"Welcome back," I whispered, the metal encroaching on my vocal cords.
My arms gave out. The connection severed.
I collapsed forward, a dead weight. Thane caught me. He didn't let me hit the hardness of the floor. He scooped me up, cradling me against his chest plate, the cold, rune-etched metal of his armor pressing against the burning fever of my remaining skin. He smelled of pine needles and ancient sorrow, but the scent of rain was gone.
He scrambled to his feet, holding me effortlessly, as if I were made of hollow glass. He turned to the wall, to the remaining chain that anchored the containment field.
He was shaking. But it wasn't the palsy of fear anymore. The vibration running through his massive frame was rage. It was a pure, clean, volcanic rage directed at the voice in the sky, at the manipulative goddess who had dared to use his ghosts as a weapon against his family.
"She thinks I am weak," Thane growled, his voice vibrating through my ribs, deeper and more terrifying than I had ever heard it. "She thinks my guilt makes me heavy. She thinks it keeps me down."
He grabbed the remaining Chain of Tartarus with one hand, his knuckles white, while holding me tight against his heart with the other.
"She forgot," Thane roared at the ceiling, his voice challenging the very stone of the mountain, "that the earth carries the weight of the deadandthe living!"
He didn't pull. He didn't heave. He struck.
He brought his fist down on the chain where it met the anchor bolt, channeling every ounce of his pain, his shame, and his desperate need to save me into a single point of kinetic impact.
CRACK.
THIRTEEN
Elias
The sound of the final chain snapping wasn't metallic. It was the wet, resonantthwackof a tendon severing, followed by a shockwave that rattled my bones.
Thane roared, a sound of pure, unadulterated release, and the massive metal link exploded into shrapnel.
Hephaestus fell.
He didn't float down like a god should. He crumpled. Gravity, sensing the release of the divine suspension, reclaimed him with brutal immediacy. He hit the obsidian floor in a heap of tangled wire, scarred flesh, and lead bracing.
"Brother!" Kaelen was moving before the dust settled, but I was already there.
I skidded to my knees beside the fallen Smith, my hands hovering over his ruined form, tracing the ley lines of his aura. It was a mess. His divinity felt like a dying automaton, hot, grinding, and dangerously close to seizing up.
Hephaestus coughed, a sound like gravel rattling in a tin can, and spat a mouthful of golden ichor onto the soot-stained metal. He pushed himself up on trembling arms, his mismatched eyes,one brown, one a milky, cataract-blind white, locking onto the ceiling.
"Hera," he rasped. The name wasn't a curse; it was a promise of violence so profound it lowered the ambient temperature of the forge by ten degrees. "And Zeus. The architect and the jailer. When I am done here, I will dismantle their thrones down to the atomic bonds."
"Save the revolution for later," Flynn snapped, stepping over a piece of twisted chain, daggers still drawn and twitching with nervous energy. "We have a more immediate problem. Can you stand? Or do we need to strap you to Thane’s back?"
Hephaestus turned his head slowly, the vertebrae clicking audibly. He looked at Flynn, then at Kaelen, and finally at Thane, who was still standing by the wall, chest heaving, cradling Aria against his breastplate.
The Smith God’s gaze snagged on Aria.
He froze.
He scrambled backward, a crab-like, panicked motion, dragging his heavy lead braces across the floor. "No," he whispered, his voice cracking. "No, no, no. Why did you bring it here?"
"She is not an 'it'," Kaelen growled, stepping between Hephaestus and Thane, his hand dropping to the hilt of his sword. "She is Aria. And she is dying because of your handiwork."
"My handiwork?" Hephaestus let out a bitter, screeching laugh that sounded like metal tearing. He pointed a trembling, soot-stained finger at Aria’s limp form. "Look at her! Look at the vessel! That is not my design. That is a bastardized echo! A copy of a masterpiece made on cheap paper!"
"Fix her," I said.
My voice was quiet, but it cut through the cavern’s roar. I stood up, smoothing the front of my tattered robes. I felt theweight of my own guilt pressing down on my shoulders, heavier than any gravity spell I could cast.
