Chapter 5
Tove
The darkness of the lava tube was absolute, a heavy, suffocating weight that pressed against my eyeballs until they ached.
The violent, deafening howl of the ash storm outside had been reduced to a low, hollow moan at the mouth of the cave, leaving nothing but the sound of water dripping from the ceiling and the rapid, terrifyingly loud clatter of my own teeth.
I clamped my jaw shut, trying to force the muscles to stop spasming, but the cold was too deep. It was already in my bones.
The small, circular power-indicator on the chest of my silver environmental suit had gone dark ten minutes ago.
Without the internal battery powering the thermal regulators, the lightweight fabric was useless.
It had been designed to reflect the crushing external heat of Ignis IV, but now, trapped in the subterranean chill of the volcanic winter, it was acting like a refrigerator, aggressively trapping the freezing cave air against my skin.
I curled my knees to my chest, wrapping my arms tightly around my shins.
The physical sensation of the freezing was horrifyingly familiar.
It felt exactly like the psychological numbness that had consumed me a year ago.
The slow, creeping paralysis. The way the edges of my perception blurred, dulling the sharp, vibrant colors of the world into a flat, meaningless gray.
I had spent my entire adult life as a crisis negotiator, wading into the most desperate, violent, emotionally volatile situations humanity could produce, trying to talk people down from the ledge.
And then, one day, the ledge just hadn't seemed that high anymore. The empathy had simply run out, leaving an absolute, terrifying void. I had come to this burning planet hoping the sheer scale of the fire would jolt me back to life.
Instead, I was going to freeze to death in the dark.
A faint, pulsing orange light broke the oppressive blackness of the cavern.
Kaen was slumped against the curved basalt wall a few yards away. The dim, eerie illumination was coming from his own body. The jagged fissures running up his charcoal-gray arms and neck were glowing with a sluggish, sullen magma-light.
He looked terrible. His breathing was ragged, his massive chest heaving with every uneven pull of air.
His left wing hung at a sickening, unnatural angle, the heavy obsidian feathers dragging against the dirt.
A thick, dark substance that smelled of hot iron and sulfur was seeping from the torn joint, sizzling faintly as it pooled on the freezing stone.
But despite his own obvious, agonizing pain, his glowing eyes were fixed entirely on me.
"Your suit," he rasped, his gravelly voice echoing off the damp walls. "The light is dead."
I tried to answer, to tell him I was fine, but my jaw locked. A violent tremor racked my entire body, violently jerking my shoulders. I hugged my knees tighter, squeezing my eyes shut.
Kaen cursed. It was a harsh, guttural sound in his native tongue that vibrated through the floor.
I heard the heavy, scraping crunch of his boots against the stone as he pushed himself upright.
He crossed the distance between us in two massive strides, dropping to his knees beside me.
The ambient heat radiating from his glowing veins washed over my face, but it barely penetrated the dead silver material of my suit.
"You're freezing," he said, reaching out to touch my shoulder.
"I'm..." I forced the word past my chattering teeth. "I'm okay."
"Do not lie to a Warden," he growled, the deep rumble of his voice vibrating in my chest.
He didn't hesitate. He shifted his massive bulk closer, pressing his side against the cold stone, and extended his unbroken right wing.
The massive, leathery appendage swept over my head, coming down like a heavy, physical canopy.
He tucked the edge of his wing firmly against the ground on my far side, effectively sealing me inside a dark, makeshift tent of obsidian feathers and hardened muscle.
The ambient heat trapped beneath the wing immediately intensified. It was like sitting next to a massive, roaring hearth.
"Better?" he asked, his voice low and tight with strain.
"Yes," I lied, my voice shaking.
It wasn't better. The heat was pooling in the small pocket of air between us, but the dead silver suit was still doing its job, reflecting the thermal radiation away from my core. I was shivering so violently my core muscles were beginning to cramp, a sharp, stabbing pain under my ribs.
I closed my eyes, leaning my head back against the cave wall. The violent tremors were exhausting. The adrenaline from the eruption and the terrifying flight had completely burned out of my system, leaving nothing but an overwhelming, crushing lethargy.
