I’d never been more wrong. As my skin vibrated with echoes of countless deaths, I was trapped in a nightmare darker than Jason’s worst spells. “Aion!” I screamed, but it was too late.
The blinding wave of my climax had already swept over him, leaving nothing but wreckage in its wake. I’d seen the exact moment it had happened, the moment my damned body had overwhelmed his.
In a twisted way, Charon had warned us something like this could happen. Aion's vulnerability to death energy overload was the reason we couldn’t undergo a binding through the power of the lake. But apparently, not even the ferryman had been prepared for this.
My chest seized. I scrambled backward, tearing myself off Aion. My bare knees slipped over the thick pelts covering the stone dais, and I slammed my palms flat against his chest. I hunted for the deep, rhythmic vibration of his core, the steady hum that always told me he was close.
The bronze was just cold, heavy metal. The comforting, living resonance had vanished.
My breath caught in my throat, choking me. I looked up at him, at that stern, inhuman face I’d come to love so much. His eyes were open, but the gentle fire burning within them was gone. The once-blazing blue had turned dull and flat. I touched his cheek, my fingers trembling against his rigid jaw. The magic humming beneath my skin met no resistance, no answering flare of life.
“No. No, please.” Tears spilled hot over my cheeks, dripping down onto his face. “Aion, wake up. Look at me.”
I grabbed his heavy shoulders and tried to shake him. It was like trying to move a mountain. He was stiff and motionless, a lifeless piece of metal.
The truth crushed the air straight out of my lungs. Jason was right. My creator had spent my entire life forging me into a weapon, beating the reality into my bones: I was a walking plague. My only purpose was to make things wither and rot. I had dared to defy him. I had dared to believe I could be touched without leaving a corpse behind.
And I had only proven Jason right. I had reached for Aion, and the raw surge of my curse had shattered his soul. I had executed the only man I had ever loved.
No. There had to be some way, some way to fix this. This was Asphodelia, the city of the dead, and Aion had yet to rot. Surely, someone could fix this. Surely, it wasn’t too late.
I slid off the edge of the stone, the room spinning as I tried to focus. My hands swept the floor until my fingers snagged the heavy silk of my discarded robes. I dragged the fabric over my shivering shoulders, ignoring the ties at my waist. The simple action anchored me, and I finally made a mad dash for the heavy wooden door.
The damp, winding corridors of Phix’s den stretched out before me in the gloom. I ran blindly toward the distant entrance, my bare feet slapping hard against the cold floor.
“Help!” I pushed my burning lungs to their limit. “Someone, please help me!”
The solid rock beneath my feet shuddered. A low frequency rattled my teeth and sent a fresh spike of terror throughmy veins. A massive, bone-shaking boom echoed through the tunnels. The air pressure plummeted. Above me, the deafening sound of crystals shattering echoed down from the city’s distant canals.
The devastating surge I had released had done more than hurt my colossus. It was tearing the city apart.
I breached the threshold of the den, bursting out into the sprawling asphodel garden. I barely dared to hope, but I had to do something to help my mate somehow. But even for that plan, it was too late.
Only an hour ago, the vast field of white asphodels had swayed peacefully in the wind. Now, thousands of flowers shook on their stems, glowing with a panicked light. The ground beneath my feet hummed, still screaming with the echoes of what I'd done. And Skaros and Phix were standing there, motionless.
They were exactly where I’d left them, surrounded by the now-agitated flowers. Phix was waiting casually as if nothing at all was wrong. And Skaros… Was Skaros glowing too? Like the flowers?
I didn’t understand why they hadn’t done anything, why they were just pretending everything was fine. But they were my only chance.
“Phix!” I stumbled toward them through the flailing asphodel blooms. “Aion… something is wrong! He won’t move. Please, you have to help him!”
This time, the flowers didn’t wither away like they had in the Blighted Lands. But what happened was so much worse.
As I reached the edge of the path, a glowing, silver-blue thread drifted away from Skaros’s broad shoulder. It looked like a single strand of luminous silk pulling free from his flesh and unspooling into the heavy air. Then another thread detached from his chest. Another slipped from his furred legs.
There was no blood. There were no screams of agony. He was simply unraveling.
“Skaros?” The horror compounded, twisting my stomach into a tight, sick knot.
The manticore turned his head to look at me. His amber eyes were incredibly clear, stripped of any predatory edge. The triple row of razor-sharp teeth was visible as he offered a small, peaceful smile.
“Perhaps I was meant to have your unweaving touch after all,” he said.
“What is happening to him?” I screamed, spinning back toward Phix. But Skaros had already told me. The surge. I was killing him too. And his own mother was just… there. Watching. “Stop it! Do something!”
Phix ignored me. She did not reach out with her massive paws to catch the unspooling threads. She offered no command for a healer. She simply watched him dissolve, her dark eyesreflecting the silver light that was pulling away from the manticore’s body.
“Why would I stop it, child?” she asked. “Don’t you see how beautiful it is?”
