Zareth
My warriors move in formation behind me, silent as stone, as we press through the last narrow passage connecting the outer ruins to the ritual chamber. Twenty-three of them. The best I have left.
Twenty-three. What that number means now, I do not let myself think about.
The arch opens.
And I see it.
The chamber is immaculate with them inside it.
That is the first thing that strikes me, and how clean their armor is.
Polished silver-and-gold plate catching the ritual firelight, every fastening precise, every insignia untouched by the ruin surrounding them.
They stand inside ancient walls black with centuries of dried Vrakken blood and collapsed magic and they look otherworldly.
Scrubbed and manicured and unbothered by what they are doing in it.
They brought torches.
The detail is offensive. I count sixteen soldiers at a glance.
Four more near the chamber's far wall where a cell is carved directly into the stone.
In the center of the room, my dead Vrakken warriors who fell defending these ruins have been rolled together in a pile.
Someone has already begun wrapping them for burning.
And beside them, arranged with a kind of deliberate contempt I find almost admirable in its cruelty, is Varkai.
The Deep Speaker. Ancient and hollow-eyed even in death. His obsidian staff has been snapped. Something in my chest pulls apart.
The bond roars.
It doesn't ask. One moment I am calculating angles and the next I am moving, and there is nothing left of the prince in me.
The first soldier barely registers as a person.
Obstruction. I take his throat with my left hand and remove it. The sound is wet and final. His partner turns—
Prey.
I put my claws through his chest from behind before he finishes the turn. I don't stop. The roar in my ears is Cybele, her presence somewhere in this chamber, alive, a bright furious flame at the fringes of my senses and every body between me and that flame is simply something to be moved.
My warriors pour in behind me. The chamber erupts.
I hear the fighting peripherally. Steel.
Shouting. The crack of Vrakken magic meeting elvish counter-spells.
None of it involves me. I have already identified the fastest path through the remaining soldiers and I am carving it open with both hands, not because I have to but because something fundamental in me has decided that precision is a luxury I no longer owe these people.
A sword catches my side. Slides between two plates of my armor and bites into the muscle beneath.
I don't pause.
I drag the soldier forward by the wrist of the hand holding the sword and feel the joint separate before I throw him into the wall hard enough that the stone spiderwebs on impact. Fine cracks race up toward the ceiling. Dust falls like ash.
The mountain is listening.
Somewhere below us, the Wildspont shrieks.
A low, resonating sound that vibrates through the soles of my boots and into my spine.
The ruins are complaining around us, ancient stone made brittle by years of dying magic, and every blow I land against these walls is another insult the structure is slowly deciding not to forgive.
I don't care.
Three more soldiers close on me together. Coordinated. Trained.
I give them three seconds of effort. No more.
The blood in my mouth tastes like iron and old magic and I realize distantly that one of them managed to open my cheek before I finished him. I wipe it away with my bare wrist and keep moving.
Then I see Malachar.
He is not fighting. He is standing near the far arch with his sword drawn and his eyes fixed on me, and even from twenty feet away I watch the calculation happen on his face in real time. He came here expecting to find a prince. A political creature that weighs consequences.
What he is looking at instead makes him go still.
He raises one hand. A sharp, silent gesture.
Light detonates. White-hot and blinding, filling the chamber like a second sun, burning the shapes of everyone in it into bright afterimages burned directly into the eye. My warriors stumble. I hurl up one arm to shield my vision and snarl.
And by the time the light collapses, he is gone.
I could follow him. The instinct claws at me to hunt, pursue, end it and I take two steps toward the arch before her voice cuts through every other impulse in my body.
"Zareth."
Just that. My name. Hoarse and shaking, but alive.
I turn.
The cell door is iron-and-stone, old enough that the hinges have partially fused to the wall. I tear it off anyway. Not carefully.
She is on her feet when I reach her. She looks at my face and doesn't flinch.
She looks at my hands, at what is on them and doesn't look away. Her amber-brown eyes move over me slowly, cataloguing the damage, and what I find there when they come back up to mine is not fear. It is more complicated than fear. My chest tightens when I identify it.
She is looking at me like I am real.
"Are you injured?" My voice doesn't sound like mine.
"Nothing serious." A pause. "You're bleeding."
"I noticed."
A silence stretches for a breath. Then she reaches out and touches my face — careful, deliberate, her fingers warm against skin that is always too cold and the bond in my chest drops to a low, steady hum. The screaming for hours finally allowed to exhale.
"The records," she says quietly.
She moves before I can answer, already stepping past me into the chamber, and I watch her navigate the wreckage sharply and purposefully.
Her hands find the scattered research materials, prehistoric records, Seralya's maps, stolen documentation and she gathers them against her chest like someone reclaiming a sacrality. Her chin is set. Her eyes are dry.
She is furious, I realize. She has been furious this entire time.
That, too, feels more real than anything else in this room. I make myself look at the rest of it. Twenty-three warriors came in behind me.
I count what remains. I count again, because some part of me is still convinced the number will change if I look longer. It doesn't.
The silence in the chamber after battle is its own specific weight. No groaning. No movement from my side of the room. Only the drip from a crack in the ceiling, and the distant shriek of the Wildspont two levels below us, and the sound of Cybele's breathing.
She comes back to my side without being asked. Stands close and I can feel the warmth of her, a small persistent heat against the cold that lives in my bones.
"Zareth."
I don't answer.
"Look at me."
I do.
Her eyes are steady. She has seen what I am, tonight, not the prince nor the performance of control I maintain for courts and councils and she is still standing here. Looking up at me with the ancient records pressed to her chest and her hair half-destroyed and blood that is not hers on her sleeve.
The ruins tremble around us. Another spiderweb of cracks races along the wall above the arch.
I reach for her. My hands are still shaking, blood hunger, the crash after feeding fury, old and ungentle and I pull her against my chest with more force than I meant to and she doesn't fight it.
"I knew," I say. The words come out stripped of everything. No armor left. "When I came through that arch, I knew what it would cost."
She is very still against me.
"And if the answer had been different." My arms tighten. "If it had cost me everything above and below this mountain—"
I stop. The sentence doesn't need finishing.
She doesn't tell me I'm wrong.