The cavern shuddered, stone grinding against stone as if the mountain itself drew breath. Dust sifted from the jagged ceiling, coating Rhea's lashes, and the air thickened with a damp, fetid heat.
Kael's hand found hers, strong and grounding, but even his grip couldn't still the tremor that raced through her bones.
"What now?" she whispered.
The Elders did not answer at once. Their masks turned as one toward the floor, where the cracks from the trial had not sealed. Instead, they widened—spiderweb fissures that glowed faintly, not with flame this time, but with a sickly green light.
The lead Elder raised his staff, voice carrying with a weight that made the cavern walls hum. "You have bound the flame. But beneath fire lies hunger. Always hunger."
Kael stepped in front of Rhea, blade half-drawn again. "Then say it plain. What's coming?"
The Elder's reply scraped like iron on stone. "The shard stirs. The Queen was never whole. She is a fragment,one mouth of the beast that festers in the marrow of this world."
Rhea's breath caught. The Queen's whispers still echoed in her skull, sharp and insistent, but beneath them… something deeper pulsed. A rhythm that wasn't her heartbeat.
She staggered. "The Hunger Below."
The Elder's staff struck the floor in affirmation. "Yes. She is its echo. You are its vessel."
Kael's golden eyes flared, jaw clenched so tight it looked carved from granite. "And you brought us here knowing this? You risked her—" he broke off, his grip tightening on the hilt of his sword.
"To kill her," the Elder rasped, "would be to tear the gate wide. She binds it, even as she tempts it free. That balance is the last chain on the Hunger."
Rhea's skin crawled. Inside her, the Queen's voice twisted sharp and triumphant. See, little one? You were never meant to win. You were made to hold me.
She clutched her chest, desperate to drown the whispers, but the pulse inside her grew heavier, as if the cracks in the stone below mirrored the cracks spreading in her soul.
The cavern floor buckled with a deafening crack. Kael dragged her back as a section of stone collapsed inward, chunks of rock crashing into an abyss that glowed with molten green. Heat and stench rushed upward—sulfur, rot, and something more revolting, like drowned flesh left too long in the sun.
Then it moved.
Not shadow, not flame, but flesh. Pale, slick, ridged with spines, sliding across the abyss like a serpent vast enough to coil the earth.
Rhea gagged, bile rising in her throat.
Kael's arm barred her protectively, his sword gleaming. "Tell me how to kill it," he demanded, voice raw.
The Elder only lowered his head. "You cannot. You can only bind. And binding demands cost."
Rhea's knees weakened, dread like ice sinking into her marrow. "What cost?"
The Elder's mask tilted toward her, voice almost pitying. "All that you are. All that you love. To cage it, you must burn yourself to ash."
The fissure widened with a thunderous groan. The creature pressed higher, a maw splitting open in the dark, its teeth rows of bone jutting like shattered spears. A roar tore upward,not a sound, but a vibration, shaking loose stone from the ceiling, rattling Rhea's bones until she thought her heart would burst.
The Elders lifted their staffs as one, chanting in a tongue so old it scraped Rhea's mind raw just to hear it. Wards blazed to life along the cavern walls, runes glowing like firebrands against the dark.
The thing screamed again, a sound so vast it drowned the chanting. Runes flickered, cracks widening as if even the Elders' power strained to contain what clawed its way toward freedom.
Rhea's shadow surged against her skin, begging release. Kael's hand seized hers, their fingers locking, heat sparking between them like steel striking flint. His eyes locked to hers,burning, unyielding, even in the face of this impossible terror.
"If that thing gets out," she rasped, terror shaking her bones, "it ends everything."
"Then we don't let it." His voice was a vow. Fierce. Certain. "Not while we still breathe."
The fissure tore wider. The beast's spined back heaved, shaking the cavern. The Elders' chant faltered under the pressure of its roar.
And the wards began to break