17. Chapter 17 - Matt #3
Theron’s claws tore across the King’s chest. “Never.”
“NOW!” Vale screamed.
Baptiste hit the detonator.
The stabilizers ruptured the heart seal in a column of blinding red-white light, collapsing the chamber inward and tearing the bridges apart.
Matt saw Theron disappear beneath collapsing stone and erupting light at the exact moment the King screamed.
Then the entire throne chamber gave way beneath them. The bridges shattered apart as the abyss swallowed the collapsing platform, dragging the throne, the King, and the dying seal downward while the mountain began tearing itself apart around them.
The blast tore the hyena shape out of him. Vale’s team dragged Matt into the evacuation passage while he bled, half-dressed and human again, fighting every hand that tried to pull him away from the throne chamber.
Matt barely remembered escaping as everything became noise, falling stone, heat, and darkness while Vale’s teams dragged the survivors toward the surface. The mountain tore itself apart behind them.
By the time they stumbled into the night, half the mountain had already collapsed into itself. Smoke and black dust rolled upward through the shattered peaks while distant explosions echoed beneath the earth.
The bond was gone.
Not weakened.
Not distant.
Gone so completely that the absence of it hurt more than any wound the mountain had left behind.
For one impossible heartbeat, Matt couldn't even tell whether Theron still existed.
Vale caught his arm before he could turn back toward the collapsing entrance.
“You can’t go back in there.”
Matt tore free. “He’s still alive.”
“There is nothing left alive in there.”
For one horrifying heartbeat, Matt believed her.
Then something flickered at the edge of his awareness, weak and buried beneath pain and stone but unmistakable. The bond was still there. Relief and panic struck together as it hit Matt that Theron was alive.
Matt turned toward the ruins and started running before Vale could stop him.
“Matt!” she shouted behind him.
He ignored her and forced his way back into the tunnels as smoke and dust swallowed the passageways. Loose stone crashed through the fractured corridors overhead, but the faint pull of the bond guided him deeper. He followed it blindly until movement appeared through the dust.
A figure staggered out of the darkness. Theron.
Matt stopped breathing.
The older wolf barely remained upright. Blood covered most of his body while black dust and stone fragments clung to his torn clothing and exposed skin. One arm hung uselessly at his side, and exhaustion hollowed his face badly enough that he looked moments from collapsing entirely.
But his eyes found Matt. And the bond surged back to life between them so violently that Matt nearly staggered from the force of it. Relief hit hard enough to hurt. Theron looked at him like he could barely believe he was real.
Then the older wolf finally lost the fight to remain standing.
Matt caught him before he hit the ground, wrapping one arm around him while dust and heat rolled violently through the collapsing tunnel behind them. The mountain continued groaning overhead as fresh cracks raced through the stone walls around them. “We need to move,” Matt said.
Theron tried to answer, but exhaustion dragged the words apart before they fully formed.
Matt half-carried him forward through the tunnel. Every uneven step Theron took echoed through the bond, but beneath the pain, the connection felt clear and unmistakably alive.
Another tremor shook the passage, sending loose stone crashing behind them. Matt tightened his grip. “Yeah, no. We are officially done with caves forever.”
A weak laugh escaped Theron. “This is becoming repetitive.”
Matt stared at him. “You are concussed if this feels repetitive.”
The older wolf smiled faintly despite the exhaustion dragging at him.
Matt held onto that expression harder than he wanted to admit.
The tunnel sloped sharply upward ahead of them now. Cold night air finally cut through the dust thick enough to choke, and Matt nearly sagged with relief when he saw pale moonlight breaking through the fractured stone above.
“We’re close,” he said.
Behind them, the lower chambers collapsed with a deafening groan. The shockwave tore through the tunnel, pitching the ground beneath their feet as Matt struggled to keep them both upright.
“Move!” Vale’s voice echoed faintly from somewhere ahead.
Matt pushed forward. Sections of the final tunnel gave way around them as they forced their way toward the surface. Then suddenly the stone opened above them and cold night air hit Matt hard enough to steal half a breath from his lungs.
They stumbled out onto the mountainside just as another massive section of the ruins collapsed inward behind them.
Vale was already moving toward the tunnel entrance when Matt and Theron emerged from the dust. She stopped short, relief flashing across her face before irritation took over.
“You have got to be kidding me,” she snapped.
Matt looked down at himself. Blood covered most of his body, half his clothes were torn apart from the shift, and he was still supporting a barely-conscious ancient wolf against his side while an entire mountain collapsed behind them.
“You know,” he said hoarsely, “I’m starting to feel very underappreciated.”
Several surviving Valker agents actually laughed.
Vale pointed directly at him. “You ignored direct orders, disappeared back into a collapsing death pit, nearly got yourself buried alive, and somehow complicated an active apocalypse.”
Matt shrugged. “In my defense, the apocalypse already had momentum.”
Vale stared at him for a long second, then shook her head with visible exhaustion. “You are either the bravest person I’ve ever met or the single dumbest.”
“Why not both?”
A few exhausted voices answered him with tired amusement.
Theron shifted beside him then, unsteady enough that Matt tightened his grip around him again.
Vale noticed the movement and her expression softened as she looked toward Theron. “Glad to see you survived, old wolf.”
Theron looked toward the collapsing mountain behind them before answering. “Barely.”
The ground trembled one final time, and the mountain folded fully into itself. Stone, black dust, and shattered ruins disappeared in a violent chain reaction as the remaining peaks folded into the devastation below.
The roar echoed across the valley for several long seconds before silence finally settled over the ruins.
No red light remained afterward. No whispers. No breathing beneath the stone. Only wind moving through broken rock beneath the night sky.
Matt felt the bond settle between himself and Theron, steady and unmistakably real now in a way it had never been before.
Theron looked toward him, and for the first time since Matt had met him, there was no shadow of the mountain left behind his eyes.