Chapter 8: The Throne's Last Kiss
The doors gave way with a groan that sounded less like moving stone and more like a bone breaking. The air that pushed past them was dead. Not cold, not hot. It was inert, vacuum-sealed for decades, and it carried the scent of pure, powdered ash.
Yelena took the first step over the threshold. Her breath fogged in the sudden stillness.
The Throne Room of Flamaris was a mausoleum dressed as a court. Vast columns of black marble, veined with extinct rivers of gold, rose into a darkness the weak wall sconces couldn’t touch. The floor was a mirror-polished obsidian, reflecting the few flames until it seemed they walked on a starless night sky. And at the far end, on a dais of fossilized, twisted roots, sat the throne.
It wasn’t merely obsidian. It was a clot of darkness, a jagged tear in reality. Light didn’t touch it so much as die upon it. The carvings weren’t decorative; they were forensic. Delicate, terrifyingly accurate skeletal forms were woven into its structure—ribcages formed the armrests, a fused spinal column the high back, small skulls grinning from the terminus of each leg. The previous brides. Not memorialized. Incorporated.
“Oh,” Yelena exhaled. The sound was tiny, swallowed whole by the room.
Imoria stood beside her, rigid. “I had it sealed. The day after the treaty was signed. I never came back.” Her voice was a dry rustle. “I didn’t need to. I could feel it from the antechamber. A… a sucking patience.”
Hector and the guards lingered at the door, their faces pale in the unstable light. The normal heat of the mountain was absent here. This was a separate ecosystem.
“It’s not pushing corruption out anymore,” Yelena observed, the bond humming a low alert. “It’s just… holding. Like a lung full of poisoned air.”
“It knows we’re here,” Imoria said.
As if summoned by her words, a faint violet light kindled deep within the obsidian of the throne. It pulsed once, a lethargic, sick heartbeat. In its flash, the carved skeletons seemed to shift, their hollow eye sockets turning to track the intruders’ progress.
“Right. Cheery.” Hector cleared his throat, hefting his engineering hammer. “Where’s the main feed? We sever it, we starve whatever that is.”
Imoria pointed a faintly trembling finger toward the dais. A gargantuan pipe, wide enough for a man to stand in, emerged from the wall behind the throne. It was made of the same black marble, but a web of thick, pulsating violet veins covered it, converging where it fed into the base of the seat. The pipe didn’t look like a construction. It looked like an umbilical cord.
They moved forward, their footsteps echoing too loudly. The mirrored floor showed their twin reflections gliding over the void below. With each step, the violet pulse from the throne grew stronger, syncing with Yelena’s own heartbeat until she felt a nauseating dissonance, her body trying to match its rhythm.
They were ten feet from the dais when the floor moved.
It wasn’t the floor. It was the reflection. Black, slick tendrils of pure shadow erupted from the polished obsidian, silent and swift as striking eels. They wrapped around Yelena’s ankles, her wrists. They were insubstantial as smoke but held with the tensile strength of steel cables. She cried out, more in surprise than pain, and yanked back. It was like being rooted to the earth.
Imoria gasped beside her. Identical shadows had seized her. They thrashed, but the binds only tightened, cold seeping through their clothes. The bond screamed with a shared, electric panic.
Hector and the guards rushed forward, but the shadows coalesced into a shimmering, dark wall between them and the dais. Hammer blows hit it with a sound like hitting deep water, ineffective.
“It’s not attacking them,” Yelena gritted out, straining against the ethereal hold. “It just wants us.”
The violet light in the throne blazed. The black veins on the feeding pipe writhed, and from the base of the dais, more tangible corruption emerged. This wasn’t shadow. It was a physical, tar-like substance, shot through with the same vile light. It slithered across the floor, not toward them, but between them, a spreading, connecting stain.
The bond, already wide open, was suddenly flooded not with their own emotions, but with an external pressure. A will. It was ancient, childishly petulant, and utterly devoid of warmth. It carried a single, repeating command: Hold. Keep. Stay.
“It’s the throne,” Imoria whispered, her eyes wide with a horrified realization. “Not the mountain. The throne itself. It became the brain. A selfish, stupid brain that only knows one thing: consumption.”
The tar reached their feet. Where it touched the shadow-bonds, it fused. The cold became a painful, invasive numbness, crawling up their legs. The separate binds began to pull, drawing them inexorably toward each other, toward the center of the spreading stain.
