Chapter 9: I love you
The cold from the flagstone seeped up through the knees of Aria’s leggings. She stared at the bare stone slab as if she could see through it to the abyssal quiet waiting beneath. Ithan’s boot beside her was a solid anchor in a world that had just tipped sideways.
A thin thread of conscious thought, waxy with exhaustion and pain, brushed against the edge of her awareness. It was faint, as if whispered from the bottom of a deep, dry well.
‘The sword… can only be wielded by the Asteri. No other being can touch it. Not a mortal, not an immortal, nothing of this soil. It… recoils. Or worse. That’s why it’s best to keep it in the box while transporting it.’
The words formed in her mind, clear and hollow. It wasn't his voice, but the ghost of his intention. He was spending precious, taxed energy to be a teacher while the agony of his shattered body thrummed beneath the thought like a subsonic note.
The others were arguing in hushed, sharp tones a few feet away.
“—then we wrap the whole damn flagstone in something,” Bryce was hissing. “Quarantine it. Stick it in a bank vault in another fucking dimension.”
“And how do we move a sealed magical compartment powered by blood we don’t have?” Ruhn shot back.
Aria ignored them, focusing inward. She pressed a thought down that fragile psychic tether, clumsy, like shouting through a keyhole. Okay… what do we do with it? Right now.
A long, terrible pause. She felt his focus drifting, his consciousness fraying. She felt him pulling himself back, a monumental effort against darkness and pain. For her.
‘Keep it safe. Don’t worry about me. Take it somewhere safe…’ It ended in a frayed whisper.
The composure she’d been clutching shattered. No.
The word wasn’t a thought. It was a thing with teeth and fur, coated in the weight of every loss that had ever carved a space inside her. She didn't care about the details, the dangers. The first thing she’d truly been given, been entrusted with, since Conner died, was him, and this bond. She couldn't abide the self-sacrificing garbage. Not when she could feel the greasy, nauseating flicker of his very life force.
‘We’re coming back for you,’ she thought, pushing the words down the line with every shred of willpower she possessed.
‘No, sweet girl. Don’t.’
The endearment, ripped from his agony, was more violent than any command. It flayed her open. The absolute, gentle refusal beneath it was worse. It wasn't fear for himself anymore. It was something clean, and steely, and fully committed to a path that ended with him in the dark and her elsewhere.Safe.
Ithan noticed her shift, saw the tears that suddenly streaked the dirt on her face. He reached for her. “Ari?”
‘Dae, I’m not—‘ her mental protest started, desperate, bargaining.
He cut across it. ‘You have to. I love you. So fucking much. Keep that sword safe.’
And then, like a door quietly shutting against a storm, the connection didn't sever, but went dormant. Deliberately dormant. He had… retreated. Pulled back so she wouldn’t have to feel it anymore. She was left gripping a static-filled line to a ruin.
The world went silent, both inside her head and out. Bryce’s mouth was moving, forming more words, but Aria couldn't hear them. She could only hear the psychic echo of the words he’d left, and the vast, silent vow within them.
What they’d found here, this dreadful quiet trapped under a rock… he’d paid in blood and pain and an absolute surrender of his own future for her to walk away with it. It wasn’t a choice. It was a one-way transference of burden. He’d taken the physical torment; he was giving her the world-ending relic.
Finally, she’d found her place within the pack: the Archivist of the Apocalypse. She didn't smile. It wasn't funny. It was truth, sandpaper-dry and tasting of steel and cold stone.
Ithan’s hand tightened on her shoulder. “What happened?” His voice, low in her real ear, pulled her back to the crumbled chapel, the mountain wind, her allies’ frustrated faces.
He was dead certain something had come through the bond. His own protective tether to her vibrated with the need to swat at the unseen threat hurting her.
Aria drew in a shuddering breath, the air cold enough to burn her lungs. “He told me the deal. Asteri weapon. We… mortal-adjacent people… can’t touch it. Period. Only survive if we keep it in its puzzle box.” She looked at Ruhn. “And he gave me his final instructions.”
“Oh, fuck him,” Bryce muttered, catching the drift. “He really did the whole ‘leave me, save yourself, the mission is everything’ bit, didn't he?”
“Something like that,” Aria whispered, her throat raw.
“Then he’s a self-important prick,” Hunt said, his voice clipped with the tone of a soldier who’s seen too many noble deaths turn to ash and strategic failure. “He hid the doomsday button. Rigelus knows he hid it. We’ve got the magic fire hydrant and no hose. Leaving the only guy who knows the specs to be torn apart by a pissed-off eternal being isn’t a strategy. It’s a slow-motion path to having it pried from his dying brain. We retrieve him and we move the box.”
