"The others felt that," he said dryly.
"Let them feel it," I said, sitting up and reaching for my discarded tunic. My body ached, but it was a good ache. A solid ache. I felt heavy, grounded. "Let the whole damn Underworld feel it. We aren't dying today."
Kaelen sat up. He stretched, his spine cracking audibly. He looked at his hands, flexing the fingers. The movement was fluid, powerful. The torpor was gone.
He stood up, unashamed of his nudity, and walked to the mouth of the cave. He stood there for a second, silhouetted against the grey light of the ravine, a statuesque god of war and fire.
He took a deep breath, and shouted.
It wasn't a word. It was a roar. But it came from a human throat. It echoed down the canyon, bouncing off the obsidian, challenging the silence.
"FLYNN! THANE! ELIAS!"
A moment later, three shadows scrambled down the rocks.
Flynn skidded to a halt first, his eyes wide. He looked from Kaelen, standing naked and glowing in the gloom, to me, still pulling my boots on in the back.
Smells like... burnt air,Flynn projected, wrinkling his nose.And ozone. And... holy hell.
Thane arrived next. The Bear stopped, staring at Kaelen.
Your eyes, Thane rumbled through the bond.
Kaelen turned to look at his brothers. He didn't blink. The vertical pupils narrowed as they adjusted to the dim light.
"The Dragon is awake," Kaelen said calmly. "And we are leaving this ditch."
He turned back to me, extending a hand.
I took it. His grip was scorching hot.
"Ready, mate?" he asked, a smirk playing on his lips that was all arrogance and fire.
I squeezed his hand, my star-metal fingers locking with his flesh ones.
"Ready," I replied. "Let's go hurt something."
SIX
Elias
Down in the ravine, the atmosphere had been heavy, a suffocating blanket of cold decay, but at least it had mass. It had resistance. Up here, hovering twenty feet above the heads of my companions, the air was a lie. It offered no lift, no thermal pockets, no friction for my wings to bite into.
I flapped, a desperate, frantic motion that sent spasms of ache through my pectoral muscles. Being a bird was usually an exercise in fluidity, a dance with the wind. But being a Phoenix in the Underworld was like trying to swim through a vacuum. My fire, usually a roaring corona of rebirth, was dampened to a sullen, flickering coat of feathers that barely illuminated the ground below.
And what a ground it was.
We had left the iron shelf and the ash dunes behind. We had emerged onto a desert of glass.
To a casual observer, say, Flynn, whose mind operated on the admirable but binary logic ofthreatorprey,this landscape was simply broken terrain. But to me? To the architect who had once helped design the golden ratios of Olympus?
This was mathematical.
The void-glass beneath us wasn't just obsidian. It was a geometric nightmare. The ground didn't roll; it folded. Sharp, acute angles of black glass jutted upward, forming impossible ridges that twisted back on themselves like strips of folded paper. There were no curves here. Nature loves curves; rolling hills, waves, the gentle arc of a river. Entropy, I realized with a shudder of intellectual arousal, loved angles.
Triangles. Hexagons. Fractures that split the light, what little light there was, into spectrums of grey that shouldn't exist.
Elias,a voice projected into my mind. Solid. Warm. It felt like a hand grabbing my ankle.You're drifting.
