Thane was awake. He was watching the entrance, his expression grim but calm.
"We have to move," he rumbled, his voice deep, the subsonic vibration back in full force.
I shifted, groaning as my muscles protested the hard floor. "How’s the gravity?"
He held up his hand. A small pebble from the floor floated up to his palm, hovered there for a second, silently spinning, then dropped with a sharpclack.
"Controlled," he said.
He helped me stand, adjusting my tunic, his touch lingering on my waist with a possessive weight. He looked at me, really looked at me, and nodded once.
"Thank you," he said.
"Don't thank me," I said, checking the charge in my metal arm. It was humming efficiently, fed by the residual energy of our connection. "Just be my wall."
"I am the wall," he agreed.
We walked to the front of the grotto.
Kaelen was waiting. He stood up as we approached, his golden dragon-eyes scanning Thane’s face. He looked for the cracks, for the madness.
He found only granite.
Thane nodded to his brother.Ready.
Kaelen let out a breath of smoke, a small smirk touching his lips.About time, Bear.
We stepped out of the grotto and back onto the glass plains. The silence rushed in to meet us, eager to swallow us whole.
But Thane stepped forward, and his boot hit the ground with a sound that wasn't a thud, but a declaration.BOOM.
The glass didn't crack. It didn't liquify. It supported him.
He looked back at us, his broad shoulders squaring against the endless grey horizon.
"Form up," the Bear Prince commanded, his voice solid as the mountain itself. "We have a river to cross."
I fell in beside him, feeling the weight of his presence not as a burden, but as a shield. He was back.
But as I looked ahead, past his massive silhouette, I saw the true horror of what lay in our path.
The Phlegethon River wasn't just dry. The bed was filled with something else.
It wasn't water. It wasn't lava.
It was ash. Miles and miles of grey, shifting ash, flowing like a liquid torrent. And rising from the ash, twisting in the silent air, were thousands of pale, grasping hands.
The river was made of souls.
And we had to walk on them.
NINE
Aria
Legend said the Phlegethon burned. Legend said it was a torrent of liquid flame that circled the Underworld, a moat of suffering designed to keep the wicked in and the living out. I had braced myself for heat. I had prepared my star-metal skin to absorb the thermal shock of a thousand volcanoes.
But there was no fire.
