She looked at me with those too-old eyes, then nodded. “I’m with you.”
We ran through the chaos, Kevin limping beside us, his damaged wing dragging, but his spirit unbroken. Around us, the battle raged. Tam, the rebel who’d fallen off his bee twice, went down under a guard’s blade. Another bee deflected what would have been a killing blow to Jareth—apparently, the bee-riding lessons had paid off after all. The rebels were holding, but barely.
“I know where the convergence chamber is,” Mora said suddenly, surprising me. “I was with Elle when they dragged her there. They knocked me out and locked me in a side room, but I woke up when I heard the explosions. The guard at my door ran to see what was happening, and I slipped out.”
“Then lead the way,” I said, trusting this brave, brilliant woman who’d already risked everything. “The sound,” I said, realizing something else. “Everything here has a resonance, a frequency. And there’s something deep below that’s screaming at a pitch that makes my antennae want to crawl off my head.”
We plunged into the Heartspire proper, and immediately I knew we were walking into something worse than a trap. The walls pulsed with that sick mixture of Root and Bloom, the corruption so thick I could taste it with every breath. My compound eyes picked up movement in every shadow—not guards, but the building itself, aware and hungry.
The walls themselves pulsed with that sickening mixture I’d seen before—Root and Bloom twisted together in the rot channels, creating something completely unnatural. During my scouting mission, I’d watched guards coat their weapons in it, seen it dissolve a training dummy like acid through flesh. The science of it nagged at me even now, even in the middle of a battle for our lives. Root and Bloom weren’t supposed to mix—that’s what made marked ones so rare, what made convergence so dangerous. But here they were, deliberately combined, weaponized.
My mind churned through the implications even as my body fought to survive. If you could mix them artificially… if corruption could be combined with purity… what happened to that mixture when you distributed it? Spread it thin enough, across enough vessels, would it still be lethal? Or would it become something else entirely? Something manageable?
The thought slipped away as another section of wall tried to eat Mora, but it lingered in the back of my mind. Distribution. Dispersal. Dilution across multiple points instead of concentration in one.
“Stay close,” I told Mora, then louder, to the rebels who’d followed us in: “The building’s alive! Don’t touch the walls!”
Too late for some. I watched in horror as a rebel brushed against a seemingly innocent piece of stonework and immediately began transforming, his skin becoming bark, his screams becoming the rustle of leaves. Another stepped on the wrong floor stone and sank into it like it was quicksand.
“This way!” Thrak’s voice cut through the chaos. He’d fought his way inside, Vera beside him, both covered in blood that wasn’t all theirs. “The main chamber’s below!”
We fought our way deeper, every step a battle against both guards and architecture. The Heartspire’s defenses were awakening—thorns erupting from walls, floors becoming acid, air turning poison. But we pushed through, because what else could we do? Elle was down there. Our people were dying up here. Stopping wasn’t an option.
Then something changed.
A wave of wrongness rolled through the Heartspire that made even the corrupted walls recoil. It wasn’t the building’s sickness—I’d been feeling that since we entered. This was something else. Something colder. Something that felt like death.
Kevin buzzed nervously on my shoulder, his usual bravado replaced by something I’d never felt from him before: genuine fear. Not the healthy fear of fighting guards or dodging corruption. The primal terror of prey sensing an apex predator.
“What was that?” Thrak asked, his scarred face going pale.
“I don’t know,” I lied, because I did know. I’d felt this kind of power once before, weeks ago, when Kaelren had been standing at the edge of giving in completely to his corruption. But this was worse. This was that momentfully realized. Whatever Kaelren had become, it was beyond corrupted.
“Something just changed,” Vera said quietly, her tactical mind already working. “Something big.”
“Kaelren or Elle,” I said. “Maybe both. The convergence is close—reality’s thin enough that I can practically taste it. Whatever’s happening in that chamber, we’re running out of time.”
We moved faster after that, driven by the certainty that somewhere below us, things had gone to shit.
Part of me hoped that was a good thing. The rest of me worried it meant we were all about to die.
A massive guard blocked our path to the lower levels, wearing armor that gleamed with that sick Root-Bloom mixture. His blade was less sword and more portable apocalypse, humming with wrongness.
“You go no further, rebels.”
“That’s what you think,” I said, gathering sonic energy. “Kevin, you remember that move we practiced?”
Kevin buzzed agreement, then did something I’d never seen him do before—he started vibrating at a frequency that matched my sonic pulse. When I released the energy, he amplified it, creating a wave of sound so powerful it didn’t just knock the guard down—it liquefied his armor, leaving him gasping on the floor in his underclothes.
“That’s embarrassing,” I noted, stepping over him. “Maybe invest in better underwear next time.”
We descended stairs that spiraled into darkness, the chanting growing louder with each step. My extra joints ached with every movement, and I could feel blood still seeping from my wounds, but stopping wasn’t an option.
“There,” Mora whispered, pointing ahead.
Massive doors stood before us, and I knew that there was no coming back from what was on the other side.
“Together,” I said, looking at the rebels who’d made it this far. Maybe thirty of us, all wounded, all exhausted, all determined.