I recognized the clinical signs. I had read the medical briefings on deep space exposure. My core temperature was dropping below ninety degrees. The violent shivering was my body's last, desperate attempt to generate kinetic heat.
When the shivering stopped, the real dying began.
I don't know how long we sat there in the dark under the canopy of his wing. Minutes. Maybe hours. The passage of time distorted, stretching into a slow, syrupy crawl.
Eventually, the painful, violent spasms in my shoulders began to slow down.
My locked jaw relaxed. The sharp, agonizing bite of the cold against my skin began to dull, replaced by a strange, heavy warmth that I knew logically wasn't real.
It was the blood retreating from my extremities, pulling back to protect my failing organs.
The agonizing tension locking my spine completely dissolved, and my cramping muscles went terrifyingly slack. The terror of the disaster faded. The exhaustion vanished. I just felt incredibly, wonderfully sleepy as the cold tricked my dying brain into letting go.
"Tove."
Kaen's voice sounded distorted, like he was speaking from underwater.
I didn't answer. I didn't want to open my eyes. The darkness was so quiet and inviting.
"Tove!"
The heavy canopy of the wing was suddenly yanked away. The freezing, damp air of the cave rushed back in, hitting my face like a physical slap, but I couldn't even muster a flinch.
Kaen grabbed my shoulders, shaking me. His glowing eyes were wide, the magma-veins in his neck pulsing with a bright, frantic orange light.
"Your thermal signature is crashing," he said, his voice rising in panic. He ran his large, calloused hand over the silver fabric of my suit. "The suit is acting as a barrier. The ambient heat isn't penetrating. You're freezing to death right in front of me."
"I'm..." My tongue felt thick and heavy. "I'm just tired."
"No. You are not going to sleep."
He pulled his hand back, staring at his own violently glowing palms. His chest was heaving. I could see the terrifying, volatile pressure fighting against his control—the blinding white heat in his veins warring with the sudden, raw panic in his eyes.
"I'll burn you," he whispered, the words ragged and desperate. "If I touch you, if my control slips, the cycle will incinerate you."
"Kaen," I mumbled, my head lolling to the side against the stone. I couldn't focus on his face. The world was shrinking into a tiny, pinpoint of gray light. "It's okay."
"No, it's not!" he roared, the sound violently shattering the silence of the cave.
His control finally shattered under the weight of sheer, brutal desperation.
Kaen grabbed the heavy clasps of his shredded tactical vest and ripped them open.
He tore the reinforced fabric away from his body, tossing it aside, exposing the massive, heavily muscled expanse of his chest. His skin was completely covered in deep, jagged fissures, the magma-light pulsing so brightly it cast stark, terrifying shadows against the cavern walls.
He didn't stop there. He reached for the collar of my dead environmental suit. He found the main seal and ripped the zipper down with terrifying, precise force.
The freezing air hit my chest, but before I could register the shock, Kaen was pulling me forward. He hauled me out of the heavy silver fabric, stripping the dead weight away until I was wearing nothing but my thin, moisture-wicking base layer.
He sat back on his heels, pulling me entirely into his lap, and crushed my freezing, lethargic body directly against his bare, glowing chest.
The physical shock of the skin-to-skin contact was absolute.
It was agonizing. The heat radiating from his cracked skin slammed into my frozen nerves like a physical impact, a searing, blinding wave of thermal radiation that made me gasp violently.
But it didn't burn.
The moment my freezing, icy flesh met his superheated skin, the impossible thermodynamic exchange we had experienced on the balcony violently restarted.
I was so cold, my body acted as a massive, desperate vacuum.
I drew the heat out of him, pulling the agonizing, lethal excess of his blistering energy directly into my own shivering bones.
The searing pain of the initial contact vanished, replaced by a deep, flooding warmth that chased the lethargy from my blood. My heart gave a violent, stuttering kick, then began to beat with a strong, rapid rhythm.
Kaen gasped, his head dropping back against the cave wall, his arms tightening around my waist with crushing, possessive force.
