"Listen to me," she whispered, pressing her forehead against my nose. Her skin was fever-hot. "The Devourer wants you to leave the pack. It wants you alone. If you go into the dark, Flynn, I can't pull you back."
I'm sorry,I whined.It's loud in my head. The quiet is loud.
"I know," she repeated. She closed her eyes, and I felt a pulse of energy travel from her hand into my neck.
It was a memory. Not a big one. Just the two of us existing together, but it grounded me. It pushed the cold, hungry void out of my brain.
"Better?" she asked.
Better.
"Good. Now check on Elias. He looks like a dying fire."
I moved back into position, but I kept my shoulder pressed against her leg. I needed the friction, the proof that she was there.
But as I walked beside her, feeling her limp get worse, watching the way she winced every time she put weight on her flesh leg, I saw it.
It was subtle. You wouldn't see it if you weren't looking with wolf eyes, if you weren't hyper-attuned to the breaking point of things.
On her left shoulder, where the star-metal fused with her neck, there was a glow. Not the healthy pulse of her markings from the magic she carried within.
This was a jagged, white-hot line. A crack.
A hairline fracture in the divine alloy.
It ran from her collarbone up toward her ear. And every time she pushed energy into the bond, every time she woke Kaelen up, or pulled Thane out of the mud, or grounded me, the crack pulsed brighter.
She wasn't just tired. She was coming apart at the seams.
We were too heavy. We were Titan-blooded monsters dragging an anchor through the bedrock of hell, and the anchor was just a girl. One infused with magic and power, yes, but still just a girl.
She's breaking,I realized, the horror bubbling up in my throat like bile. It didn’t matter that she’d been remade, that she’d stepped into the Primordial Flame and come back out whole, whatever had happened, whatever power she was tapping into in order to keep us sane was destroying her.
I looked at Kaelen. He didn't see it. He was too busy fighting the cold. Thane was too busy fighting the gravity. And Elias could barely exist at all.
We were eating her alive, just by existing.
I wanted to tell her to stop. I wanted to tell her to drop the leash and let us go into the dark, because anything was better than watching her shatter.
But then she stumbled, and Kaelen’s wing shot out to catch her, and Thane moved his massive bulk to shield her, and she looked up at us with a fierce, terrifying love that said she would burn to ash before she let us go.
So I didn't say anything. I just pressed closer, offering my warmth, my strength, my motion, desperate to patch the cracks we were making.
Just a little further, Pup,I prayed to gods that weren't listening.Just get us to the Well before you break.
We walked on into the silence, and the crack on her shoulder glowed like a countdown in the dark.
FOUR
Aria
The landscape shifted, the change imperceptible at first, like the slow, grinding turn of a massive cog. The pitted iron floor that had defined our descent began to fracture, giving way to a soil composed entirely of grey dust.
We had reached the outskirts of what, by all ancient cartography and mythological precedent, should have been the Fields of Asphodel—the meadow of the indifferent dead. It was supposed to be a place of eternal twilight and whispering poplar trees, a holding pen for souls who had been neither good enough for the sun-drenched heights of Elysium nor wicked enough for the torture pits of Tartarus. A place of mediocrity. A place of rest.
Now, it was a scrapyard of existence.
There were no trees. There was no whispering grass, no soft currents of memory. There were only dunes of ash that shifted without wind, rising and falling like the slow breaths of a dying giant. A heavy fog clung to the ground, tasting of static electricity and iron filings, coating the back of my throat with the metallic tang of old blood and ozone.
