And behind me, Kaelen screamed.
It was a sound I had never heard from him, not in my nightmares, not in his rage. It was a cry of pure, shock-induced agony.
I spun around, my hand freezing inches from Flynn's reaching fingers.
Kaelen had fallen to his knees. His back was arched, his head thrown back, and the golden tethers binding him to the Gate had turned a sickly, frozen blue. Lightning arced down from the ceiling where I'd been staring at Olympus and pierced Kaelen's chest.
Thick, white frost crusted his lips and was spreading across his skin. It raced up his arms and across his body from the points of light that connected him to me and to the gate, turning his dark tunic white, creeping up his neck like a strangling vine.
"Kaelen?" I gasped, the name tearing from my throat.
He looked at me, his molten gold eyes wide with shock. His skin, usually radiating furnace-heat, was pale as milk, the veins beneath standing out in stark relief.
"Stop," he choked out, a cloud of visible vapor erupting from his lips with the word. The frost cracked on his jaw as he tried to speak. "Aria... stop."
I looked back at the Gate, at Flynn's desperate, reaching hand, and then at Kaelen, who was freezing to death before my eyes.
If I pulled Flynn through, would I kill Kaelen?
I let go of the connection.
Flynn roared in fury as he was sucked back into the vortex, the amber light dimming instantly. The pressure in the room vanished with a thunderclap that knocked me off my feet.
I scrambled across the floor to Kaelen. The frost stopped spreading, but Kaelen was shivering violently, his body convulsing.
"What happened?" I demanded, grabbing his face. His skin was terrifyingly cold, hard as marble. "Kaelen, look at me."
He gasped, drawing in a ragged breath that rattled in his chest. The golden tethers hummed, returning to their normal hue, but the damage lingered. He leaned into my touch, trembling, seeking my warmth like a lifeline.
I pressed my palms against his cheeks, channeling warmth, trying to force the blood back into his frozen skin. He felt like winter stone, sucking the heat straight out of my flesh. The frost on his tunic had stopped spreading, but it wasn’t melting, either.
"Kaelen," I urged, my voice cracking. "Tell me. Did the feedback loop hurt you? Is it the connection?"
He didn’t blink. He didn’t even seem to know I was there, kneeling in the wreckage of the Sanctorum with my hands on his face. His molten gold eyes, usually so focused, so piercing, stared right through me, fixed on some point in the swirling aurora above our heads.
"Kaelen!"
Nothing. No recognition. No sarcastic retort or commanding reassurance. Just a vacant, terrifying stillness, interrupted only by the violent shudders racking his frame.
I tried to push into our mental bond, to force my presence into his mind the way I had done a hundred times before.Answer me!
But where I usually found a roaring fire or a wall of iron will, I found... static. A wall of white noise, pulsating and angry, crackling with interference that stung my mental touch. It was like shouting into a storm.
Then, he stiffened. His head snapped to the side, chin lifting, ears straining toward the gaping hole in the roof where Olympus hung heavy and threatening.
"What?" I whispered, looking up. I saw nothing but the bleeding sky and the shifting stone. "What do you hear?"
The silence in the chamber was absolute, save for the low, thrumming vibration of the golden tethers that bound us. But Kaelen was listening to a cacophony I couldn’t perceive. His pupils dilated until the gold was nearly swallowed by black. His lips moved, shaping words that didn’t belong to a human throat, syllables that twisted the air as they left his mouth.
"Ktheaa... voros nill..."
The sounds were guttural, liquid and sharp all at once, vibrating with a resonance that made my teeth ache. It wasn't the old tongue I used for rituals. It was older. Heavier. It sounded like rocks grinding together at the bottom of the ocean, or the wind howling across a dead planet.
"Athos... mori..."
He grabbed my wrists, not to hold me, but to move me aside, his grip bruising. He wasn’t looking at me; he was looking past me, toward the transformed Gate, toward the darkness where Flynn had vanished, his expression twisting into something unrecognizable. Not fear. Not rage. Devotion.
"Kaelen, stop. You're scaring me. That language…I don't understand."
