“I... I don’t know how,” I admit, heat rising to my cheeks, burning down my neck. “I was never taught that part.”
The Golden Son exhales sharply, muttering, “Because they expected you to be dead by this point, I imagine.”
A bitter truth.
Then, a flicker of luck. The portal stops widening.
I glance down at my arm, where my blood, once a river, is now only a trickle.
“It needs more blood to open fully,” I realize aloud. “They won’t fit through.”
The Golden Son’s jaw tightens. “Do you want to test that theory?”
I don’t answer. I don’t have to.
I seize Ashen’s mane, fingers knotting through the strands. I yank hard.
“Hear me, Ashen! Turn around! Please!”
But the beast does not stop. If anything, he moves faster, drawn to the world within the portal, an unholy pull dragging him forward.
The cries sharpen, rising to a fever pitch, matching the frantic hammering of my heart, the pulse in my throat, the blood pounding through my veins.
Then a white-hot pain rips through my stomach. A scream tears from my throat, raw and jagged, louder than the horrors swarming towards us.
I double over, clutching at my middle as my baby shifts inside me. My skin stretches so tight I think it might tear, veins pulsing beneath the surface.
I grit my teeth, my breath shuddering as I force my eyes open. The portal is closing.
Slowly, like a stitch drawn through fabric, the darkness begins to weave itself shut.
A small mercy.
But then, there’s a hand. Skeletal, wrapped in blackened, withered flesh, the bones straining against their decaying sheath. It thrusts through the narrowing rift, fingers curling and clawing, desperate to rip the wound in the world even wider. And behind it, something follows. A figure cloaked in tattered black robes, the fabric snapping in a wind I cannot feel. Its eyes blaze, twin moons of searing white that cut through the dark, and from its chin, a writhing nest of tentacles, each one twitching in a slow, grotesque rhythm.
Those eyes. They don’t just see me. They see through me. They burrow into my very soul.
Frozen. I can’t move, can’t breathe.
“You,” the thing hisses, its voice a slithering whisper like serpents tangled in the depths of a black pit. It holds the portal open, its other hand stretching impossibly toward me, its fingers curling like the promise of doom.
No. Not towardme. Toward my stomach. My baby.
Fear churns in my veins, and the pressure in my belly intensifies, sharper than ever before. The tiny hands inside me claw, the little feet kicking with such force I fear they’ll tear me apart from the inside. My breath comes in ragged gasps, the pain nearly overwhelming.
The thing’s lips curl into something like a smile, its voice a hiss of hunger as it speaks. “You bring a feast for my master. Meat for the beast.”
“No!” I scream, my voice a desperate cry that cracks through the air. “Daedalus!”
Then, somewhere in the distance, past the roar of my blood pounding in my ears, beyond the monstrous army crashing toward me, beyond the creature still reaching for my baby with its clawed, twisted hands, I hear it.
His voice.
“Amara!”
It cuts through the chaos, a lifeline, a tether in the storm, and for a moment, everything else fades.
My body jerks toward the voice, as if the very threads of my soul, our souls, are being pulled taut, stretching across the darkness to find him. Thin, golden strands shimmer like dust caught in moonlight, weaving through the abyss, parting the shadows as they reach for me.
