Yet the compass in Zeriel’s pouch is pulling us toward it.
What in all the hells could the emperor want from a place like this? Sanctuaries like these were meant for oaths, for rites, not for the finish line of a gladiatorial death race. Using it for this feels like a profound desecration, another piece of our history being stripped of its meaning and repurposed for imperial sport.
Zeriel moves to stand beside me at the rock’s edge, his gaze following mine. The heat of his emotions cool, replaced by a focused, assessing stillness. He sees it too. Not just a building, but a piece of a past they tried to erase.
The gorge between us and the temple looks like a raw wound in the earth, its bottom lost to shadow. There is no bridge. No path. Just a sheer drop and a hundred yards of empty, hungry air.
The other champions gaze at it too. The goal, and an obstacle. A new tension settles over the precipice, the rivalry with Blaise momentarily forgotten, replaced by the stark, shared challenge ahead. This isn’t about fighting each other. Not yet. This is about crossing the abyss.
The voices of the crowd intensify, a bloodthirsty symphony for the champions who stand before them. We are now an event in full view.
Chapter 48
Adeep, resonant horn blast echoes from the imperial dragon riders above, a sound that vibrates in my bones. The rock beneath my feet trembles, a low, grinding shudder that seems to rise from the very depths of the chasm. The other champions tense, hands instinctively flying to their weapons.
What is that?My thought is a sharp point of alarm directed at Zeriel.
He doesn’t answer. His gaze is fixed on the abyss, his body a coiled spring.
Then, from the sheer black walls of the gorge, they emerge.
My blood turns to ice. They don’t look like dragons, not in any way I have ever known. They are nightmares. Skeletal, bone-white bodies, long and emaciated. They move with a horrifying, clicking gait, their claws digging into the rock as they crawl upward from the darkness. Their heads are elongated, skull-like, their jaws lined with serrated bone that open and close with a dry, rasping sound. Their eyes are so hollow they look like empty sockets, cold as the abyss itself.
Abyssal Reavers,the name screams through my mind, a piece of forgotten lore I didn't know I had.
They crawl up both sides of the chasm, their impossibly long limbsreaching across the void, intertwining, locking together. They are forming a bridge. A living, writhing, terrifying bridge of bone and sinew.
“The path is laid,” Overseer Pellvorn’s voice booms from above. “Cross it.”
For a horrified moment, no one moves.
Then the spell breaks. Damiar Korren lets out a roar of defiance, but Zeriel is the first to move, one hand clamping around my wrist.
Climb on my back. No arguments this time.
There are none. I move as if we are two parts of the same whole, my body finding his with a chaotic familiarity. I scramble up, my fingers trembling as they grip his shoulders, my legs wrapping around his waist. The hard line of his spine presses against my softer flesh, and I feel the raised ridges of scars where his wings should be, the heat of his skin burning through the thin fabric between us. My chest molds against his back, cheek brushing the curve of his neck as I tighten my hold, fingers fisting in the weave of his tunic. Every muscle beneath me is a tightly wound cord.
And then it comes—like a suffocating tide. His resolve washes through me, a wildfire igniting in my veins, unbidden yet impossible to resist, consuming every flicker of doubt. His ferocity becomes mine, and with it the rest of him—rage, grief, hunger. Yet beneath it all, something quieter, still fiercer: the primal need to protect what he once failed to save.
Before I can begin to unpack it, the precipice erupts into a mad scramble. Champions shove past one another, a desperate, feral pack lunging for the writhing bridge.
Our first step onto it is more than a nightmare. The bone is slick under Zeriel’s boots, coated in some foul cave slime. The entire structure shifts, undulating with the collective, unnatural life of the creatures that form it. A dry, clicking sound rises from all around us, the gnashing of a thousand skeletal teeth.
They are not a passive walkway. As we run, skeletal claws snap up from the gaps between bodies, aiming for ankles and legs. Areaver’s head twists on a neck of vertebrae, its hollow sockets fixing on me, jaws gaping with a sound like grinding stones.
Before it can strike, Zeriel’s boot slams into its skull, sending it recoiling with a screech that echoes into the depths.
Is this how they hunt? I wonder. Pretending to be prey or a pathway, tempting creatures to approach?
I risk a look back and see the eleven remaining champions strung out across the living bridge, all of them now on this side of the rock. At least a couple have lost or left behind their wards already. I don’t see Elara’s friend, that younger woman whose name I never caught, and never will. Hers was possibly the first scream I heard.
Blaise is immediately behind us, eyes glinting with that reckless, feral hunger.
Zeriel is a steady press of raw strength and focus.
You’re too calm,I can’t help but think, trying to distract myself.
You like it.
