She adjusted her grip on the bone map Hades had given her. Her knuckles were white. The star-metal arm was humming a low, defensive note, vibrating against her ribs.
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
The sound of her walking was the only counter-argument we had.
I forced myself to look ahead, to be the scout. I scanned the horizon, looking for the Soul-Well, looking for the tear in the world.
But my mind wouldn't stop processing the environment. It saw the angles of the ridges and calculated the shear strength of the glass. It plotted the trajectory of our decline.
We were descending. The slope was subtle, a gradient of perhaps a degree or two at the most, but over the distance we travelled, it was significant. We were spiraling down a funnel.
And the funnel was perfectly smooth.
Friction,I thought desperately.We need friction.
Life is friction. Biology is messy, inefficient, and full of drag. Grief is heavy. Love is chaotic. That’s what keeps you real. The Void is the absence of friction. It’s the slip-n-slide to oblivion.
I looked at Aria again.
She was limping. The alignment of her hip was off by millimeters. Her metal leg was heavier than her flesh one, creating a torque on her spine that must have been agonizing.
She was the definition of friction. She was a biological impossibility, a hybrid of god-metal and mortal meat, held together by sheer stubbornness. She was the most inefficient structure I had ever analyzed.
And she was beautiful.
"Elias," she called out again, not looking up. "You're lagging."
I flapped harder, forcing my tired wings to beat against the dead air.I am here. Calculating routes. Avoid the flat panes;they reflect the clearest lies. stick to the fractured edges. The broken glass distorts the image. Less... compelling.
"Understood," she said. "Fractured edges. Got it."
She led the group toward a ridge of shattered obsidian, away from the smooth, inviting pathway of black mirrors.
It was harder walking. The shards crunched violently underfoot. Flynn yelped as a sharp edge nicked one of his paw pads, but the pain seemed to ground him.
Pain is real,Flynn projected, shaking his paw.Pain is honest. Mirrors are liars.
We walked for what felt like hours, though time here was a variable that had been set to null. The silence stretched tight, a drum skin waiting to be struck.
Then, the geometry changed again.
Ahead of us, the jagged desert didn't just end; it dissolved. The horizon line became fuzzy, like a snow storm in the distance. Great blocks of obsidian floated in the air, disconnected from gravity, rotating slowly.
Perched on the largest floating block, maybe fifty yards out, was a structure.
It wasn't a ruin. Ruins imply something fell down. This looked like it had been un-built.
It was an archway. A triumphal arch, like the ones on Olympus, but made of negative space. It was a hole in the world shaped like a door.
And standing in the center of the door was a figure.
I squinted, engaging my telescopic vision, enhancing the thermal imaging.
The figure was tall. Broad-shouldered. He wore armor that I recognized, the heavy, burnished plate of the Olympian Guard. But the armor was wrong. It was rusted. Pitted. And the helmet...
The helmet was fused to the head.
I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature.
