"And the risk?" Kaelen asked, his face pale beneath the soot.
"The risk is total annihilation," Hephaestus said flatly. "If you push too hard, you'll vaporize her. But if you don't push hard enough, the metal cools mid-transformation, and she is trapped in a half-life of agony forever. If your focus wavers, the feedback loop could kill all five of you."
Silence descended on the Forge. The only sound was the rhythmichiss-thumpof the bellows and the ragged breathing of the woman we loved.
Kaelen looked at Aria. Flynn gripped his daggers until his knuckles were white. Thane looked down at the woman he held, his face a mask of stone.
"Do it," Aria whispered.
She didn't look at us. She looked at the Anvil. It was a slab of dark, meteoric iron, scarred by eons of divine crafting. It radiated a heat that distorted the air above it.
"Aria," Kaelen started, his voice thick.
"I can verify the timeline," I interrupted, my voice devoid of emotion because if I let myself feel, I would collapse. "The runes on her skin. Look at the variable shifts."
I pointed to her throat. The silver lines were no longer creeping; they were sprinting. They pulsed with a frantic, strobing light.
"They are mapping a path to the core," I said, analyzing the trajectory. "The Silvering is attempting to encase the heart to contain the pressure. Once the cage closes..."
"The heart stops," Hephaestus confirmed. "Or it detonates."
"How long?" Thane asked, his voice low and rumbling.
I watched the lines. I calculated the distance, the rate of spread, and the resistance of her remaining biological tissue.
"Two hours," I said. "Maybe less if she struggles. Once those lines touch the sternum, it’s checkmate."
Kaelen took a sharp breath, his eyes burning with renewed resolve. "Then we don't have time to debate. Hephaestus, prep the Anvil."
The Smith God nodded grimly. He limped toward a rack of tools that looked more like instruments of torture, tongs the size of unsuspecting men, hammers with heads of solid diamond.
"Give me a moment to get everything ready," Hephaestus ordered, picking up a heavy iron mallet. "And pray to whatever you believe in that the clay holds."
I walked beside the god, my mind already racing through the arithmancy of the soul, trying to remember the specific weave patterns I had suggested a millennium ago. I was so proud then. So arrogant.Look, Zeus, I can weave a paradox.
Now, that paradox was a woman with eyes like a sunset and a smile she rarely showed, and I was going to have to rip her apart to save her.
"Elias," Kaelen murmured as he grabbed my arm, stopping me.
I looked at him. The Dragon Prince was terrifying when he was angry, but right now, he just looked terrified.
"Can you do this?" he asked. "Can you hold the pattern?"
I followed Kaelen's gaze and looked at Aria. The heat wasn't helping the way I thought it would. Her body was shaking and even from this distance I could tell she was cold from the way she held herself. Cold. In the forge of Olympus.
"I helped build the cage, Kaelen," I whispered, the bitterness coating my tongue. "I am the only one who knows where the key fits."
"That's not what I asked," he pressed.
"Yes," I lied. "I can do it."
Because the alternative was watching the variables unravel until the equation equaled zero. And I was done with zero.
FOURTEEN
Aria
The heat of the Forge should have been killing me. It was a physical weight, pressing against my eardrums, smelling of sulfur and the copper tang of blood. The magma river flowing ten feet away threw off enough heat alone to blister paint, and the air shimmered with the distortion of a blast furnace.
