I was sure that it intended to sterilize the breach. To collapse the tunnel while my brothers were still inside.
The realization hit me like a blow to the solar plexus. If that spear struck the vortex while Flynn, Thane, and Elias were in transit, they wouldn't just be trapped. They would be unmade. Their essences would be scattered into the void between realms, lost to the eternal static of the ether. No rebirth. No afterlife. Just cessation.
And if we ran...
If I dragged her into the tunnels, we might survive the day. But the Sentinel would seal the Gate behind us.
My brothers would be trapped in the wreckage. They would be dragged back to the true Tartarus, or worse, taken to Olympus. They would be dissected. They would be mined for every scrap of information about the mortal realm, flayed of their minds until nothing remained but compliance. The betrayal of Pandora’s line would be viewed as an act of war, and without the Gate to hold them back, the Olympians would descend on this world like golden locusts.
We had no options. The chessboard had been flipped, the pieces scattered.
Aria saw the calculation in my eyes. She felt my resolve crumple through our bond, tasting the bitterness of my defeat.
"If we run, we lose them," she said, her voice steady, despite the tremors racking her hands. "If we stay, I have to take them all."
"It will kill you," I said, my voice thick with grief for a loss that hadn't happened yet. I wanted to shake her, to scream, to drag her away, but the strategist in me knew she was right. "To hold the Wolf, the Bear, the Phoenix, and the Dragon... Aria, you will be lightning in a glass jar. You will shatter."
"Then I shatter," she said.
She didn't wait for my permission. She didn't wait for the Sentinel to fire.
She turned her back on the creeping Sentinel and faced the swirling vortex of the Gate. She threw the heavy journal to me. It sailed through the air and hit my chest with a thud that sounded much too final, like a coffin lid closing. I grabbed it purely on instinct. Theron had wanted her to have it for whatever cryptic reason, and if she wanted me to hold on to it, then that was what I would do.
I just hoped I didn't have to watch her die while I held her legacy in my hands.
She spread her arms, opening her chest, her heart, her mind. The air around her began to warp, the heat rising to impossible levels.
"Now!" she screamed, her voice layering with a harmonic distortion that vibrated in my marrow, a command that spoke to the divine parts of me. "All of you! Now!"
The Sentinel fired.
The beam of white eradication lanced toward the Gate, a straight line of death aiming for the heart of the vortex.
And Aria Pandoros stepped into its path.
But she didn't just block it. Sheabsorbedit.
Or rather, the golden light exploding from her body met the white beam and swallowed it whole. She was no longer a woman standing on stone; she was a singularity, a point of infinite density where magic and will collided. The blinding white of the Sentinel's attack hit the gold of her aura and crumpled.
The golden tethers connecting her to the Gate snapped, not breaking, but dissolving before being sucked into her.
The tether on my chest yanked violently, dragging me not away from the Gate, buttowardher. The pull was irresistible, magnetic, dragging me into the gravity well she had become.
I didn't fight it. I let go.
"Damn you," I whispered, letting the current take me, feeling my physical form begin to lose its edges. "You magnificent, suicidal fool."
I threw my head back and let the dragon rise, dissolving my partial manifestation. I poured everything, every ounce of ancient rage, every strategy I had ever devised, every fire I had ever stoked, all of it, into the woman who had decided to become my world. If she was going to burn, I would be the fuel that made the fire bright enough to blind the gods.
FOUR
Aria
I expected pain. I braced for the biology of it, the burning of nerve endings, the tearing of tissue, the agony of being ripped apart by forces too large for the vessel of my skin. I waited for the scream to die in my throat.
Instead, there was silence.
A profound, expansive silence that stretched out in all directions, infinite and cool, swallowing the thrumming chant of the Gate and the roar of the Sentinel’s weapon.
