"He’s panicking!" Hephaestus yelled, dodging a tendril of black magic that cracked the stone floor where he had been standing. "If he severs the link now, the feedback loop destroys everyone in this room!"
I felt the bond tearing. The golden thread connecting me to Kaelen, to Flynn, to Thane, it was unraveling. The pain of it was excruciating, a physical tearing of my soul, but I welcomed it. If I cut the line, maybe the poison stops flowing. Maybe if I remove the Architect, the building stops falling.
I retreated, step by stumbling step, toward the shadows of the ventilation tunnel.
Let go,the darkness whispered.You ruin everything you touch. Let go.
A blast of heat hit me, Kaelen’s fire trying to reach me, trying to burn away the panic, but my shadows swallowed it. I was closed off. I was a singularity of self-loathing.
Then, a hand grabbed me.
Not physically. There was twenty feet of burning air between me and the Anvil.
But a hand grabbed my soul.
It was cold and heavy. It felt like polished steel and raw, bleeding meat.
Don't you dare walk out on me, Elias.
The voice didn't come from my ears. It resonated inside my ribcage, vibrating the hollow space where my heart beat.
I froze.
The world around me, the roaring forge, the screaming princes, the falling dust, froze with me. The color drained away, leaving only a gray-scale landscape of static and pain.
I was pulled.
Violently.
I wasn't standing on the iron floor anymore. I was standing in a void. But it wasn't the cold, hungry Void of the Devourer. This was a space of woven light, a tapestry stretching infinitely in all directions, like the threshold but different and the tapestry was burning. The threads were snapping, flailing in a wind I couldn't feel.
And in the center of the unraveling web, she stood.
Aria.
She looked... terrifying.
She was naked, but she wasn't exposed. Her left side was a masterpiece of flowing, liquid star-metal, glowing with complex runes that shifted and rewrote themselves every second. Her right side was flesh, but it was translucent, glowing with the white-hot fire of the Dragon. Her eyes were pools of magma.
But she was falling apart. I could see the cracks in her essence, the places where the mortal spirit was too thin to hold the divine weight.
"Aria," I whispered, the shame choking me. I tried to step back, to hide in the dark periphery of the vision. "Look at you. Look what I built. It's broken."
"It's not broken," she said. Her voice was everywhere at once, a chorus of steel and bone. She stepped toward me. Every step she took repaired the threads beneath her feet, fusing them into something new. "It's expanding."
"It's agony," I argued, gesturing wildly at the burning web. "I calculated the tolerances! I aimed for perfection! But you, you’re chaotic, messy. The variables are all wrong!"
"Fuck your variables," she snapped.
She lunged at me. She grabbed the front of my robes and yanked me down to her level.
Her face was inches from mine. The heat radiating from her was unbearable. It seared my skin and burned my eyes.
"You think this is a math problem?" she demanded, shaking me. "You think you can solve me?"
"I am trying to save you!" I cried, tears leaking from my eyes. "The flaw, the mortal flaw, creates resistance. Resistance creates heat. Heat leads to structural failure! I have to unmake the cage to get you out!"
"The flaw is the point, you idiot!"
