"The lattice is fluid," Elias muttered, mostly to himself, wiping blood from his nose with a tattered sleeve. "It adapts. It learns. We broke the laws of physics, and the cosmos thanked us for it. Beautiful."
"We can discuss the academic breakthrough later!" Hephaestus yelled from the Anvil.
The Smith God was frantically throwing tools, calipers, hammers, tongs, into a massive leather sack. He looked terrified. His hands, usually so steady, were shaking.
"Why?" Flynn asked, turning his head, his nose twitching as he scented the air. "We chased off the bad guy. We won the round."
"You fired a cannon inside a glass house!" Hephaestus roared. He pointed a trembling finger at the floor.
I looked down.
The cracks in the floor weren’t just cracks anymore. They were fissures. And they weren’t glowing orange with magma from the localized vents. They were glowing blood-red, pulsing with a deep, rhythmic thrum.
THUMP.
The sound came from beneath us. It wasn’t the rhythmic mechanical heartbeat of the bellows. It was a singular, massive impact, as if a fist the size of a city had struck the underside of the earth's crust.
The entire Forge seemed to stutter for a moment. I was thrown into Kaelen. The remains of the catwalks above us sheared off their supports with a screech of tearing metal, raining twisted debris down into the magma channels.
"The shockwave," Elias realized, looking up at the ceiling where dust was raining down in sheets. "The energy release didn’t just clear the Void. It acted as a defibrillator."
"For what?" I asked, gripping Kaelen’s arm to stay upright as the floor rolled like the ocean in a storm.
"For the Titan!" Hephaestus screamed, cinching his bag tight. "He’s awake! Fully awake! And he wants to stand up!"
The mountain groaned. It was a sound that vibrated deep in the teeth, a frequency of pure geological agony. The walls of the cavern began to buckle inward, the stone protesting the shift in the foundation.
"We have to go!" Kaelen barked, switching instantly from lover to general. His eyes scanned the crumbling chamber. "The escape route?"
"The ventilation shafts are crushed," Thane reported, looking at the debris pile where we had entered. "The stairs are gone."
"The main chimney!" Flynn shouted, pointing to the massive, open shaft above the Anvil, where the black rain was still falling, though lighter now. "It’s a straight shot up!"
"It leads to the Void!" Elias argued, his eyes wide. "That is the mouth of the storm!"
"The Void is better than being squashed into geological strata!" Flynn countered, baring his teeth as another tremor shook the ground beneath us.
CRACK.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Aria
The floor didn’t just crack; it disintegrated.
The solid iron plating we were standing on dissolved into shrapnel, sucked down into a maw of churning fire as the foundation of the Forge gave way. Gravity lurched, sickening and sudden.
"Move!" Kaelen’s shout was barely audible over the screaming of twisting metal.
He didn't wait for compliance. He grabbed me by the waist and threw me.
I sailed through the air, the heavy, dense weight of my new body feeling surprisingly light under his dragon-strength. I landed hard on a ledge of basalt that was still attached to the wall, my boots striking the stone so hard that the impact shook my whole body, but there was no pain in my shin, no buckling of the knee. Just a solid, resonantthud.
"Thane! The support pillar!" Elias screamed, pointing a bloodied hand at a massive column of obsidian that was tilting dangerously toward Flynn.
Thane didn't look. He reacted. The Bear Prince slammed his shoulder into the falling stone, catching tons of rock with agrunt that sounded like two continents colliding. His boots slid backward, carving deep grooves into the ledge, but he held the weight long enough for Flynn to scramble underneath, a blur of motion.
"Go! Go!" Thane roared, muscles bulging against his armor as he shoved the pillar into the abyss. It fell silently into the red gloom, swallowed by the rising smoke.