“What is it doing?” Yelena panted, digging her heels in, skidding on the slick floor.
Imoria’s face was a mask of dawning, visceral dread. “It thinks it’s fixing the circuit. We opened a new path. We shared warmth. It felt that through the stone. It’s… it’s trying to replicate the connection. By force.”
The pull became brutal. They stumbled, collapsing toward each other. The shadowy bonds on their wrists yanked their arms wide, then forced them together. Their bodies slammed, breast to breast, in a brutal parody of an embrace. Yelena’s free hand flailed, finding Imoria’s shoulder, clutching at her tunic for balance. Imoria’s breath was hot and ragged against her neck.
The throne pulsed, victorious. The tar surged, climbing their calves, holding them locked together.
Then it moved to their faces.
A strand of the viscous, glowing substance snaked up from the pool, fat and deliberate. It didn’t strike. It caressed Yelena’s cheek, a mockery of a lover’s touch. It did the same to Imoria. Then, with a sentient, horrifying precision, it coiled behind their heads and pulled.
Their faces were drawn together. Resistance was futile. Their lips met.
It was not a kiss.
It was a seal. A completion of a circuit.
The moment their mouths connected, the throne’s will exploded through the bond. It was a tsunami of corrupted data—a century of starved, perverted longing, the echoes of every fearful bride’s last breath, the twisted joy of a thing that knew only how to take. It flooded them, a violation so complete it erased the line between flesh and spirit.
Yelena’s mind fragmented. She was not herself. She was the throne, drinking the warmth of sacrifices. She was Imoria, staring into the darkness of this room, choosing to become its warden. She was the cold, the hunger, the loneliness given a shape and a purpose.
Inside the storm, a single point of clarity erupted. Not a thought. A presence. Imoria. Not the queen, not the broken warden. The core of her, a white-hot coal of defiance that had hidden even from herself for a hundred years. Yelena felt it, recognized it, and without hesitation, threw the essence of her own will toward it—not Eskoran princess, not sacrifice, but the girl who fixed old engines and believed dead things could flow again.
The two core selves touched in the maelstrom.
The throne’s forced connection, intended to subsume them, became the conduit for their rebellion.
They didn’t push the corruption out. They re-routed it.
Together, within the shared space of their violated bond, they took the throne’s century of hoarded, poisoned energy and they sent it not into each other, but back along the very pipe that fed it. They focused it into a single, white-bright command, a wordless shout of pure negation: ENOUGH.
The effect was instantaneous.
The black veins on the feeding pipe glowed violet, then white. They shattered with a sound like cracking ice.
The tar binding them vaporized into a foul-smelling mist.
The shadowy bonds dissipated.
They broke apart, stumbling back, both gagging, wiping their mouths with the backs of their hands. Yelena spat, the taste of ashes and bitter ozone coating her tongue.
At the dais, the throne gave a final, agonized pulse. The violet light flared, then winked out completely. The carved skeletons seemed to sag, their terrible animation gone. Just stone. Just dead rock.
Silence. True silence. The humming pressure was gone. The room was just a cold, dark, empty hall.
A sharp, crystalline tink broke the quiet. A hairline fracture appeared on the throne’s left armrest. Then another. A web of cracks spiderwebbed across its surface. It wasn’t exploding. It was… disintegrating, gracefully and completely, crumbling into a mound of inert, grey dust. The Throne of Ashes had finally earned its name.
Hector lowered his hammer, the dark wall before him gone. “What in the seven hells was that?”
Yelena couldn’t answer. She was shaking, every nerve raw. She looked at Imoria, who was staring at the pile of dust, her own body trembling.
The bond was still there. But it was different. Cleaner. Quiet. The memory of the violation was a scar they both could feel, but so was the memory of the fusion that ended it. The forced intimacy had, in its final moment, been replaced by a chosen one. The distinction was everything.
Imoria finally turned to look at her. Her eyes were wide, her lips slightly swollen. There was no romance in her gaze. There was a stunned, terrible reverence. “You… you didn’t fight it. You used it.”
“We did,” Yelena corrected, her voice rough. She hugged herself. “I think… I think I need to sit down. Not there,” she added, with a weak gesture toward the dais.
A faint, genuine laugh escaped Imoria. It was a raw, unused sound. “No. Not there.” She took a few unsteady steps toward Yelena, then stopped, an arm’s length away. The space between them electric with what had just happened, and what it now meant. “The conduit is severed. The false heart is dead. The real mountain can breathe.”
