younger trolls, silver fae magic slicing through shadows with frightening precision, his expression so calm it was almost unsettling, as though he were simply weeding a particularly stubborn garden.
The foundations shook harder.
Cracks spread beneath Nick’s boots, racing toward the platform where Kara stood.
“Kara.” His hands framed her face desperately, thumbs brushing tears he had not seen her shed. “Look at me.”
Her eyes lifted to his, slow, glassy with pain. Pain burned there now. And fear. Real fear.
“I can’t lose her,” she whispered.