The sheer practicality of it cut through the cathedral-grade doom shrouding the room.
“He withdrew,” Aria said, her own voice startling her with its flatness. “From the bond. I think he’s forcing them to dig for the location now. Physical torture again. Giving us time.”
Bryce’s face contorted in rage. For Hunt? For Aria? It was impossible to tell. “So he’s baiting Rigelus while we’re having a hardware debate? Great.” She stalked to the discarded broken altar, kicking it with a sneaker.“Fine! Fine! We move the damn stone. Forwards.” She looked at Ruhn. “Can you lift the whole slab, entraptment-friendly-like, and tele-freight it? One short hop? No tampering?”
Ruhn eyed the flagstone, then the enormous dimensions of the ceremonial chunk of granite floor it was set into. It was the size of a grave plot. “One hop. Across the valley. My powers are… optimized for biotics, not freight logistics. I'll get it there. Can’t guarantee a gentle landing. The stasis spell on the box itself might shatter from the impact.” He scrubbed his hands over his face, frustrated. “How the fuck did Dae get this thing here?”
“He’s probably the reason this ruin exists,” Ithan said, his eyes on the shadowed, damp corners of the chapel. He’d been thinking. His logic had taken a sharp turn away from resentment. It was about battlefield resource allocation now. And what he’d just witnessed of Dae had shifted the file from "potential threat" to "captured specialist of vital strategic importance." He looked at Aria. “Getting this thing across dimensions safely takes certain tools. Or certain beings.”
All eyes drifted, inevitably, to Hunt. The angel had specific cross-dimensional delivery experience.
“I am not taking that,” Hunt growled, glancing at the flagstone as if it would turn his feathers to dust. “Absolutely not.”
“I don't think you can, anyway,” Ruhn said, musing. “The box is locked to a specific form of Fae princely energy. My working theory is it’s like a biometric lock. Dae’s—or likely, the Avallen Patriarch’s genetic signature—opens it to place or remove the sword. But it sealed when closed.” He crouched by the slab again, his hands hovering a respectful inch above it. “The box likes the ground. It’s rooted into the earth here. Lift the stone and the box as one unit, via the stone, sure. But I bet if you tried to carry the stone while flying, this thing's paranoia systems would read ‘unauthorized conveyance’ and have a fit. Might explode.Might open. The safest way is to stay grounded. Move it like an extremely delicate piece of furniture across actual terrain.”
They had decided. Plans, albeit terrible ones, became a placebo against that overwhelming dread. They couldn't stand still.
Ithan stepped toward Ruhn. He slipped his powerful hands under two corners of the great flagstone slab—not just the one-foot square, but the entire three-by-three-foot element it was set into, as Ruhn had indicated. Muscles across his shoulders and back corded as he lifted, his knees bending with the effort. The stone came free with a thick, sucking sound of disaggregated dirt. Beneath it, the grey velvet in its carved nook remained undisturbed. The pressure in the air remained, but bottled, stationary.
"Hell's bells, you're strong," Bryce murmured, impressed despite the circumstances.
“It's nine hundred pounds of bullshit,” Ithan grunted, resetting his grip.
Hunt flew a low recon circuit while Bryce and Aria wordlessly pulled dusty altar cloths from a rotted chest. The fabric was stiff but clean. They wadded it around the corners of the lifted slab, turning it into a bizarre, clumsy package, a sarcophagus with something far worse than a corpse inside.
There was something hideously absurd about the hushed, meticulous padding.
"Don't jostle the soul-drinking death-sword," Bryce whispered, a bead of sweat tracking through the dirt on her temple. She let out a soft, semi-hysterical snort.
The small sound was like a bell breaking the tension. Not all the way, but enough to let Aria draw a breath that didn't taste of static.
"We take it to the pack grounds," Ithan said, his voice firm with a Prime's finality. "The Maw. The lower vaults. It's bedrock, far underground, warded and guarded by Pack Gate, Spellcleaner, Fleshrefuse, the works. More than a bank. More discreet than any palace." His gaze met Ruhn’s, then Hunt’s. "It's within the city wards. You can all get there without triggering inter-dimensional alarms."
"The underground approach," Hunt said, nodding slowly. "Hide it beneath something Rigelus would have to declare open war on the entire Vanir culture to root out. It's aggressive camouflage."
"It's home turf for me," Ithan said, though home turf felt like a questionable advantage when the weapon made the air taste like metal and memories.
