There was no crunch of bone. No spray of blood. Just the sound of shattering glass. The hound exploded into a thousand sharp, black motes of nothing.
Easy,Flynn projected, a flicker of his usual savage glee cutting through the bond.
Then a second creature, a wolf, darted in from his left. It was impossibly fast. It dodged his counter-snarl and sank its crystalline fangs into his flank.
Flynn yelped, a sound of pure shock, and spun, snapping the creature's spine with a whip of his head. It dissolved. But Flynn stumbled, his hind leg buckling.
"Flynn!" I shouted. "Are you hurt?"
He shook his massive head, then paused. A look of profound confusion clouded his amber eyes. He looked down at the leg the creature had bitten. There was no blood. Not even a tear in his fur. But a patch of his hide, the size of my hand, was flickering, turning translucent.
It...He paused, his mental voice laced with a strange, childlike bewilderment.Did I... did I forget how to stand on this leg? I can't remember the command.
My blood ran cold. Elias had been right. It wasn't about violence. It was about erasure.
"It eats history," I said, my voice barely a whisper. "Kaelen, don't let them touch you!"
"Then they die before they get the chance!" Kaelen roared. He stepped forward, and the dragon woke. Not his full form, but the power of it. His skin flushed with a deep, bronze heat, and the air around him began to shimmer with thermal distortion. "Thane, the door! Elias, get behind Aria!"
Elias, still fragile and achingly human, scrambled behind me without a word. I planted my feet, my star-metal leg finding a solid purchase on the buckled floor. I became his wall.
The wave hit us. A tide of broken geometry and silent, screaming hunger.
Kaelen unleashed hell.
He opened his mouth and a torrent of fire, so white-hot it was almost blue, blasted into the charging horde. This wasn't the contained, tactical flame of a general. This was the raw, desperate venting of a star's core. The sheer force of it cracked the obsidian floor, melting it into a glowing river of slag. The void-creatures vaporized on contact, the sound of their unmaking a chorus of high-pitched shrieks.
But the fire was consuming him, too. I could see it. Fine, hairline cracks of pure magma appeared along his forearms, spiderwebbing up his neck. Smoke, thick and black, wasn't just coming from his mouth; it was rising from his own skin. He was burning up his physical form to fuel the inferno.
While Kaelen held the center, a huge creature, a bear made of shifting fault-lines and gravitational pull, lumbered around his wall of fire. It ignored Kaelen’s heat, its form simply absorbingthe energy. Its eyes were holes into nothing. It was coming for me and the pale, trembling man I was shielding.
It never reached us.
Thane met its charge with a sound that shook the foundations of the Underworld. It wasn't a roar; it was the sound of a mountain gaining a voice. He slammed into the void-bear, and for a moment, two opposite and equal forces of nature cancelled each other out.
The void-bear lashed out, its claws not of glass, but of pure absence. They swiped across Thane's chest.
Thane grunted, his feet sliding back, his boots carving deep gouges into the stone. Where the claws connected, his leather armour didn't tear. It just... wasn't there anymore. A strip of it, six inches wide, vanished, leaving his bare skin exposed.
I felt the feedback through the bond. A jolt of pure vertigo. For a terrifying second, Thane’s mind went blank. The image of the Ridge battlefield, the memory of his guilt, the entire complex architecture of his sorrow... it flickered. The void had tried to steal his grief.
Then Thane roared, his eyes blazing with a fury so profound it was holy.
You do not get to take them!His thought boomed.They are MINE! My failures! My burdens!
He grabbed the void-bear’s head in his massive hands. And he squeezed.
But you can’t crush a vacuum. So Thane did something else. He poured his own history into it. He forced the weight of his soul, the dense, heavy gravity of his Titan-infused blood, into the creature. The void-bear, designed to erase, was suddenly faced with a memory so heavy, so dense with pain and love and duty, that it couldn't process it.
The creature swelled, its form distending. Then, with a silent implosion, it collapsed into a single, shimmering tear in reality, which immediately sealed itself shut.
Thane stood panting, his chest bare where his armour had been. His skin was untouched. He had refused the erasure. His blood, I saw, was practically boiling under his skin, a slow, angry simmer that made the air around him thick and heavy.
More were coming. Skittering things, like spiders woven from shadow, were crawling down from the ceiling. Kaelen’s fire couldn’t reach them all.
My turn.
"Stay behind me, Elias," I muttered.
