CRACK.
It wasn't the sound of bones breaking. It was the sound of a shell cracking open.
SEVENTEEN
Aria
The hammer strike didn't hurt. Pain requires nerves to transmit a signal to the brain, and in that split second, I didn't have either. I was just sound. I was a vibration ringing through the iron of the Anvil, a purely resonant frequency ofbeing.
Then the echo faded, and the nerve endings grew back. And with them came the fire.
It wasn't a flame I could shy away from. It wasn't licking at my skin; it was blooming in my marrow. I gasped, a ragged, wet sound that tasted of copper and ash, my back arching off the dark metal slab.
"Stay down!" Hephaestus roared, his voice a landslide of gravel.
CLANG.
He hit me again. Right on the sternum.
This time, I felt it. I felt my ribcage shatter, not into bone fragments, but into dust. And then I felt it knit back together, not as calcium, but as something denser. Something hotter.
"She is rejecting the heat!" the Smith God bellowed, swinging the massive tongs to grip my left arm, the metal one. "The alloy is cooling too fast! It’s brittle! Dragon, you have to push harder!"
"I am burning her alive!" Kaelen’s voice came from the north, a raw, terrified scream that tore through the white noise in my head.
Through the bond, I felt his hesitation. He was pulling his punches. He was trying to warm me like a hearth when I needed to be thrown into a kiln. He saw the woman he loved writhing on a butcher’s block, smoke curling from her lips, and his instinct was to pull the fire back, to spare me.
Don't you dare,I projected, forcing the thought through the molten sludge of my mind.Don't you dare save me, Kaelen.
I opened my eyes. The world was a blur of aggressive reds and blinding whites, but I found his gaze. His golden eyes were wide, brimming with tears that evaporated before they could fall. He looked destroyed.
"Burn it," I rasped, the words scraping my throat like sandpaper. "Burn it all away, Kaelen. The fear. The weakness. Do it!"
He flinched, then his jaw hardened. The dragon surfaced.
The white fire hitting me intensified. It wasn't just temperature anymore; it was pressure. It was the weight of a star collapsing on my chest. My blood boiled. I could physically feel the oxygen bubbles in my veins expanding, sizzling. It was agony so absolute it both made sense and seemed completely ridiculous. I was being unmade. I was ash. I was smoke.
I started to drift. The pain was too much, so my soul decided to leave. It pulled at the seams, looking for an exit, a quiet, dark place where the hammer couldn't reach.
Going up,I thought, feeling lighter.Just let go.
Then the mountain fell on me.
Thane.
"No," his voice rumbled, not in my ears, but in the tectonic plates of my new skeleton. "You stay here. You stay with us."
Gravity slammed into me. It wasn't the gentle pull of the earth; it was the crushing density of a black hole. Thane may as well have grabbed my wandering spirit with hands made of bedrock and shoved it violently back into the body on the slab.
I slammed back onto the Anvil with a thud that knocked the wind out of me.
Heavy,I whimpered in the dark of my mind.Thane, it’s too heavy.
I have you,his presence was a fortress wall built around my panic.I am the anchor. You cannot drift if I hold you. Endure the weight, Aria. Be the stone.
I couldn't be stone. Stone didn't hurt like this. Stone didn't scream.
And gods, I wanted to scream. I wanted to open my mouth and let out the sound of every atom splitting, but my lungs weren't working. They were crystallized, frozen in a silent gasp. The air was there, but the mechanism to pump it was fused.
