The realization hit me harder than the hammer had.
"The jar," I breathed.
"Was never meant to keep the evils in," Pandora hissed. "It was meant to let themout. To let the divine filter down to the earth, to act as a transforming step-down so the power wouldn't burn the world. I was designed to be the handshake between heaven and earth. To let the gods walk among men without crushing them."
She touched her chest, right over her heart, where a complex knot of scarred runes pulsed.
"But they panicked," she said sadly. "The Keepers. The Council. They saw the door opening, saw the power flowing, and they called it a leak. They called it a curse. They forced me to close the lid. They forced me to become a dam instead of a river. They called the princes evil and spread rumors that they were being sent to take over when we both know that was the furthest thing from the truth. The truth was so much worse given that we were all bait for the Devourer."
She looked at me, her expression full of an ancient, grieving rage.
"Pressure builds behind a dam, Aria. If you don't let it flow, the structure cracks. That is what happened to me. I tried to hold it all. I tried to be the 'Good Keeper.' And it shattered my mind."
I looked down at my own hands. The metal and the flesh were fused now, indistinguishable. I felt the thrumming power of the Princes, Kaelen’s heat, Thane’s mass, Flynn’s speed, Elias’s design, waiting at the edges of my consciousness. I had been trying to hold them. To contain them. To keep them safe inside me like trophies in a vault.
"I don't have to hold it," I whispered.
"No," Pandora agreed. She smiled, and this time it radiated warmth. "You just have to let it pass through. I called you a bridge, but you were also right with your description. You are the lens, Aria. You focus the light; you don't keep it. Nor do you keep the power of a Titan's heart, but I sense it flowing through you just like the others."
The white fire around us began to shift. It swirled, turning from blinding white to a spectrum of colors, violet, gold, turquoise, crushing black, and pulsing red.
"Going back is going to hurt," Pandora warned, her form beginning to dissolve into mist. "The world is not kind to things that change. Some will look at you and see a monster."
"Let them look, let them think I’m a monster if that’s what they choose," I said, feeling the Dragon’s fire ignite in my belly, not as a burden, but as an engine. "But I’m done hiding in the dark."
"Good," she faded, her voice lingering like the hum of a bell after it had been struck. "Then show them what a Titan's heart looks like when it beats. Show them what love looks like."
Everything around me collapsed in on itself, like the world was suddenly made of folded paper. I closed my eyes to try and make sense of it, but before I could, sensation returned with the violence of a head-on collision.
I gasped, sucking in air that tasted of sulfur and panic. My eyes snapped open.
I wasn't floating. I was standing in the center of the Primordial Flame.
But the fire wasn't burning me. It was weaving into me. The white tongues of flame were being sucked into the pores of my metal skin, fueling the bioluminescence.
I looked down at myself.
The matte grey of the star-metal was gone. The alloy had darkened, tempered by the Primordial heat into a sleek,obsidian-dark chrome that seemed to drink the light. But it wasn't dark.
It was etched.
Complex, living runes burned across every inch of my body, both the metal left side and the translucent, golden-hushed flesh of the right. They weren't static scars. They were flowing. They moved like liquid magma through channels cut into my skin, pulsing in time with a heartbeat that sounded like a war drum.
I felt... immense.
Not only that but I felt the Titan beneath the floor as if he were a pet waking from a nap. I felt the specific temperature of Kaelen’s despair as he watched the fire swallow me.
"Aria?"
The voice was Kaelen’s. It was broken and terrified.
I looked up.
I was deep in the pit, standing on a ledge of superheated rock amidst the updraft. The Princes were gathered at the edge of the rent in the floor, peering down into the blinding glare.
I didn't climb out. I simplydecidedto rise.
I flexed my will against the gravity of the earth. Thane’s gift, integrated and amplified.
