33 – A White Wing

The tunnel was dying around them.

Ashley threw up another shield as a wave of fire rolled down the passage, the barrier flaring white against the orange glare before the flames split around them and roared past. The heat on the other side of the spell pressed like a physical weight against her palms.

“Move!” She grabbed Simon’s sleeve and pulled him forward the moment the fire thinned.

Their shoes hit the floor and found it wrong. The metal plating had warped in the heat, buckling upward in places, splitting open in others to reveal the glowing rock beneath. Every step required a calculation: where to land, what would hold, what wouldn’t.

Simon stumbled and Ashley caught him without slowing down.

Aury.

The pain in her chest had settled into something duller since the seal broke, a pressure that pulsed in time with her heartbeat.

What does it mean? What has he become?

She nearly overshot the next bend.

“Left!” Simon’s hand found her shoulder, steering her hard.

The corridor walls glowed a uniform red and yellow with running, liquid iron, a brilliant wash that completely erased the shadows and flattened her depth perception into a single, blinding plane.

“Thanks,” she said, wiping a smear of soot from her cheek. “I was lost in thought.”

“Now is not the time,” Simon murmured. “I’m sure they’re fine—”

The overhead plating bulged glowing incandescent red a split second before the metal seam tore open. She shoved him backward.

Simon stumbled, his unfinished word swallowed by a wet crash as a column of molten sludge dropped between them, striking the floor where he had been standing a heartbeat earlier and spraying glowing strands across the floor.

The descending torrent severed the corridor, cutting them off completely.

Then the pool spread.

The liquid slag crawled outward in a slow, searing ring, hissing as it forced Simon to scramble back. Ashley tried to step forward, but another rope of liquid iron tore loose from the ceiling and slapped down beside the first, widening the barrier.

“Simon!”

“I’m fine!” his voice echoed back, muffled behind the shifting curtain of red light.

The boiling sludge kept pouring, pooling around his boots in uneven channels, curling along the grooves of the floor plates and sealing off the narrow gaps he might have used to slip through.

The incandescent ring was closing around him, narrowing into a fluid trap with the priest at the center.

Ashley’s heel plunged ankle-deep into the roiling sludge, the liquid heat parting around her foot like an ordinary puddle of water. She strode through the molten pool without slowing, sending brilliant droplets sloshing left and right with each step. Reaching the center of the trap, she thrust out her hand.

“How—” Simon grimaced as his fingers locked around hers. “So it’s true you bathe in lava?”

Ashley hauled him upward with a firm jerk. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s my spell, [Heat Protection].”

A thin barrier spread from her fingers, running over Simon’s hand, up his arm, and across the rest of his body in a faint shimmer.

Simon’s spine went rigid as the sudden coolness blanketed his blistering skin, his focus clearing as he blinked. “Oh. That’s… surprisingly pleasant.”

They crossed the pool of magma together.

Ashley moved through it easily, the molten surface shifting around her ankles like thick water. Simon, however, had to fight for every step.

Even with the protection wrapped around him, the lava clung to his boots like half-melted tar.

Each time he planted a foot, it sank slowly, and each time he tried to lift it, he had to pull with both hands and force his leg free inch by inch.

“This is harder than it looks,” he grunted.

When they were out, they bolted forward. The corridor narrowed sharply as it descended, the overhead iron dropping until Simon and Ashley had to hunch their shoulders to clear the warped plating.

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The glow ahead was changing. The flat, industrial orange of superheated metal and escaping steam faded, replaced by a deeper illumination bleeding through the opening at the end of the passage. It throbbed.

Ashley slowed her pace, digging her heels in the grid plates.

“What is it?” Simon asked, crowding in behind her.

She kept silent, tracking the illumination as it shifted against the basalt walls. Crimson, then blinding white, then crimson again. The steady, rhythmic swell mimicked the rise and fall of a gargantuan pair of lungs.

A different shockwave drowned out the industrial din. The air itself compressed, thick and unyielding between each impact, slamming against Ashley’s eardrums in slow, leaden pulses. Two primal entities were tearing into each other down below.

“Aury’s in there,” Ashley said, her knuckles tightening.

Simon remained silent, his jaw locking as the vibration rattled his teeth.

Ashley took one more stride toward the opening.

The world collapsed into white.

There was no warning, no sound she could catch before the force hit her. One instant she was moving forward, the next the blast slammed through her body and tore the ground out from under her.

Her vision vanished.

Then her spine struck the heat-softened metal.

She lay flat on her back, the breath driven completely from her lungs.