From somewhere deep below, the distant, musical gong of the Temple Bellows echoed up through the stone. It was slower now. A lullaby. A resting pulse.
Hector ventured carefully toward the pile of dust, kicking it gently with his boot. Nothing moved. “So it’s over? The corruption?”
“This part is,” Imoria said. She looked at Yelena, and a new, profound exhaustion etched itself on her face. “It forced a memory into us. To break us. Did you see it? At the end?”
Yelena nodded, the invasive image flashing behind her eyes—not of a broken Lysandra, but of a triumphant one, standing before a different throne, a blade in her hand that was not meant for the queen. A secret, held in the throne’s stolen memory. “It wasn’t what you thought. The betrayal.”
“No,” Imoria whispered. “It was worse. I blamed her. I built this,” she gestured to the crumbling dust, “on top of her grave.” She closed her eyes. “The throne is gone. But the reason it existed… that’s still here. In the dark, somewhere. We just wiped the slate clean. She not only wanted to kill me, she wanted to wipe this kingdom of all it's people.”
The silence in the dead throne room was absolute, absorbing Imoria’s words until they seemed to hang in the ash-thick air themselves.
Yelena just stared. Her mind, still tender from the throne’s violent intrusion, fumbled with this new, colder truth. It wasn’t a coup. It was extermination. "Why?" The word was a scrape in her throat.
"I don't know." Imoria’s admission seemed to cost her. She wrapped her arms around herself, a solitary figure in the vast dark. "The throne showed me her face, her intention, just as she breached my chambers. I never let her explain. I reacted. I sealed everything. Including the truth."
Hector cleared his throat, the practical sound a welcome anchor. "Majesty. The pipe is dead stone. Whatever that was, it’s gone. But this room…" He glanced around at the sepulchral black marble. "Feels like a tomb."
"It is," Imoria said, her voice regaining a shred of its old steadiness. "We should seal it again. For now." Her eyes flicked to Yelena. "We need air that doesn't taste of ghosts."
They left the way they came. The antechamber, with its sighing new stream of hot water and its scorched portraits, felt shockingly alive by comparison. Yelena leaned against the wall, finally letting the full-body tremors take her. The adrenaline was leaching away, leaving a hollowed-out ache behind. She watched Imoria give low, swift orders to Hector about masonry and locked doors, the queen’s mask hastily reassembled.
But Imoria’s hands were shaking too.
Dawn, a real one, found its way down the great central air shaft for the first time in living memory. It was a pale, hesitant light, but it carried no extra burden of heat or expectation. The mountain’s own warmth was doing that now, quietly, persistently.
In the following days, the changes were sensory, then social, then seismic.
A child on the lower residential tier was the first to report it, racing to her mother with bare feet slapping against suddenly non-frigid stone. "The floor is talking!" The hum was the sound of gentle, distributed heat moving through long-atrophied channels. By that afternoon, people were rolling up threadbare rugs to press palms and cheeks directly to the living rock, laughing with a kind of confused joy.
Yelena saw it all. She couldn't stay in the royal quarters, with their echoing whispers and Imoria's palpable, silent tension. She needed the noise of life. She pulled on a simple, borrowed tunic and woolen leggings and just walked, Hector a silent, watchful shadow a few steps behind.
She helped an old man clear the rubble from a dormant vent in his cramped apartment, her fingers brushing stone that shifted from cold to cool to a gentle, reassuring warmth as they worked. He didn’t thank her. He just gripped her hand afterward, his knuckles gnarled like old roots, and tears cut clean tracks through the dust on his face. She learned his granddaughter’s name. Mirra.
She spent an afternoon in a communal kitchen, where steam from a newly-functional hot-water coil fogged the windows as women taught her how to shape the dense, dark rye bread of Flamaris. Their chatter was about baffle-clearances and pressure-valves, domestic engineering concerns that were suddenly vibrant with hope. They called her "the river-waker," a title she tried to refuse but that settled on her shoulders anyway, light and warm.
She came to love the kingdom in these pieces. Not as a concept, but as the calloused hand of the baker, the precise knot-language of the engineers, the way a group of children taught a complex tapping game on the warming pipes. Their resilience wasn’t noble or legendary. It was stubborn, clever, and deeply human. It had been waiting, just like the water, for a path to open.
And through it all, she felt the gaze.
