"Ash," I whispered, the word rasping against teeth that felt grimy with the ambient dust.
The ravine floor was filled with a moving, grinding slurry of grey particulate. It flowed like a mudslide, sluggish and heavy, churning with a sound like sandpaper rubbing against bone. But it wasn't just dirt. As I watched, shapes pressed up against the surface of the flow.
A hand, pale and stretched. A face with no mouth, screaming silently. A torso, twisted like a wrung-out rag.
It was a river of souls that had been ground down into silt. They weren't swimming; they were the water.
We can't walk on that, Flynn projected, his voice tight. His posture was low, tense, and his hackles were raised as he sniffedthe air and recoiled violently, sneezing.It smells like... like burning hair and static. If we touch it, we sink. If we sink...
"We join the flow," Thane finished, his voice a low rumble of stone sliding against stone. He stood at the edge of the bank, his boots mere inches from the moving ash. The toes of his boots were already beginning to smoke, not from heat, but from friction. The entropy of the river was eating the leather.
Kaelen stepped forward, heat radiating from him in waves. "I can fly us. One by one."
""No," I said, watching the surface of the ash-river. Even as I spoke, a soul-hand breached the flow, reaching ten feet into the air before being dragged back down. Reaching. "Look at it, Kaelen. It's not water. It wants to move upward. The moment you lift off, every hand in that river will be grabbing for your wings. You'd never make it halfway before they pulled you in."
Kaelen's jaw tightened. He'd seen it too.
"Then we're stuck," Kaelen growled, frustration leaking into his voice. "We can't swim. We can't fly. We can't walk."
"We build," I said.
The words tasted like copper on my tongue. I looked down at my left arm. The star-metal plating was dull in the grey light, but the runes were pulsing with a deep, steady violet rhythm. It was the only thing in this entire realm that felt solid. It was the only thing that hadn't surrendered to the Devourer.
"Aria," Thane warned, sensing the shift in my intent through the bond. "You're already fractured. I can see the cracks in your neck."
"It's structural," I lied, though we both knew it wasn't. "The star-metal extends. You saw what happened in the Forge. I can stretch the lattice."
"That was with Hephaestus's hammer striking you," Elias pointed out, his voice thin. "Here, you would have to be thehammer and the anvil. You would have to project your own soul out of your body to act as the walkway."
I looked at the river again. A hand breached the surface, clawing desperately at the air before being dragged back down by the weight of a million others.
"It wants to eat us," I said softly. "So let's give it something it can't digest."
I stepped to the edge of the precipice.
"Kaelen, eyes on the sky," I ordered. "The Devourer knows we're here. When I anchor, I'm going to light up like a flare."
"I'll burn anything that comes close," Kaelen promised, shifting his stance, his muscles bunching as the dragon stirred beneath his skin.
"Flynn, watch the shadows," I commanded. "Don't let anything touch the anchor point."
"On it," Flynn said, drawing twin daggers of obsidian he'd scavenged from the glass plains.
"Thane," I said, looking up at the massive Bear Prince. "You carry Elias. He's too weak to cross on his own."
Elias started to protest but my bear drowned it out. "And who carries you?" Thane asked, his brown eyes full of a terrifying gentleness.
"I don't need carrying," I said, raising my metal arm toward the far bank. "I am the road."
I closed my eyes and reached inward. I bypassed the fear, bypassed the exhaustion, and went straight to the molten core of the Titan heart I had swallowed. It was heavy, dense, and ancient.
Project,I commanded the metal.
It hurt immediately.
It didn't feel like magic. It felt like dislocation. I gasped as my left arm jerked forward, the metal skin splitting open at theseams. Strands of glowing, golden light erupted from my wrist and palm, shooting out over the river of ash.
They wove themselves together in mid-air, a complex, spiraling lattice of solid light and star-metal essence. It hit the far bank with a wetthud, anchoring deep into the obsidian.