They moved.
Ruhn led them down the mountain through a different, more circuitous path, designed to avoid even the possibility of patrol optics. Ithan carried the bundled stone, his gait steady and determined. Aria’s role was Navigator. With the bond gone neutral, her only bearing was the slight thrum of concealed relic in the slab itself, a lodestone pulling her toward the Pack Compound lands to the east, giving minute corrections to their path.
For an hour, no one spoke. The world narrowed to breath, cautious footsteps, and the oppressive weight of the impossible thing they carried. High-flying jet contrails bisected the evening sky above the canopy, passengers sipping drinks, utterly oblivious that five beings beneath them portaged what amounted to a portable black hole in a granite box.
They didn't wait. They didn't think about Dae. To think about him was to invite the panic and paralysis that crept around the edges of Aria’s control. This was about completing the objective. Step.Plant. Breathe.
From the shadows at the outermost edge of Pack territory, where the ragged city-state gave way to the preserved, sacred wilds, emerged four immense silent shapes. Gate, with his human face set in a grim line above shoulders thick enough to stop a truck. Tracker-Two, a lanky female who tested doorways for magical resonance. Knuckle, whose roles broke bones. Keeper, a tiny-seeming male with eyes like a surgical scalpel that catalogued every entry and exit. Ithan didn't even need to see them. He said the strings of Air-resonance clicks—gate-prime-bear, twist—into the air. They melted back into the woods as reception mode, ghost-runners acting as advanced forward scouts clearing the pack’s ten miles of besieged-of-out prime with lethal discretion.
The Pack Compound wasn't a castle; it was a village inside itself. It sprawled, but its heart—the Maw—sunk deep into the bones of a territorial integral amongst those coveted now as cheaper prototypes for Wendigo’s meat-industry production floor accommodations.
Finally, they arrived—not at the high, glowing façade of ground-level lodge, but at an utterly unremarkable doorway set into a cliff-face where shifting instincts played tricks and convinced a casual eye that it was simply part of an august gray wall, a patch of slightly darker shale.
Finally, they arrived—not at the high, glowing façade of the ground-level lodge, but at an utterly unremarkable doorway set into a cliff-face where shifting instincts played tricks and convinced a casual eye that it was simply part of an august gray wall, a patch of slightly darker shale.
Gate materialized from the shadows, placed his massive palm flat against the stone, and whispered three guttural words. The door shivered, a vibration felt in the teeth, then slid sideways with a hiss of perfectly counterweighted granite. Beyond lay not darkness, but a slanting shaft illuminated by cool, blue mage-lights sunk into the rock ceiling, descending into the earth’s deep belly. The air changed instantly: dry, still, and tasting of ancient dust and potent, layered wards.
"No lifts," Ithan grunted, adjusting his grip on the granite slab. "Pure stair. Forty-seven flights."
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," Bryce groaned, peering down the seemingly endless spiral. Her neon running shoes looked absurdly bright against the primordial stone.
Ruhn gave a sharp, breathless laugh. "Think of it as cardio with consequences." He glanced at Ithan. "You need a rotation?"
"I've got it," Ithan said, his voice tight with strain but unwavering. He started down, each step a controlled, thunderous descent. Aria followed right behind him, her own muscles tensing in sympathy, her hand occasionally hovering near the bundled stone as if to steady it.
The descent was a form of meditation. Each step was a thud of effort, a breath drawn in the chill, warded air. The deeper they went, the quieter the world became, until even their breathing seemed muted. The weight they carried felt less like stone and more like concentrated silence. Hunt brought up the rear, his wings tucked tight, his presence a vigilant hum of restrained lightning at their backs.
They hit the bottom—a vast, circular chamber hewn from bedrock. The ceiling soared into gloom. Around the perimeter stood massive, reinforced doors of dark alloy, each bearing a different, ominous sigil. The air hummed with latent power, a chorus of defensive spells so dense it made Aria’s wolf-ears ring. This was the Maw. The pack’s deepest, darkest secret.
Ithan moved to the centermost door, devoid of any marking."This one. Clean room. Nothing in, nothing out unless the Prime commands it." Gate, who had followed them down, produced a physical key of black iron, intricate and heavy. It turned with a sound like a mountain sighing.
The room within was small, maybe ten feet square, and utterly empty. The walls, floor, and ceiling were a seamless, polished obsidian that drank the light. Ithan knelt, his knees popping with the strain, and set the granite slab down in the exact center. It settled with a final, deep thump that seemed to resonate in their bones. For a long moment, they all just stared at it, this innocuous-looking piece of floor now imprisoning a cosmic threat.
