His eye opened a fraction.Too... cold. Can't...
"You have to," I said, stripping off my heavy outer coat. The air in the cave was biting, raising gooseflesh on my human arm immediately. "I can't warm a dragon. There’s too much mass. You need to be small. Tou need to be human."
He groaned, a sound of heavy stones grinding together.Pain. Magic says no.
"I know," I whispered, pressing my forehead against his cold scales. "I know it hurts. I know the magic doesn't want you to. Do it anyway."
He shifted.
Suddenly, bones began to audibly snap and rearrange themselves. Muscles tore and re-knit. He screamed, a raw, guttural sound that tore at my heart, as his mass compressed.
When the smoke cleared, he was human. Mostly.
He lay curled on the black rock, naked and shivering violently. His skin was pale, almost translucent, the blue veins standing out starkly. He looked smaller than I had ever seen him. Not the imperious Prince, not the General of armies. Just a man freezing to death in the dark.
I dropped to my knees beside him and pulled him into my arms.
It was like hugging a glacier. The cold radiating off him burned my skin. I wrapped my limbs around him, my flesh leg over his, my human arm around his shoulders, trying to encompass him, to share what little warmth I had.
"Kaelen," I murmured, rubbing his back frantically. "Wake up. Ignite."
He shuddered, his teeth chattering with a sound like dice in a cup. "A-Aria... leave... you'll freeze."
"Shut up," I said, pressing my face into the crook of his neck. "I'm not going anywhere."
But it wasn't working.
I could feel my own body heat being sucked into him and vanishing, swallowed by the void inside his chest. He wasn't just cold; he was empty. The Underworld's atmosphere had siphoned his essence. Physical heat wasn't enough. Biology was too weak a weapon for this war.
I pulled back, looking at him. His lips were blue. His eyes were rolling back in his head.
I looked at my left arm. Star-metal was conductive. It was designed to channel energy. It had held the Titan's heartbeat. It had channeled the Anvil's strike.
I realized then what I had to do. I didn't need to warm him. I need tostrikehim. I needed to become a live wire.
"Kaelen," I said, my voice changing, dropping into that command register that resonated with the metal in my blood. "Look at me."
I straddled his hips, ignoring the biting cold of his skin against my thighs. I grabbed his face with both hands, one flesh, one metal.
The metal hand hissed when it touched his frozen cheek.
"I'm going to give it back to you," I said.
He blinked, confusion warring with the torpor. "Give... what?"
"The fire," I said. "I'm the conductor, Kaelen. I'm the bridge."
I didn't wait for permission. I closed my eyes and reached inward, past the exhaustion, past the fear, down to the molten core of magic I had absorbed from the Titan, from the Forge, from the bond itself.
I pushed it into my arm.
The runes etched into my silver skin flared. First a dull red, then a bright orange. Searing heat flooded my veins.
I pressed my metal palm flat against the center of his chest, right over his heart.
Kaelen gasped, his back arching off the stone.
"Feel it," I commanded.
