The amber prison shattered into a million particles of light, dissolving like mist in a gale. Time rushed back in with a roar of sound that shook the foundations of the citadel. The bellows pumped with a rhythmic thunder. The magma hissed and popped.
Hera screamed as the connection was severed from our side. We didn't just reject her; we evicted her. The white projection flared blindingly, a supernova of indignation, then collapsed in on itself, expelled by the sheer density of our unified will.
She vanished, dragged back to her high throne, leaving only the smell of burnt lilies and ozone fading in the sulfurous air.
The vacuum she left behind was instantly filled by the heat of the Forge and the new, terrifying reality of what we had done. We had rejected heaven for the hell of the fight, and we stood ready to burn.
TWENTY-SIX
Aria
I didn’t just release the energy; I became the energy. Just for a second.
The moment I unclenched my will, the compressed storm inside me didn’t fire in a straight line. It bloomed. A sphere of violet and white-gold light expanded from my palm, screaming with the resonant frequency of five souls fused into one perfect, terrifying chord. It wasn’t just heat or kinetic force; it wasdefinition. I was projecting the absolute truth of our existence against the chaos of the Void.
"Burn," I commanded.
The sound of my voice shattered the remaining plating on the floor. It was the chime of a bell the size of a planet, a note so pure it rattled the stones around us.
The blast hit Apollo.
He didn’t fly backward.
The void-shield he raised, that weaving of black smoke and dead silence, evaporated instantly. It offered no more resistance than mist against a hurricane. The light washed over him. The grey, necrotic skin boiled away, sluicing off him in sheets of dissolving darkness. The black smoke leaking from his eyesturned to white steam, hissing as it met the purity of my power. The tarnished, pitted gold of his armor flared, the rot scorching off to reveal a brilliant, blinding luster beneath.
He screamed, but it wasn’t the discordant, multi-layered screech of the Devourer’s puppet. It was a man’s scream. A god’s scream.
"Stop!" Apollo clawed at his face, dropping to his knees as the obsidian tiles beneath him turned to magma. "It burns! The light, it burns!"
"It’s not burning you," I said, drifting closer.
My feet didn't quite touch the melting floor. I was suspended by the sheer output of energy, a creature of heavy gravity and blinding radiance. The star-metal alloy on my left side hummed, vibrating in harmony with the devastation, feeding off the ambient destruction and turning it into strength.
"It’s cleaning you."
I pushed harder. I didn't just use my own reserves; I pulled on the tether. I drew on Kaelen’s pilot light burning in my belly, a limitless reservoir of command and heat. I anchored my hollow bones with Thane’s crushing gravity. I synced my pulse to Flynn’s frantic drumbeat in my blood, and I let Elias’s understanding of patterns hold the focus. I channeled it all into the Sun God.
The rot ran off him like oil under a waterfall.
For one breathless, agonizing second, the monster was gone.
The black pools of his eyes cleared, the darkness receding like a tide, revealing irises of startling, sun-drenched blue. The grey pallor flushed with the gold of divine ichor, life returning to dead tissue. The air in the room shifted violently. The sulfur and dead-grave stench vanished, replaced by a sudden, overpowering scent that had no business existing this far underground.
Hot sand. Crushed laurel leaves. The sharp, acidic tang of citrus ripening in the heat.
It smelled like summer. It smelled like the brother they had lost.
Apollo looked up. His face was twisted in agony, tears streaming down his cheeks. Real, wet, human tears, not black slime. He looked past me, his gaze bypassing the threat of my light to lock onto the battered, soot-stained figures of the Princes standing in the shadows of the machinery.
"Kaelen?" he choked out.
His voice was raw, stripped of the void’s metallic distortion. He reached a trembling hand, fingers restored and un-clawed, toward them.
"Thane? I... I can't hear the music. Why is it so quiet?"
Kaelen took a step forward, his sword tip dropping until it scraped the floor. His face cracked, the Dragon’s mask of rage fracturing into a terrible, bewildered grief that looked entirely too human on his sharp features.
"Apollo?" Kaelen whispered, the name a jagged hook in his throat.