It was never overt. During councils in the Heart Chamber—now lit by honest lanterns, the brutal crystal monolith just a neutral piece of infrastructure—Yelena would offer a observation about Eskoran crop rotations that might supplement their fungal groves. Imoria would listen, nod, her replies sharp and political. But her eyes, those pale, weary windows, would linger on Yelena’s mouth as she spoke, tracing the shape of words as if searching for a trace of the connection that had been forced there. She would look away quickly, a faint, rigid tension in her jaw.
Once, when Yelena laughed freely at something the forge-master’s apprentice said, a clear sound that bounced off the newly lively cavern walls, she turned to find Imoria standing in a doorway across the chamber. The queen was absolutely still, watching her with an expression of such raw, unguarded hunger that it stole Yelena’s breath. It wasn’t desire, not exactly. It was the look of someone in a desert watching another person drink from a spring. It lasted only a heartbeat before Imoria vanished back into the gloom of the corridor, a shadow retreating from the light.
Yelena knew better than to mention it. The forced communion in the throne room had been a wound. Some scars pucker and close. Others, you just learn to move with. This one thrummed between them, a silent third presence in every room.
The kingdom, meanwhile, bloomed. Vents that had only ever exhaled dust now breathed steady, moist warmth into green-stone chambers where pale, hardy crops began to show startling shoots of green. The Temple Bellows sang their deep, sporadic song at random hours, and people would stop to listen, smiles touching their faces. It was a messy, cacophonous, living recovery.
It couldn’t last.
A week after the throne fell, Hector found them in the Reactivated Forge, now the bustling, humid heart of the mountain. Yelena was wrist-deep in a control rune, calibrating its sensitivity by feel, the bond providing a subtle itch of guidance. Imoria was reviewing a mineral survey, but her attention was on the efficient flex of Yelena’s fingers.
"Courier came in from the Western Watch," Hector said, his voice dropping. He didn't bother with ceremony anymore. "Not a scheduled run. He looked… spooked."
Imoria’s focus snapped to him, the queen fully present. "Report."
"Hard to make sense of it. Said the ice-fields beyond the thermal boundary are… behaving oddly. Not melting. Not collapsing. He described it as 'flowing against the slope.' And he saw lights. Deep blue, like cold flame, moving in patterns." Hector shook his head. "The man’s not a fantasist. He’s been on that watch for twenty years."
The good warmth in the forge suddenly felt thin. Yelena pulled her hands from the stone, the pleasant connection severing into a cold dread.
Imoria’s face had gone the color of old bone. "Lysandra’s mother was a geomancer from the Western Wastes. She was said to command the slow ice, to make glaciers walk." She finally looked at Yelena, and the fear in her eyes was absolute. "She didn’t just want to kill me. She wanted to break the mountain. To set the ice-fields crawling over our gates. To grind Flamaris and every soul in it into silica and bone-dust."
Yelena felt the truth of it, a cold that had nothing to do with temperature seeping into her core. The vengeance wasn't paused. It had just been waiting for the kingdom to thaw, to have something warm and alive and hopeful enough to lose.
She wiped her gritty hands on her trousers, the mundane gesture anchoring her. "Okay," she said, her voice surprisingly steady. "So where do we find someone who knows how to stop a walking glacier?"
Imoria’s answer was immediate, born of a century of obsessive, lonely vigilance. "There is a prison-tomb. Carved into the living ice at the very edge of the wastes. They sealed her conspirators there after the coup failed." She swallowed. "If any are still alive in that cold, they hold the only maps to what Lysandra planned."
The momentum of the past days—the warmth, the healing, the fragile new connections—coalesced into a single, unavoidable vector. They were going into the ice.
The forge’s humid breath felt suddenly cloying on Yelena’s skin. “A prison-tomb. In the ice.” She let the words hang, their chill seeping into the steamy air. “You kept them alive.”
“I buried them,” Imoria corrected, her voice hollow. “Alive was never the point. Information was. I thought I might need…” She trailed off, staring at the pulsating blue veins in the stone as if they were unfamiliar. “It was a century ago. They’ll be bones and frost.”
“You hope,” Hector muttered, sharpening a pickaxe with a grating schick-schick of stone. “Hope makes for poor armor out on the flows.”
Yelena ignored him, her mind clicking through implications. “They knew Lysandra’s plan. The geomancer’s daughter. So they’d know the countermeasures. The weaknesses.” She stepped closer to Imoria, the bond humming with a low-grade urgency. “Would they tell you? After you sealed them in a frozen hole for a hundred years?”