"Well," Bryce said, breaking the silence. Her voice was small in the sealed space. "We've successfully buried the problem. Now we just have to live on top of it."
A couple of days passed.
They were a strange, brittle kind of days. Aria existed in a state of suspended animation, the bond with Dae a cold, silent line. She ate because Ithan put food in front of her. She slept in fitful bursts, jolting awake expecting to feel phantom pains that never came. She constantly felt the phantom tug toward the Maw, a low-grade nausea that was her soul’s awareness of the Firegard’s proximity.
Ithan moved through the compound like a storm front contained in skin. The pack felt his tension, responding with heightened patrols and a silent, watchful energy. Bryce and Hunt had ostensibly returned to their lives in the city, but a text thread was eternally active, a digital lifeline of anxious check-ins and morbid jokes. Ruhn was a ghost, reportedly using every Danaan and Fae intelligence channel to try and get a whisper, any whisper, about the Avallen Embassy. There was nothing. It was as if the building, and Daemian within it, had been swallowed by the earth.
Then Rigelus figured it out.
It happened at dusk on the third day. One second, the central courtyard of the pack compound was quiet, the first stars pricking through the lavender sky. The next, the air split.
It wasn't a sound. It was a pressure change so violent it popped eardrums. Wolves throughout the compound cried out, clutching their heads. The ordinary evening air in the courtyard shredded, tearing open a vertical seam of blinding, gold-white light. And through it, as casually as a commuter stepping off a train, walked Rigelus.
He wore the same immaculate grey suit. Not a hair was out of place. His expression was one of mild, patronizing displeasure. And in his left hand, he held a chain of solidified light. It was attached to a collar around the neck of the figure he dragged behind him, a figure he released with a casual flick, sending it sprawling across the rough-hewn cobblestones.
It was Daemian.
He was almost unrecognizable. His clothes were tatters, stiff with old blood and new. Bruises covered every visible inch of skin in a violent, overlapping tapestry of purples and blacks. His right arm was gone, severed cleanly at the shoulder. The stump was a horrific mess of charred flesh and crystallized blood, clearly cauterized by something that wasn't fire. He didn't move.
Aria’s scream was soundless. The bond, dormant and frozen, exploded back to life, flooding her with a tsunami of agony, disorientation, and a cold so profound it felt like her own heart had stopped. She staggered back into the wall of the lodge, her vision swimming, bile rising in her throat.
Ithan, Bryce, Hunt, and Ruhn—who had been conferring grimly on the porch—were already moving, spreading out in a loose, defensive half-circle between Rigelus and the lodge. Pack warriors emerged from doorways and shadows, growls rippling through the twilight, but they hesitated, held back by the sheer, annihilating aura of the being in their midst.
"Prime Holstrom," Rigelus said, his voice pleasant, conversational. It cut through the growls and the tension like a scalpel. "You harbor something that belongs to me. A trinket. I've grown tired of asking your… guest… where he misplaced it." He toed Dae's limp form with a polished Oxford. "His resilience was, I'll admit, moderately impressive.But ultimately pointless."
Ithan’s body was a live wire. "You are not welcome here." The words were a growl, fangs lengthening in his mouth.
"Welcome is irrelevant," Rigelus replied, examining his perfect nails. "I am here. You have my property. This creature no longer serves as a viable repository for information. The locus of the problem has shifted. To you." His pale eyes lifted, scanning the compound, the trees, the very earth. They lingered on the cliff-face. "You've put it somewhere… crude. Underground. I can feel its disagreeable silence from here." He took a step forward.
Hunt’s wings snapped wide, lightning crackling down his primary feathers. Bryce’s hand glowed with starlight. Ruhn’s shadows pooled at his feet.
Rigelus smiled, a thin, cold curve of his lips. "You would raise your hands against me? Here? I could unmake this territory, and every genetic strand within it, before your nerve impulses reached your muscles." He took another step. "Give me the Firegard.Now. Or I will peel this mountain apart to find it, and paint your den with the slurry that remains of your pack."
The standoff was absolute, a heartbeat from annihilation. Every ounce of focus was on the blinding, terrible figure in the courtyard. On the broken body at his feet. On the impossible choice between a sword and a world.
Aria, pressed against the lodge wall, her soul screaming in tandem with Dae's broken one, did the only thing she could think to do. She stopped screaming inside. She let the bond's agony flow through her, accepted it as a roadmap. And while every eye was on Rigelus, she melted backward into the open lodge doorway.