The blinding, chaotic white glare of his magma-veins instantly dimmed, settling into a deep, rhythmic, soothing crimson as my icy void anchored the feral storm in his chest.
We were a closed loop. We were achieving a perfect, impossible equilibrium in the center of a freezing tomb.
I buried my face in the crook of his neck, my hands clutching blindly at his broad, heavily muscled shoulders.
The texture of his skin was incredible—rough, hardened scales interspersed with smooth, impossibly hot fault lines of raw energy.
I could feel the heavy, thunderous beat of his massive heart directly against my own chest.
I was thawing.
And as the physical ice melted from my veins, the psychological dam I had spent a year building finally, catastrophically broke.
A choked, ragged sob tore its way out of my throat.
It was the first time I had cried since the hostage crisis on Neo-Corinth, since I had watched three innocent people die because my words hadn't been enough to stop a madman.
The numbness that had protected me since that day dissolved entirely, leaving me completely, terrifyingly raw.
I wept, my tears sizzling faintly against the hot skin of his collarbone. I couldn't stop. The sheer, overwhelming sensation of being alive, of feeling the heat and the pain and the terrifying safety of his arms, was too much.
"I've got you," Kaen rumbled softly, his large hand cupping the back of my head, his thumb stroking my hair. He was careful not to move his broken wing, using his right arm to anchor me entirely against him. "You're safe. The cold is gone."
"I wanted to feel it," I whispered, the words tumbling out of me in a broken, frantic rush.
I couldn't hold them back. The physical intimacy had entirely stripped away my defenses.
"I came here because I wanted to feel the fire.
I was a negotiator. I spent my whole life swimming in other people's trauma, trying to fix them, trying to talk them down. Until Neo-Corinth."
I shuddered, the memory rising up like bile, no longer held back by the ice.
"The negotiations failed. I remember the exact sound of the silence after the comms cut out.
Just... empty static, right before the charges blew.
And then the choking stench of melted plastic and that sickeningly sweet smell of burned flesh when they opened the blast doors and we saw what he'd done to the hostages.
I stood there, and I realized I didn't feel anything anymore.
There was just... nothing left. I was completely empty.
I thought if I came to the most violent planet in the sector, it would shock my heart back into rhythm. "
Kaen listened, his breathing steady, his hand continuing its slow, rhythmic stroke against my hair.
"I was terrified," I sobbed, my fingers digging into his scales. "When the shivering stopped, I realized I was dying, and I was terrified because it felt exactly like the numbness. I don't want to be numb anymore."
Kaen shifted slightly, tucking his chin over the top of my head. The ambient heat radiating from his skin was a heavy, protective blanket.
"I was terrified too," he confessed, his voice a low, gravelly vibration against my temple.
I pulled my head back slightly, looking up at his face in the dim, crimson light of his veins. His jaw was clenched, his expression etched with a deep, ancient exhaustion.
"My biology is designed for one thing, Tove," he said, his glowing eyes dropping to meet mine.
"Destruction. The Rebirth Cycle isn't a gentle molt.
It's a localized supernova. We burn everything around us to ash so we can rise from it.
When I realized the only way to save you from the cold was to touch you.
.. I thought I was going to be the thing that killed you. "
He reached up, his rough, calloused thumb gently brushing a tear from my cheek. His touch was impossibly hot, but infinitely gentle.
"But you didn't burn," he whispered, staring at my face with a look of raw, unguarded reverence. "You grounded me. You pulled the fire right out of my chest."
"You saved my life," I replied, my voice shaking.
"And you are saving mine," he rumbled.
He didn't let me go. He shifted his massive body, adjusting his position against the cold stone wall to ensure his broken wing was protected, and pulled me back down against his chest. He draped his unbroken right wing over us both, sealing the cocoon, trapping our shared heat entirely within the darkness.
The exhaustion of the flight, the crash, and the terrifying brush with hypothermia finally claimed me. But as I drifted into sleep, tangled entirely in the arms of the volatile alien Warden, I wasn't numb.
For the first time in a year, I was perfectly, undeniably warm.