"Can it be fixed?" Thane asked. The Bear was standing near Aria, essentially using his massive body to block her from the sight of the leaking corruption. He looked grey, his endurance taxed to the limit.
Elias was running his hands over the unblemished sections of the crystal, his face pressed close to the stone. He looked like a physician trying to find a pulse on a corpse.
"The resonance chamber is shattered," Elias murmured, his voice lacking its usual musical lilt. "The harmonics won't align. If we try to play the song of the Void through this it will come out distorted. It won't sound like empty space. It will sound like a scream."
"And a scream attracts predators," I finished, running a hand through my hair. It was stiff with rock dust and sweat.
I looked at Aria.
She was sitting on the floor with the journal open in her lap, but she wasn't reading. She was staring at the black ooze leaking from the crystal with a look of utter, hollow defeat. Her shoulders were slumped, and the fire I’d seen in her eyes in the room above, the fire that had let her command a dead Titan, was banking low.
She smelled like rain that had stopped falling. Just damp, cold earth.
I hated it. I hated the smell of her giving up. It made the wolf inside me want to tear something apart just to prove we were still alive.
I walked over to her, crouching down so I was in her eyeline.
"Hey," I said softly.
She looked at me. Her eyes were dull, the gold and amber flecks swirling sluggishly in the amethyst. "We failed, Flynn. We got to the finish line, and the whole plan turned out to be pointless."
"Since when do we rely on a single plan?" I reached out, tucking a strand of dark hair behind her ear. My thumb grazed her jawline, and I felt the faint, thrumming pulse of her blood. It was slow. Too slow. "We aren't done, Pup. We're just taking a breather."
"Hera is digging us out," she whispered. "Listen to that."
BOOM.
A crack appeared in the smooth curve of the ceiling, a spiderweb of white against the dark stone. A chunk of rock the size of a fist fell, shattering near Elias.
"She’s using the Titan’s energy to unmake the rock," Elias noted, stepping back from the debris. "Efficient."
"We need to fix the crystal," Kaelen insisted, turning to glare at the broken machine. "Use the Dragon fire. Use the Phoenix restoration. Fuse it back together."
"It’s not just broken rock, Kaelen!" Elias snapped, his composure finally fraying. "You cannot fix a violin with a forest fire!"
Kaelen roared, a sound of pure frustration, and kicked the base of the structure. "Then what? We sit here and wait for the Queen to open the roof like a can of sardines?"
I looked from the broken crystal to Aria, and then to the golden veins still faintly visible on her neck.
An idea sparked in my brain. It was dangerous. It was insane. It was exactly the kind of thing that usually got me yelled at by Kaelen and sighed at by Thane.
"The book," I said, pointing at the journal in Aria's lap. "What exactly did it say? About the song?"
Aria blinked, looking down. "It said...'To alter the song, one must strike the Chords of Silence located in the Throat.'"
"Right," I said, standing up. I started pacing again, the energy coiling in my legs. "Strike the chords. Play the music. But the instrument is broken."
"We established that," Kaelen growled.
"But themusic," I pressed, looking at Elias. "The song. It's just magic, right? Potent, specific vibrations of magic?"
"Essentially," Elias agreed, watching me warily. "Elemental tones reconfigured to mimic the vacuum between realms."
"And the crystal is just a system to take the signal and broadcast it out to the cosmos so the Devourer hears it."
"Yes," Elias said slowly. "Flynn, where are you going with this?"
I stopped in front of Aria again, reaching down and pulling her to her feet. She swayed, but I steadied her, my hands on her waist.
