"I am holding the roof!" I argued, my knees buckling under the dual strain. If I grounded the energy, I lost the canopy. If I held the canopy, I crushed the girl.
"Ground it through me!" Aria gasped.
She turned her head on the Anvil, the movement stiff and metallic. Her eyes locked onto mine. They were no longer amethyst; they were swirling pools of magma.
Thane,she projected, her mental voice fierce and searing.Don't filter it. Give it to me.
It will crush you,I thought back, the fear cold in my chest.You are the sky, Aria. You are the wind. You are not meant to be the stone.
I am the bridge,she corrected, and I felt the steel in her will, harder than any metal Hephaestus could forge.Give me the weight.
The black oil rain outside pounded harder, eroding my shield. The Titan stirred beneath my feet. The stone canopy groaned, spiderweb cracks forming in the obsidian pillars.
I had no choice.
I opened the floodgate in my mind. The raw, primal connection I had with the waking Titan, the sheer, crushing mass of the mountain, and I poured it into her.
Aria arched her back, her body lifting off the Anvil.
But she didn't break.
Her skin turned a deep, dark grey, the color of stone walls at twilight. The runes glowing on her body shifted from gold to a deep, pulsing crimson. She absorbed the weight. She took the crushing gravity of the earth, the power that should have flattened a mortal, and she breathed it in.
"It's working!" Flynn yelled, watching the energy stabilize, his amber eyes wide. "She's eating it! She's metabolizing the mountain's magic!"
Hephaestus bellowed, a sound of triumph and madness. He brought the hammer down with everything he had, the final strike to seal the alloy.
BOOM.
The impact didn't just ring; it detonated.
The force of the blow sent the stone canopy flying, tearing itself apart from the inside out.
Debris rained down around us, bouncing harmlessly off Kaelen’s heat shield and Elias’s protective wards. The black rain returned, falling through the shattered roof. I glanced up trying to figure out how to repair it and protect Aria and that was when I saw it.
A figure floated down through the breach in the ceiling, descending through the curtains of black sludge.
It was a figure I hadn't seen since before we were sent to the mortal realm, since before the chains. I recognized himinstantly, even from a distance, even through the smoke. But the recognition brought no joy, only a cold dread.
He wasn't the Golden God anymore. His skin was grey, dead and ashen. His eyes, once bright as the morning sun, were black voids giving off distinct trails of smoke. He didn't glow; he seemed to suck the light out of the air around him, a black hole in the shape of a man.
He landed on the remains of my stone canopy, his feet touching the rock silently.
"Well," Apollo said. His voice was a distorted echo, like words spoken underwater, layered with a thousand whispering screams. "Looks like I missed the party."
TWENTY-ONE
Flynn
The smell hit me before his feet even touched the wreckage of the stone canopy.
Apollo used to smell like summer. I remembered it from the Before, he was all citrus, hot sand, and the clean, sharp ozone of a lightning strike that missed just to scare you. He smelled like noon on a summer day.
This...thingdescending through the black rain didn't smell like citrus or summer. It smelled like the bottom of a well that had been sealed for a thousand years. It smelled of stagnant water and the metallic tang of blood that had gone cold.
"That's not him," I snarled, the words ripping out of my throat. The hair on my arms stood up, not from the cold, but from the visceral, primal rejection of what I was looking at. "That is not our brother."
Apollo stood on the pile of broken obsidian Thane had shattered, the black oil rain slicking his grey skin. He wore his golden armor, but it was tarnished, eaten away by acid-like pitting. His laurel wreath was dead, the leaves brown and curled. But it was the eyes that made my stomach roll. There was nowhite, no iris, just pooling, infinite black that leaked smoke like a chimney.
