"No!" I yelled.
Or I tried to. The word died in my throat as the horror of the scene truly registered.
The soldier nearest to us, a young man with a spear broken in his chest, reached out toward Thane. His face was twisted in a plea, his mouth opening to beg for salvation.
But before the words could come out, the mistatehim.
It didn't swallow him whole. It unmade him.
I watched, paralyzed, as the soldier's jaw dissolved into grey mist. His eyes widened as his nose vanished, turning into smoke. He tried to scream, but he had no mouth. The sound of his plea turned into a high-pitched screech of static.
The soldier clawed at his own face, but his fingers turned to ash upon contact. In seconds, he was gone. Not dead. Erased.
Thane reared up.
The bear stood on his hind legs, towering into the gloom, a monolith of grief and stone. He roared, a sound of pure agony that shattered the silence of the Underworld.
DO NOT TAKE THEM!
His mental scream nearly deafened me.
He slammed his front paws down, intending to smash the earth, to fight the enemy.
But the earth didn't break. It liquefied.
The ground beneath Thane’s massive impact turned instantly into a slurry of grey quicksand. It wasn't natural mud; it was the physical manifestation of the Void's hunger. It rippled outward, hungry and sentient.
Thane!Elias shrieked from above, his phoenix fire sputtering as the air pressure dropped.The density! Moving mass is sinking!
Thane didn't try to pull free. He was staring into the fog, where a dozen more faces were manifesting.
"Orders, sir?" one face asked, half of its skull missing, leaking static instead of blood. "We can't hold..."
"Hold the line!" Thane bellowed back, his voice human and bear and earthquake intertwined. "I am coming!"
Crunch.
The sucking sound was loud and wet. The mud swallowed Thane’s legs up to the knees in a single gulp.
"He's too heavy," Kaelen shouted, lunging forward. He grabbed Thane’s flank, digging his fingers into the fur, planting his feet on a patch of semi-solid glass. "His soul is too heavy! The gravity is pulling him down!"
It wasn't physics. It was metaphysics. Thane carried the weight of the world, literally, since he commanded gravity, but he also carried the crushing weight of his failure at the Ridge. The Devourer had tuned the ground to the specific frequency of his guilt.
The more he grieved, the heavier he got. The heavier he got, the faster the Void ate him.
"Let me go," Thane rumbled, stopping his struggle. He looked at the dissolving faces of his men. "I belong with them. I am the captain."
He sank to his hips.
"No you don't!" I screamed.
I didn't think. I scrambled up the side of the sinking Titan-bear. My boots found purchase in his thick fur. I hauled myself up his mountainous back until I was perched behind his massive shoulders, right at the base of his neck.
The star-metal in my arm was screaming, burning hot against my skin, reacting to the sheer density of the void magic pooling around us.
"Thane, look at me!" I yelled, slamming my palms against the sides of his head. "They are gone! You can't save ghosts!"
He shook his head, a violent motion that nearly threw me off.
