Thane,I projected, my thought sharp with warning.Front and center.
The Bear Prince rumbled, stepping up beside Aria. He saw it too.
The figure stepped forward, out of the archway of nothingness. As it moved, the glass beneath its feet turned to grey dust.
It raised a hand.
It wasn't a hand. It was a lump of grey matter, vaguely shaped like a fist.
Who is that?Flynn asked, his hackles rising.
SEVEN
Aria
The figure in the archway didn't attack. It didn't scream. It simply dissolved.
One moment, it was a rusted, hulking silhouette of an Olympian soldier; the next, it was a smudge of grey static on the lens of the world. It fell apart like wet ash, drifting away on a wind that didn't exist.
"Thane?" I asked, my voice tight.
The Bear Prince had stopped. His massive, stone-fused paws were buried deep in the shifting glass, but he wasn't looking at the ground anymore. He was staring at the empty archway with a recognition that turned the air in my lungs to ice.
I know this place,his thought rumbled into the bond. It wasn't the sturdy, tectonic thought of the protector I knew. It was fragile. It sounded like a crack running through granite.
"It's just glass, Thane," I said, stepping closer to his flank. The heat coming off him wasn't warm; it was feverish, a clammy, stifling humidity. "We're in the Underworld. It's just... geometry."
No,Kaelen cut in, moving up beside me. He had shifted back to his human form to conserve the supernova energy of hiscore, and he looked naked and terrifying in the grey light, his skin dusted with ash. He squinted at the horizon.Look at the elevation, Aria. The strategic choke point. The way the ridges funnel toward that central keep.
I looked. Really looked.
The jagged shards of void-glass were softening. The sharp, mathematical angles that Elias had been obsessing over were blurring, losing their definition. The ground wasn't obsidian anymore. It was mud. Grey, sucking, freezing mud that smelled of copper and latrines.
And the floating blocks of stone... they were arranging themselves. They stacked and fused until they weren't abstract art. They were walls. Shattered, blast-scarred battlements rising out of the mist.
"It's the Ridge," Kaelen whispered, the color draining from his face. "It's the fortress where the line broke."
The fog thickened. It rolled off the phantom battlements like steam from a cracked pipe, yellow-grey and heavy. It didn't swirl; it crawled. It moved over the ground with intent, seeking heat, seeking life.
And inside the fog, things were moving.
Contact, Flynn snarled. He backed up, pressing his haunches against my legs, his head whipping back and forth.Too many. Smell is wrong. Smell is... old.
Faces began to press out of the mist.
They weren't the spectral, translucent shades we had seen in Asphodel. These were… wet. They looked solid, carved from the grey muck of the landscape. Helmets dented by war hammers. Breastplates scarred by claws. Eyes that were wide, white, and terrified.
"Help us," a mouth formed. The sound was a hiss of static.
"General..." another whispered, the voice dripping like water.
Thane let out a sound that tore at my heart. It was a whimper, small and broken, coming from a throat built to roar at gods.
My men,Thane projected. The guilt hit me like a physical blow, staggering me. It was heavy, a suffocating blanket of lead.I told them to hold. I told them I was the wall.
"Thane, they aren't real," I shouted, grabbing a handful of his thick, matted fur. "It's the Devourer. It's using your memories!"
But Thane wasn't listening. He took a heavy, lumbering step toward the mist.
