"Aria!" Kaelen screamed, his hand tearing from mine.
I watched, helpless, as we continued to fall and he began to change.
His skin split. Not with blood, but with light. Scales, black as obsidian and hard as diamond, erupted from his flesh. His face elongated, his jaw snapping forward into a snout filled with rows of serrated teeth. His wings didn't just flap; they exploded outward, spanning a hundred feet, blotting out the sky.
He wasn't a man with dragon magic anymore. He was the Dragon. A beast of legend, massive and terrifying, wreathed in black fire.
To my left, Flynn threw his head back and howled. His body contorted, bones cracking and reshaping with sickening speed. Fur, thick and brown as the forest floor, burst from his skin. He grew, expanding until he was the size of a house, a wolf of nightmare proportions, his claws tearing rents in the air itself.
Thane... Thane simply became the bear of the mountain. His form expanded, rock and moss and soil knitting together into the shape of a bear so large he could have crushed the Citadel in his jaws. He roared, a sound that shook the clouds apart.
And Elias.
Elias dissolved into flames. He wasn't a bird of flesh and feather. He was a creature of living fire, turquoise and gold, his wingspan trailing sparks that hung in the air like constellations. He screeched, a sound of beautiful, piercing sorrow.
I was falling alone amidst monsters.
I looked at my own hands. The star-metal glowed blindingly bright, reacting to the pulse, but I didn't shift. I remained as the bridge. The lens.
This wasn't a curse. It was the truth. The Titan had stripped the human masks away.
Kaelen, the Dragon, dove. He swooped beneath me, his massive back a plain of black scales.
Grab on!his voice roared in my head, primal and deep.
I didn't argue. I fell onto his back, grabbing a ridge of spinal scales. The heat was immense, but I drank it in.
Around us, the Wolf ran on the air, stepping on invisible currents. The Bear fell like a meteor, unbothered by gravity. The Phoenix spiraled, weaving a net of light.
We plummeted toward the mortal realm, four monsters and a girl, running for their lives.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Aria
The impact didn’t break my bones, but it could have shaken the soul right out of my body with how violent it was.
We hit the earth with the force of a falling star, a collision of divine weight and mortal soil that sent a shockwave tearing through the landscape. The sound was deafening, a crunch of bedrock and a scream of displaced air that popped my ears and left a high-pitched whine drilling into my skull.
I was thrown from Kaelen’s back, tumbling across ground that felt wrong. It was too soft, then too hard, then slick like oil. I slammed into a ridge of dirt, my metal arm gouging a deep trench through the soil as I tried to slow myself down, sparks flying where metal met stone.
When I stopped, I lay there for a heartbeat, staring up at a sky that was bleeding.
The clouds were torn open, leaking a viscous, purple fluid that defied gravity, dripping upward into the hungry maw of the Devourer.
I spat out a mouthful of grit. It tasted of pine needles, ozone, and sulfur.
I pushed myself up. My left arm, the star-metal one, hummed with a low, vibrating frequency, annoyed by the impact but undamaged. My flesh side ached, a blooming bruise forming on my hip, but the pain felt distant, muffled by the adrenaline flooding my system.
As I looked around my stomach dropped.
We had carved a crater the size of a small city into... a forest? A mountain? It was hard to tell. The mortal realm was here. I saw crushed oak trees and the distant outline of a tower, but it was churning together with the debris of Olympus that had come down with us.
A massive, white marble column from the Citadel was speared through the roof of a building that reminded me of the Hall of Muses. A fountain of nectar bubbled up from a crack in a road, turning the dirt into gold sludge.
Physics was broken. Gravity pools shimmered in the air, lifting rocks and buildings alike into slow, orbiting spirals.
And in the center of the crater, the monsters were rising.
