He was frozen.
Panic clawed at my throat. I crawled over to him, grabbing his shoulders and shaking him. It was like trying to shake a boulder. He didn't flop; he moved as a solid unit, rigid and unyielding.
"Flynn! Wake up!"
Nothing. No grunt of annoyance, no sleepy quip about needing five more minutes. Just that terrifying, suspended animation.
I rushed over to Elias. The Phoenix Prince was curled in a ball, looking impossibly small. I checked for a pulse. His skin was hot, feverishly so, but there was no beat beneath the surface. It was as if time itself had snagged on a nail and stopped.
Thane was a silent mountain by the tunnel entrance, his eyes open, staring unblinkingly at the dark. Even the dust motes in the air were suspended, glittering like trapped stars.
"No," I breathed, backing away toward the center of the cavern. "No, no, no. Not this. Not now."
Had the Council found us? Was this the doing of a Sentinel? A suppression field so powerful it halted biology?
Or was it me? Had I broken reality again? Had my attempt to bind the Skal, to rewrite the laws of the universe with a sharpie marker, finally caused the whole system to crash?
I spun around, looking for the monster.
Steve the Skal was coiled near the water's edge. He, too, was frozen in place, mandible mid-twitch...
No.
One of the Skal’s eyes, the central one on the left side of its armored head, blinked.
It was a slow, deliberate movement, utterly out of sync with the frozen tableau of the cavern.
I froze, breath catching in my throat. "Steve?"
The creature didn’t move its body. It couldn’t. But that single green eye swiveled, locking onto me with a terrifying intelligence that had nothing to do with the simple, distinct hunger I had experienced earlier.
The vessel is awake,a voice said in my mind.
It wasn't the wet, gurgling thought-voice of the Skal. It wasn't the briny, primitive urge to consume. This voice was dry as old parchment, layered and resonant, sounding like three women speaking in perfect unison. It smelled of dust and torch smoke.
Come closer, Aria Pandoros.
I took a step back, my hand dropping to the hilt of the dagger Flynn had given me, though I knew it would be useless here. "Who are you? What have you done to them?"
I have done nothing but pause the clock,the voice resonated, bypassing my ears to vibrate directly in my skull.Time is a river. I have simply built a dam. Step forward. The beast is merely a way to communicate.
"A way to communicate?" I repeated, the absurdity of the idea nearly making me laugh hysterically.
A conduit,the voice corrected, sounding mildly annoyed.Communication across the realms requires... infrastructure.Your pet abomination has a flexible architecture. Now, come here. We do not have long before the Weaver notices the snag in her tapestry.
I looked at Kaelen, frozen and helpless. If this entity could stop time for four demigods, I doubted running would do much good.
I walked toward the Skal.
As I approached, the air around the monster shimmered. The darkness of the cavern seemed to bleed away, replaced by a grey, misty twilight. The obsidian tomb faded. The black water of the pool became a flat, silver mirror.
I wasn't in the cavern anymore. I was in a place that felt like the space between breaths. A liminal void where paths crossed and diverged in the fog.
Standing over the frozen form of the Skal was a woman.
She was tall, draped in robes that shifted color like oil on water, saffron, charcoal, and violet. She held two torches that burned with a silent, pale fire. Her face was hidden by a veil, but I could feel her gaze on me, heavy and ancient.
"You aren't Hera," I whispered.
