The stone roof exploded inward.
Dust and feathers filled the air. A harpy shrieked in triumph, diving for Aria’s exposed face.
Kaelen intercepted it with his bare hands, roaring, ripping the creature in half in a shower of black gore.
"Now, Aria!" I shouted, placing my hand over hers, over the seed. "Crush it! Ground the energy!"
She tried. I saw the effort in her face, the strain. But her fingers were locked. The transformation had frozen her grip. She couldn't break the shell.
"I... can't," she sobbed, a dry, tearless sound.
"Help her!" Kaelen urged Kaelen as he dropped the carcass of the Harpy.
For a moment I hesitated, then I grabbed her hand, my larger fingers wrapping over her frozen fist.
"Together," I growled. "Push."
I squeezed, but it wasn’t enough. “Kaelen, Thane, I need one of you as well.”
Kalen dropped to his knees next to us and wrapped his hand around mine and Aria’s. His dragon strength, fueled by panic and love, clamped down.
CRACK.
The sound wasn't loud. It was a small, wet pop, like a berry bursting.
But the reaction was instantaneous.
A red shockwave exploded from her hand. It passed through us, through the harpies, through the walls of the Hall of Muses.
For just a moment, the world went silent, and the fighting stopped. The harpies froze in mid-air, then dropped like stones, unconscious or dead.
And then, the floor beneath us inhaled.
The mountain took a breath.
The silver light on Aria’s skin didn't fade, but it stopped spreading. It turned from a sickly, pale white to a deep, resonant iron-grey. The brittleness seemed to harden slightly, just enough so she didn't look like she'd break if she blinked wrong.
Her eyes snapped open. The milky blindness was gone.
She sat up, the movement fluid, but slightly off. She looked at her hand. Red juice stained her palm like fresh blood, but the seed was still there, cracked but not crushed completely.
"Is she..." Kaelen started, reaching for her.
The ground lurched violently, throwing us all off balance. A deep, grinding boom echoed from the roots of the world, miles below us.
Aria looked at us. "He's waking," she said.
And then the floor of the Hall of Muses split in two.
FIVE
Aria
The floor didn't just crack, it turned into a chasm of jagged white teeth that opened in the marble beneath us, breathing out a gust of air that smelled of wet clay, deep roots, and something terrifyingly alive. The harpies, those shrieking nightmares of feathers and malice, didn't attack. They didn't dive. They screamed, a collective sound of primitive, animalistic terror that scraped against the inside of my skull, and the ones that didn’t drop dead scattered into the burning sky like ash caught in an updraft.
They weren't afraid of us. They were afraid of what I had just rung like a dinner bell.
"Move!" Thane roared, his voice warring with the grinding tectonic groan rising from the deep.
