The Stormheart didn't beat.
It bit.
Kael's palm struck the gem. Cold fire ate his nerves—not a combination, but an infringement. Spiked light tore up his arm, chewing through bone and ligament like glass shards in a circulation system. His rune shouted, not in starvation but acknowledgment, peeling open like a lidless eye. Violet-indigo fibers emitted from his tissue, braiding with the Stormheart's throbbing veins.
WE ARE THE BRIDGE.
The beast's voice was a corroded surgical tool in his intellect.
"You're THE KEY. SHEATH OR BLADE—CHOOSE."
Over them, the sky ripped.
The Primary Walker's eye tore open over Neon Avalon—a planet-sized void of green-black nothing. Clouds vaporized at its edges. Understudies like passing on stars collapsed internally, drinking the light. Over the city, shouts Kick the bucket Raindrones solidified mid-fall. A road vendor's steaming noodle cart tipped, broth suspended in a dish like poisonous gold. Quiet gulped sound entirety.
Within the refinery, Chaos replied to the call.
The ceiling moaned. Cement-dsnowed down as back pillars yelled. The chained mammoth whipped, muscles coiling beneath basalt scales. Vitality bonds snapped like over-tuned wires, whipping through the discuss. One thorned wing clipped Lyss—a brutal strike that sent her slipping over the walkway. Blood blossomed blood red over her ribs, stark against her powder-colored skin.
"Thorn! Presently!" Valen's thunder was crude, broken.
Void-crystal ate. It slithered from his mutilated bicep, over his collarbone—a sparkling, indigo cancer. It ate his coat, his skin, the corner of his growling mouth. Splits beat with stolen light, lighting up the dread in his remaining human eye. He didn't hold up. He charged.
No. Kael caught on. Not strength. Edginess. A last, angry refusal to be Silas's pawn, the Academy's instrument, the Void's casualty.
Valen's gem arm exploded.
SKREEE-SHLIK!
Rugged spines erupted—spears of condensed void-energy. They punched through the beast's armored throat, sticking it to the shivering floor. Dark ichor fountained, steaming where it struck the walkway. The beast's yell wasn't sound—it was immaculate weight, liquefying Kael's eardrums, vibrating his teeth free in their attachments.
Kael pulled.
The Stormheart tore free from its platform with a damp, metallic screech.
His flesh tore. Skin peeled back from his wrist to his elbow, uncovering glowing bone melded to the crystal's center. Anguish got tobe a removed reflection, suffocated by the Stormheart's pulse—a cadence that pounded against his pulse, debilitating to smash it. He wasn't holding a weapon. He was holding a passing star. A key. A crown of blades.
"I keep ."
Lyss's voice was a whisper woven from shadow and inactivity. She stood atthe edge of the churning dark lake, her little outlineovershadowed by the beast's whipping misery. She ventured into the inky obscurity.
She didn't sink.
She up.
Her body was divided into twirling bits of violet light. Not destroyed—transformed. Rings of unadulterated awareness spilled from her dissolving frame, sewing into the beast's expanding wounds. Not recuperating flesh—knitting minds. Neural sutures of burning light bound the beast's primal wrath to Lyss's ghostly calm.
"Some time recently THE CHAINS..." The beast's whipping moderated, its single, gigantic eye clouding with violet light. "YOU WERE THE HUSH BETWEEN STARS..."
Above the city, the Walker's sky-eye SNAPPED closed.
The backfire was momentary.
Neon Avalon jarred like a rodent in a trap. Roads buckled. Windows imploded miles absent. Far off, Doors shook, spewing deluges of indigo lightning that seared the sky. And the sound—a subsonic yell that vibrated not within the air, but within the bedrock, within the marrow, within the roots of teeth. Pure, unadulterated wrath.
Kael stood amid the refinery's destruction. Tidy settled like dim snow.
The Stormheart beat warmly in his skeletal grasp. The melded bone shone with caught lightning. Over the chamber, the incredible mammoth lay tranquil, its gigantic flank rising and falling in a moderate, cadenced breath. Behind its overwhelming tops, violet light beat softly—Lyss's will a unfaltering current inside the storm of its intellect.
Valen drooped against a broken pipe, gasping, battered, and with damp breaths. Void-crystal encased half his confront, inching towards his cleared-out eye. It beat reflecting the Stormheart's shine. A spiked, living scar.
"It's not free," Kael rasped. Blood, thick and dim, dribbled from his combined wrist onto the Stormheart's surface, sizzling where it touched. "It's mine."
Valen's chuckle was a broken, crushing thing. "Congratulations, Thorn." He spat a sizable chunk of dim liquid. "You fair chained a god's favorite dog. Trust you brought treats."
Lyss's voice reverberated, not from the beast's throat, but from the discus itself, thunderous and doubled—her possessivetimbre layered with the beast's moan snarl: "The Walker felt its torment. It's outrage. It knows its weapon is shackled… and it knows where."
Kael looked down at the Stormheart. It wasn't fair to be a gem any longer. It was a heart. Beating in time with his rune. With the panicked beat of the city trembling miles over. With the far-off, blurring yell of the injured Walker.
He raised his cleared-out hand—his substance hand—to touch his sanctuary. His fingers came absent damp. Not raining. Not sweat. Thick, warm liquid.
He stumbled to a split viewport, overlooking Valen's addressing revile.
Exterior, beneath the bruised, lightning-scarred sky, rain fell upward. Millions of silver drops streaking in resistance to gravity, hustling towards the fixed, throbbing wound where the Walker's eye had been. A noiseless, inconceivable waterway streaming into blankness.
The signal was lit.
The Walker was coming.
And Kael Thorn, the canal rodent with Void-stained hands, had fairly stolen its favorite knife.
End of chapter 18.
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