She didn't think. She moved. Her feet, quiet in soft socks, carried her through the familiar halls. She took the service stairs, descending into the earth, not the main way, but the old, disused spillway for spring floods. It was narrow, slick, and pitch black. Her wolf-sight guided her, but it was the bond that pulled her forward, a magnet drawing her not to Dae now, but to the thing he had died to protect. The thing that was the cause of all this.
Her heart wasn't hammering. It was a cold, still stone in her chest.
She reached the obsidian door to the clean room. It was locked, warded, sealed. She placed her palm flat against it. She thought of Conner’s laugh. She thought of Ithan’s worried eyes. She thought of Dae’s voice in her mind, saying I love you as he left her. And she thought of the cool, detached voice of the male who had broken him for sport. The father she’d only met once, when she was small enough to be hidden behind her mother’s skirts.
"Open," she whispered, not in Common, but in a language of resonance and blood that had always lived under her tongue, unused.
The door shivered. The wards didn’t break. They recognized her. They sighed apart.
The room was as they left it. The granite slab sat in the center. Aria walked to it. She didn't kneel. She crouched, placed her hands on the cool stone, and pushed. Not with her muscles. With a command deeper than will.
The slab slid aside as easily as a curtain.
The Firegard lay on its velvet bed. Dull.Grey. Inert.
Aria reached into the compartment. Her fingers brushed the leather-wrapped hilt.
The universe did not recoil. The sword did not scream. For her, there was no psychic blast, no recoil of incompatible essence. For her, there was only a rightness, a completion, as her fingers closed around the grip. It was cool.Then warm. Then it kindled.
A low, grey flame whispered to life along the blade’s length, a fire that gave no light, but instead drank the existing light from the obsidian room. It was the flame of a star’s cold core. It was the color of oblivion.
She lifted it. It weighed nothing. It weighed everything.Ten minutes. It had been ten minutes since she slipped away. She rose, turned, and walked back the way she came, the sword a silent, hungry companion at her side. She took the main stairs this time. Her footsteps were soundless.
She emerged into the courtyard from a different archway, behind the gathered line of her brother, her friends. Behind Rigelus, who was still monologuing.
"—archaic notions of territory and loyalty. You are storage units. Occasionally, you become interesting. Today, you are obsolete."
Aria walked forward. No one saw her. Rigelus’s attention, his magnificent, contemptuous focus, was entirely on Ithan, on Hunt’s defiant lightning, on Bryce’s glowing fist. He didn’t consider the space behind him. It was his blind spot, the absolute certainty of his own supremacy.
She didn't run. She didn't scream. She simply walked up behind the Bright Hand of the Asteri, the architect of her boyfriend’s torment, the source of every cold fear in her life, and swung the sword.
It wasn't a dramatic blow. It was a smooth, horizontal pass, like scything a stalk of wheat.
The grey flame did not meet resistance. It passed through Rigelus’s neck as if through smoke.
The Asteri’s words stopped. His perfect, ageless face registered a flicker of something—not pain, but profound, universe-shifting surprise. His head tilted, then slid from his shoulders. It hit the cobblestones with a wet, heavy thud. His body remained standing for another heartbeat, then collapsed sideways.
The golden light sealing the courtyard vanished. The oppressive pressure popped like a soap bubble. A strange, ringing silence fell, broken only by the soft, hungry whisper of the grey flame along the Firegard’s blade.
Black blood, thick and shimmering with tiny motes of captured light, dripped from the severed neck, pooling on the ancient stones. Aria looked down at the head. She lifted the sword and carefully wiped the blade clean on the thigh of her leggings, leaving a dark, iridescent smear.
"Gods," she muttered, her voice eerily calm in the absolute quiet. "I always hated that dickwad. He's a shit father."
The grey flame on the sword flickered, then burned brighter, casting no light but deepening all shadows.
Everyone was staring at her. Bryce’s mouth hung open, her starlight guttering out. Hunt’s lightning died, his wings half-furled in shock. Ruhn’s shadows had stilled completely. Their faces were monuments to pure, uncomprehending terror and awe, focused on the girl and the now-flaming sword in her hands.
All except for Ithan. He wasn't staring at the sword. He was staring at his sister’s face. His expression wasn't shock. It was a grim, heartbreaking validation. A secret he’d carried since childhood, since a whispered conversation with his mother, now made horrifically, publicly real. He knew who her father was. Because they didn’t share a father, only a mother.
Aria looked up from the cleaned blade, her green eyes meeting her brother’s across the courtyard. The grey flame reflected in them, turning them into deep, starless wells.