He grabbed my waist, hauling me back from the lip of the widening fissure just as a slab of the Hall’s floor, large enough to hold a carriage, detached and tumbled into the dark. It didn't hit a bottom. I heard a wet, sucking sound, like a boot pulling out of thick mud, magnified a million times.
The mountain shifted. Not a tremor. Ashrug, or a swallow, maybe, as the section of floor disappeared.
I stumbled, my feet heavy and clumsy on the tilting floor. My skin felt wrong, tight, cold, and unyielding. The transformation hadn't receded; it had merely paused, trapped in a horrific equilibrium by the red shockwave of the Titan’s heart. I looked at my hand. The skin was a dull, matte grey, the color of raw iron.
"Aria." Kaelen was there, his hands hovering over me, afraid to touch, afraid to shatter. His golden eyes were wide, reflecting the magma-orange glow that was now bleeding from my own heavy irises. "You stopped the process. But you’re so cold."
"I feel heavy," I rasped. My voice sounded metallic, like a sword being drawn from a scabbard. "I feel dense."
"The heart anchored you. You just cracked it. I don’t think it was enough to immediately wake the titan, but with the energy still leaking from the heart, it will wake, sooner rather than later," Elias said, stepping through the dust of the ruined hall. He looked shaken; his usually impeccable robes torn, his hair wild. He stared at me not with relieved affection, but with a horrifying, clinical recognition. "For now, though, the heart grounded the frequency. But it didn't fix the vessel."
"The vessel is cracking," Flynn snapped, appearing at my side, daggers drawn as if he could stab the structural instability to death. He looked at my grey skin and swore softly. "She looks like a statue, Elias. A statue that’s about to fall over."
"We need to leave," Thane rumbled, looking at the ceiling where dust sifted down, falling in sheer curtains. "The titan stirs; if he fully wakes? This entire mountain range becomes a fist, and we are inside it."
"I know," Elias whispered. He reached out, his long, slender fingers tracing the rigid line of my jaw. He didn't use magic; he just touched me, and the contact sent a shiver of longing through the strange numbness of my skin.
"I know why you are breaking, Aria," he said, his voice dropping to a confessional whisper that cut through the roar ofthe waking earth. "It isn't just because you held the power of four princes. It is because of the design."
Kaelen stepped closer, his presence a wall of heat. "What are you talking about, Phoenix? What design?"
Elias looked at Kaelen, then at me. The turquoise in his eyes swirled with a guilt so old it felt like it had its own gravity.
"The blueprints," Elias said softly. "For Pandora. For the original mold."
The ground lurched again, violently enough to knock Flynn to one knee, but nobody moved. We were frozen by the confession hovering in the air.
"I was a consultant," Elias admitted, the words tearing out of him like fishhooks. "Hephaestus... he is a master of metal and fire, but he does not understand the soul. When Zeus commissioned the 'gift,' the perfect trap to bind us, Hephaestus came to me."
He looked down at his hands, hands that had caressed me, healed me, and apparently helped engineer the cage of my ancestors.
"I didn't know what it was, not really, and I had no idea what it was for," Elias said, his voice pleading. "I thought he was building a masterpiece. A new form of life. He asked me how to weave a spirit that could hold contradictory imperatives, love and duty, freedom and binding. I gave him the threads I saw in the tapestry of life and the future. I helped him design the lattice of the soul."
"You helped build the jailer," Kaelen growled, smoke curling from his nostrils.
"I helped build thevessel!" Elias snapped back, tears finally shining in his eyes, tears he couldn't shed. "Pandora was perfection, Kaelen! She was a masterpiece of divine engineering! She was built to hold the infinite!"
He turned back to me, his expression crumbling into devastation.
"But you, Aria, you’re not Pandora. You’re a copy of a copy, distantly removed from the original cast. Your biology is partly mortal, diluted by a thousand years of human breeding. You have the shape of the key, but the material? The material is too brittle."
He touched my cheek.
"You were never meant to hold this much power," Elias whispered. "You are a clay cup trying to hold a star. This transformation, Silvering... it isn't a spell. It’s your atoms trying to reinforce themselves into something stronger to survive the pressure. You are changing because flesh isn't strong enough."
"So I'm dying," I stated. It wasn't a question. It was a calculation. My body was trying to contain the magic the best way it knew how, and soon the process would be complete. I would be a statue. A monument to hubris.
"No," Kaelen snarled. He grabbed my shoulders, his grip bruising through the stiffness. "We’ll fix it. Unmake the magic. We drain her."
"You can't drain it," Elias said. "As I said, it has fused with her. If you pull the magic out, you pull her life out with it."
"Then we change the cup," Flynn said.
We all looked at him. The Wolf Prince was standing near a shattered pillar, wiping dust from his face. He looked terrified, but his eyes were sharp.
"If the cup is too small," Flynn said, gesturing to me, "get a bigger cup. Or stretch the one you have."
Elias went still. His eyes widened, fixing on a point in the distance.