A muscle twitched in Imoria’s jaw. “They might tell you.”
“What?”
“You’re the river-waker. The princess who fixed the heart they tried to stop.” Imoria finally met her gaze. “You’re not me. You’re the argument that I was wrong. That this kingdom was worth saving.” Her voice dropped, fraying at the edges. “It’s a better bargaining position than the one I have, which is essentially ‘the woman who tortured you for eternity.’"
The bluntness of it was a slap. Yelena turned away, walking to the edge of the mineral channel. She dipped her fingers in; the water was a comforting, constant heat. It felt like a lie now. “So we’re not going to fight walking glaciers. We’re going to ask the architects how to dismantle them. Politely.”
“We’re going to try.” Imoria moved to stand beside her. “The Western Watch is eight days’ hard travel. The prison-tomb is another day beyond, into the true waste. We’ll need thermal kits, climb-gear, enough fuel to melt water for a fortnight.”
“A fortnight in that?” Hector scoffed, throwing the pickaxe into a leather kit-bag with a heavy thud. “You haven’t been out there, not since the sealing. The cold has… changed. It listens now.”
“Then we’ll have to be quiet,” Yelena said, surprising herself. She pulled her hand from the water, watching the droplets fall, each one a tiny, temporary prism. She was terrified. But the alternative was watching the green shoots in the kitchens and the children’s warm floors get ground to powder. The math was simple, even if it made her stomach twist. “When do we leave?”
“First light,” Imoria said. “Rest tonight. What passes for rest.”
Sleep was impossible. Yelena lay in her borrowed chambers, staring at the ceiling where real, gentle heat now radiated from a ceramic panel. Her body hummed with a traitorous warmth, while her imagination painted everything in shades of blue and desperate white.
She gave up near midnight, pulling on a heavy wrap and padding silently through the corridors. She found herself not at the forge, but at the doorway to the throne antechamber. The doors were sealed with a fresh mortar, a stark, grey line.
Imoria was there. She wasn’t touching the door. She was just standing before it, a still figure in the dim glow of the steady stream that now traced its path through the floor channel.
“Can’t sleep either?” Yelena’s voice was soft.
Imoria didn’t turn. “I keep feeling the pull. Of the throne. Not the corruption. The… the gravity of it. The excuse of it.” She sighed, a cloud in the cool air. “It was easier when the monster had a shape and a seat. Now it’s a ghost in the ice, and I have to go meet it with a clear head.”
Yelena moved to stand beside her, their shoulders not touching. “You said they might talk to me. Because I’m not you. What did you do to them, Imoria?”
The silence stretched, so long Yelena thought she wouldn’t answer. The only sound was the water’s quiet journey.
“After the attempted coup failed,” Imoria began, her words measured and heavy, “we captured seven. Lysandra’s inner circle. Geomancers, tunnel-singers, a scholar of deep tectonics. I interrogated them myself. For weeks.” She finally looked at Yelena, her eyes reflecting the water’s pale light. “I was not… skilled in extraction. I was angry. I was broken. I used the only tool I had in abundance: heat. I baked them in rooms of dry stone, fed them salt, let the mountain’s fever pry at their minds.”
Yelena’s skin crawled. She saw it—the brutal, hopeless counterpoint to the cold throne room. Two sides of the same tormented coin.
“They gave me nothing. Just curses and poetry about the ice that would come for me.” Imoria’s smile was a grim slash. “So I gave them what they loved. I took them to the edge of the wastes, to a fissure that goes down to where the earth’s own heat is a memory. And I sealed them in with walls of pumped ice and iron. A tomb that mirrored their desired end for my kingdom. I told them they could live out their years with the cold they worshipped.” She swallowed. “I never went back. Not once.”
THEY CONFRONT THE TRUTH.
It wasn’t in the throne room’s violent consummation. It was here, in the quiet hallway, with the sound of living water between them. The truth was not a single act of betrayal, but a chain of them. Lysandra’s. Imoria’s. A cycle of punishment and retribution written in fire and ice.
“You made them a monument,” Yelena whispered, the horror not dispelling her clarity. “A monument to your grief. That’s what we’re going to find. Not prisoners. A monument.”
“Yes.” The word was a surrender.
“And you think they’re alive.”
