I didn't fall. Falling implies gravity, a submission to the laws of physics that determined mass must accelerate downward. This was an invitation.
I stepped into the white-hot throat of the world, and the world swallowed me whole.
The scream from the bond was immediate and deafening. It wasn't sound; it was a psychic shockwave of pure, unadulterated terror. Kaelen’s roar of denial tore at the edges of my mind, a frantic, clawing desperate attempt to grab my soul before it incinerated. I felt Flynn’s heart stop, a stuttering, horrified pause in his kinetic rhythm. Thane’s grief was a collapsing mountain, heavy and suffocating, and Elias… Elias didn't scream. He simply unraveled, his logic shattering into a thousand terrified variables.
Let me go,I whispered into the roaring silence of the fire.I have to stretch.
The heat hit me.
It should have vaporized me. This was the Primordial Flame. It was the substance of stars, hot enough to turn matter into soup.
But I wasn't matter anymore. I was a circuit.
My metal skin didn't melt. It drank.
The sensation was excruciating, but not in the way a burn is. It was the pain of a deep inhale after being underwater for too long. My lungs expanded, cracking the crystalized calcification that had plagued me for hours. The star-metal alloy fused to my left side hummed, vibrating at a frequency so high it whined like a dying engine. The gold veins beneath my skin flared, opening wide, gulping down the thermal energy like a starving man offered a feast.
I sank deeper. The red glare of the cavern above faded. The faces of the Princes, terrified, soot-stained, beautiful, vanished.
I was floating in a void of absolute, blinding white.
It smelled of clean linen and rain. Not what I expected of the Primordial Flame.
"You are loud," a voice said.
It didn't come from the fire. It came from the silence between the roar.
I turned in the suspension of light. I had no body here, or perhaps I was all body, magnified.
She was standing in the center of the flame.
She didn't look like the reflection I had seen in the Hall of Muses. That had been a ghost, a sad echo trapped in glass and sorrow. This woman was solid. She was made of the same bioluminescent material I was becoming, translucent flesh that glowed with inner starlight, veins of liquid gold pulsing rhythmically beneath the surface. Her hair was floating around her face, strands of black ink writing calligraphy in the air.
Pandora. Not the myth. The prototype.
"Ancestor," I projected, the word tasting of metal and ash.
"Don't call me that," she said, her voice sounding like wind whistling through a canyon. “It makes me feel ancient."
She stepped closer. The fire parted around her like water. She looked at me, her eyes, mismatched, one brown, one a blinding vortex of nebulas, scanning my form.
"They finally figured out the mixture," she mused, reaching out a hand. Her fingers brushed my cheek. They were cool, soothing against the inferno raging inside me. "Hephaestus always did use too much copper. He forgot that to conduct the divine, you need iron. You need blood."
"I thought I was dying," I said. My voice was steady here, stripped of the pain. "The Silvering. It felt like a disease that was eating away at me."
"It is a defense mechanism," Pandora corrected gently. "The body knows it is too small for the sky. So it builds a bigger house. You aren't calcifying, Aria. You are evolving. You are becoming the bridge."
"A bridge," I repeated. The word resonated in my chest, settling deep in the new, heavy architecture of my ribs. "First I was a door, then Elias said I was a cage. A trap for the Princes. Will I always be changing?"
Pandora laughed. It was a bitter, sharp sound, like glass breaking under a boot. "Elias is a genius, but he listened to Zeus too much," she said, her face hardening. The golden runes etched into her skin flared brighter. "Zeus is a coward. The King of Gods looked at the humans, at the mud-people below, and he was terrified. He saw that we, yes, I count myself as a human. Anyway, he saw that we had something he didn't. We had the ability tochange. We could grow. Gods are static; they are concepts frozen in amber. But mortals? We are fluid."
She waved a hand at the white void surrounding us.
"He wanted a wall," she whispered. "He told Hephaestus to build a beautiful, perfect wall to keep the divine separated from the mortal, to keep his power pure and untouched by the dirt. He commissioned a jailer to hold his enemies."
She looked at me, her gaze fierce.
"But Hephaestus didn't build a wall. He built a door."
