The currents are twisted,Elias whispered in my mind, his voice faint and flickering like a dying candle flame.It makes my head spin. But I see the drain. It pulls to what I think is the north-northeast. Downward. Into the dark.
"Then we go north," I said, adjusting my grip on the bone. "Just, uh, show me which way that is." It wasn't like there was a sun or moon I could navigate by in this featureless purgatory.
Elias turned his head and gestured with a weary wing-tip toward a particularly gloomy patch of grey. I nodded and started walking.
The Princes fell in around me instantly, a formation drilled into them by centuries of war and brotherhood. Kaelen took my right, a wall of heat and scales shielding me. Thane took my left, a mountain moving with tectonic slowness but unstoppable momentum. Flynn ranged ahead, anxious and twitchy, checking for threats that might not have a scent. Elias rode the dragon, watching the unseen currents of magic.
I was the center. The point of the spear. The human element fused with the star, binding these monsters to reality.
"We are loud," I said to the empty air, narrowing my eyes at the dark horizon where the Devourer waited. "Good. Let them hear us coming."
We marched into the grey. And with every step, the silence of the Underworld seemed to lean in closer, listening like it was hungry for our failure.
THREE
Flynn
If the Underworld had a scent, it wouldn't be brimstone or rot. Those are smells of life ending, of biology breaking down. There is comfort in rot; it means somethingwasthere.
This place? It smelled of absolute zero.
It was an olfactory vacuum that sucked the moisture right out of my nose. I kept sneezing, violent, full-body convulsions that rattled my massive frame, trying to clear a blockage that didn't exist. My ears swiveled like radar dishes, twitching at the ghost-echoes of sounds that might have been footsteps or might have been the neurons in my brain misfiring from sensory deprivation.
Scritch. Scritch.
To my left.
I snapped my jaws at the empty grey air, my teeth meeting with aclackthat vibrated through my skull. Nothing. Just the taste of iron dust and disappointment.
Stop it,I told myself, digging my claws into the pitted metal floor.You’re chasing ghosts. Focus on the pack.
But the pack was dying.
We were walking north, or what Elias claimed was north, though I suspected 'north' here was just a suggestion made by a dying bird, across a landscape that felt like the skin of a metallic corpse. The silence was heavy. It wasn't peaceful; it was a weight, pressing down on my shoulders, trying to flatten me against the ground until I became just another uneven ridge in the iron plain.
I trotted back toward the center of our formation, my gait uneven. My back left leg had a hitch in it, a phantom pain from a tendon I might have pulled in the fall, or maybe it was just the Titan magic in my blood arguing with the physics of the Underworld.
I fell in beside Kaelen.
The Dragon looked terrible. His scales, usually a terrifying, light-drinking obsidian that shimmered with an inner petroleum sheen, were dull. They looked like slate. He was rapidly losing heat. The air around him, which usually rippled with thermal distortion, was stagnant. He walked with his head low, his massive, horned snout nearly scraping the ground, his tail dragging behind him like a dead weight.
Cold,his mind projected into the bond. It wasn't a thought; it was a sensation. A shivering, reptilian lethargy.The fire is sleeping.
"Wake it up, lizard," I muttered, though it came out as a series of low, chirping whines. I nudged his flank with my shoulder. He felt like cold stone and didn't even growl at me. He just kept trudging, one heavy foot in front of the other, eyes glazed over with a milky film.
Kaelen was forgetting that he was a Prince. He was just becoming a big lizard looking for a rock to die under.
I looked back at Thane.
If Kaelen was cold, Thane was heavy. The Bear Prince was sinking. With every step, his massive paws punched through thesurface of the iron plain, plunging ankle-deep into the material as if it were mud. He had to physically wrench his limbs free with a wetsuckingsound that made my hackles rise.
Thump. Squelch. Drag.
He was crying. Great, silent tears tracked through the fur on his face, matting it down. He wasn't sobbing; he was just leaking grief. The gravity in his soul, amplified by the Titan-blood we’d absorbed, was reacting to the density of the Underworld. He wanted to be the floor. He wanted to stop moving and let the sediment settle over him.
And Elias... Elias was a flickering candle in a hurricane. He rode on Kaelen’s back, a huddled mass of feathers that sparked and sputtered. Sometimes he was a bird. Sometimes he was a geometric shape of light that hurt to look at. Sometimes he was just a pile of ash that sneezed.
We were devolving. The sophisticated, complex consciousness of the "Princes" was being stripped away by the environment, leaving only the raw, elemental animal underneath. And the animal was terrified.
