I pushed past Kaelen’s wing.
Aria!His mental voice was a frantic grip on my mind.Get back! She is not playing!
"Neither am I," I muttered.
I walked toward the Goddess of War.
The runes on my metal skin flared, pulsing with a gentle, rhythmic violet light. I kept my hands open, down at my sides. I walked with the heavy, inevitable cadence of the turning earth.
Athena tracked me. The spear tip wavered, moving from Kaelen to my chest.
"One more step, abomination, and I pin you to the ground," Athena warned. Her voice shook, but her hands were steady. "You brought the Devourer. You broke the seal. And now you bring your pets to pick the bones of the world."
I stopped ten feet from her. I could smell the ozone crackling off her spear. I could see the dilated pupils of her eyes, the sheer exhaustion etched into the lines of her face.
"I didn't bring the Devourer, Athena," I said. My voice was calm, resonant, vibrating in the metal wreckage around us. "It was already there. You know that. We just showed you what it was already doing."
I gestured behind me, to the massive, terrifying forms of the Princes.
"Look at them," I challenged her. "Don't look at the teeth. Look at the eyes."
Athena hesitated. She flicked her gaze to Kaelen.
The Dragon wasn't attacking. He was coiled tight, yes, but his wing was curved inward, sheltering Elias, who was shuddering in the air, his flame guttering. Thane wasn't charging; he wasstanding solid, blocking the wind from blowing debris into the valley below where a human town sat probably just thinking they had experienced a geological disaster, not an Olympian-made one.
Flynn moved up beside me, not to hunt, but to flank. He whined low in his throat, a sound of distress, not aggression.
Athena blinked. The warrior's mask slipped, revealing the terrified sister beneath.
"They... they are afraid," she whispered, stunned.
"We all are," I said. I took another step. "The game has flipped, Athena. It's existence against nothing."
I pointed up.
We all looked.
The Devourer wasn't just a storm now. It was a face. A massive, shifting visage of smoke and emptiness pressing down on the atmosphere, mouth open to swallow the horizon. The purple bruise of the sky was spreading, eating the green of the mortal world.
Athena slowly, agonizingly, lowered the spear. The light on the tip faded.
She slumped against the broken archway, looking suddenly very young and very old all at once.
"Everything I fought for," she murmured, looking at the ruins of the Sanctorum and whatever Olympian bui. "It's all just... dust."
"Walls fall," I said, stepping up to her. I reached out with my metal hand, offering support. "But the foundation holds."
She looked at my hand. At the star-metal fused to my flesh. She looked at the monsters breathing heavily behind me.
"Is this the plan?" she asked, a hysterical edge to her laugh. "A dragon, a wolf, a bear, a bird, and a... whatever you are... against the end of everything?"
I looked at my men. They were terrified, trapped in bodies that were too big for this world, hunted by their own mother, and standing on the edge of extinction.
But they were standing.
"It's not a plan," I said, feeling the Dragon's fire burning steadily in my chest, the Bear's weight anchoring my feet. "It's a promise."
I turned back to the void eating the sky.