“The geomancer, Kael, he could whisper to permafrost. Make it shape itself. He could have kept a pocket of air… fashioned a hibernation…” Imoria rubbed her face. “It doesn’t matter. We have to go. We have to look.”
Yelena reached out, not through the bond, but physically. Her fingers brushed the back of Imoria’s hand, which was clenched white-knuckled at her side. The skin was cold. “Then we look. And if they’re there, we offer them a different end. Warmth. A place by the forge. The truth you just told me.”
Imoria turned her hand, her fingers interlacing with Yelena’s. The contact was electric, a jolt of pure, unmediated present. No bond-transferred sensation, just skin, callous, and a shared, trembling vulnerability. “They’ll spit in your face.”
“Probably,” Yelena agreed, squeezing her hand once before letting go. The warmth of the touch lingered. “But we’ll have tried. And we’ll know. That’s the job now, isn’t it? Knowing. Instead of just… reacting.”
Imoria looked down at her own hand, then back at the sealed door. “First light,” she repeated, but the words had lost their grim finality. They were just a fact. The next step.
The morning air at the High Eastern Gate bit with a purity the mountain’s interior had forgotten. It was a clarifying cold, scoured of ozone and mineral weight, tasting only of stone and infinite sky. The gear was oppressive—insulated, articulated suits of layered leather and treated wool, crampons, ice-axes, packs laden with energy-dense fungal cakes and capsules of molten salt that would provide heat for hours.
Hector checked Yelena’s harness for the third time, his rough hands tugging at straps. “The bond,” he said, his voice low. “Out there, in that deep cold… it could do strange things. Your senses will already be lying to you. Adding another layer of shared input…” He shook his head. “Be careful what you listen to.”
“We’ll manage,” Yelena said, her breath pluming. She caught Imoria’s glance. The queen looked carved from the same pale granite as the peaks, her expression remote, but she gave a slight, acknowledging nod.
They crossed the thermal boundary an hour later. It was a visible line: on one side, bare rock held a whisper of residual warmth; on the other, a sheet of eternal, wind-polished ice began, flowing in surreal, smooth waves toward a horizon of jagged blue teeth. The silence was absolute. It was not an absence of sound, but a presence—a dense, hungry quiet that swallowed their footsteps and the creak of their packs.
They traveled in single file, Imoria leading with a predatory grace, her eyes scanning not just for crevasses, but for the unnatural. Yelena focused on the rhythm of movement, on the heat of her own breath inside the fur-lined hood. The bond was a faint, background hum, muted by the overwhelming physical reality of the trek.
On the second day, they saw the lights.
It was during the deep violet of Arctic twilight. Hector, taking a turn on point, froze and slowly raised a hand. Far to the north, across a plain of ice that glowed like a slab of cobalt, streaks of deep blue light moved. They did not flicker like flame. They slithered. They pulsed in unison, then scattered, as if following commands. They traced patterns that made Yelena’s eyes ache—angles too sharp, spirals too perfect for wind or water to make.
No one spoke. They just watched, until the last light faded into the rising dark. The silence afterward felt heavier, watchful.
On the morning of the fourth day, they found the first statue.
It was a man, or had been. He was fully encased in clear ice, as if frozen mid-stride. His face was upturned, his mouth open in a shout or a song. His clothes were tattered Flamaris issue, a century out of date. The ice around him was not smooth. It was whorled and patterned, deliberately shaped into a grotesque, beautiful shell.
Hector touched the surface with a gloved hand. “This isn’t natural freeze. This is sculpture.”
“Kael,” Imoria breathed, the name a curse and a confirmation. She looked around, her eyes sweeping the jagged pressure ridges. “We’re close. He marked the way.”
They found three more in the next two hours, each a frozen sentinel in a posture of anguish or ecstasy, each a masterwork of glacial preservation. They were harrowing signposts. They led to a fissure, a black crack in the world so deep it seemed to have no bottom. A rusted iron gantry, part of the old sealing effort, clung drunkenly to one side, leading down into the gloom.
Imoria anchored a rope, the spikes ringing out against the iron with a sound that was too loud, too final. “This is it.”
Yelena peered over the edge. A cold, drier air wafted up, smelling of iron and time. Somewhere far below, a faint, blue, non-fire glow pulsed. Just like the lights on the plains.
She looked at Imoria, then at Hector. “Okay,” she said, her voice steady. She tested the rope. “Let’s go say hello to your monument.”