The climb back up the titan-vertebrae staircase was a slow, agonizing blur of leaden limbs and ragged breath.
Malakor carried Aurelia for the first two leagues. He had slung his great sword across his back and scooped her up into his arms, refusing to set her down even as the sulfuric heat baked through the soles of his heavy boots. Her head rested against the hollow of his shoulder, her breath coming slow and shallow, her fingers loosely tangled in the collar of his shredded tunic.
"I can walk, Malakor," she had whispered twice, her eyelids fluttering against the exhaustion weighing down her marrow. "The core is steady. I am not made of glass."
"You walked across a god’s skull and cleansed its rot with your own blood," he had growled in response, his pace unyielding, his chest rising and falling against hers in a steady, protective cadence. "You can let me carry you up some damned stairs. Shut your eyes and rest, empress, before I tie you to my chest."
A faint, breathless chuckle had slipped past her dry lips, but she didn't argue again. She closed her eyes, letting the rhythmic thud of his heart and the blistering, dark warmth radiating from his skin soothe the violent aftershocks humming in her veins.
By the time they reached the high landing where Theron knelt among the rescued captives, Aurelia had regained her footing. She insisted on walking through the gates of Kar-Drakor under her own power.
The old archivist was trembling, his blind, milky eyes fixed upward toward the vaulted ceiling where the emerald glow of his cane revealed something miraculous: the fissures in the subterranean rock had ceased to weep poison. Veins of cool, silver-hued quartz were creeping across the cracked granite, knitting the bedrock back together in an unbroken, crystalline seal.
"The resonance..." Theron breathed, clutching his cane to his chest with liver-spotted hands as they approached. "The tremors in the crust have ceased. The deep current... it sings in harmony with the sky."
"We know," Malakor said, brushing past the old scholar without pausing, his free arm remaining firmly hooked around Aurelia’s waist to take half her weight. "The serpent went back to sleep. Now move your withered legs, old man, unless you want to spend the rest of your life eating subterranean moss."
The surviving prisoners—twenty soldiers and craftsmen stolen from the lower wards—fell in behind them in reverent silence, staring at Aurelia’s back as if she were a celestial myth made flesh.
The ascent through the Obsidian Maw was entirely transformed. The boiling sulfur vents had cooled to drifting plumes of warm mist, and the narrow basalt ledges that had threatened to drop them into magma were now solid, cold stone.
When they finally breached the surface at the mouth of the rift, the midday sun of Val-Khor struck them like a physical blow.
The three moons had aligned in the pale blue winter sky, but the earth did not crack. The mountains did not slide into the sea. The pale sunlight spilled across the pristine snowfields of the Razorback Spine, clean and crisp, smelling of fresh pine and the distant, salty spray of the harbor.
Waiting at the perimeter of the rift stood Lady Vespera, mounted on her gray charger, flanked by a full cohort of Vanguard shock-marines with halberds gleaming in the noon light.
As Aurelia emerged from the dark fissure, her silver hair catching the sun, her ancestral sword sheathed at her hip and her hand locked firmly in Malakor’s, Vespera drew her rapier and saluted.
"Your Grace!" Vespera’s voice rang across the crags, carrying the wild relief of a woman who had prepared for the end of the world and found dawn instead. "The palace bells began to chime on their own an hour ago. The sea-gates are quiet. The capital is waiting."
Aurelia paused at the edge of the snowfield, drawing a deep, icy breath into her lungs. The cold mountain air tasted sweeter than the finest vintage in the imperial cellars.
She looked up at Malakor.
His scarred face was caked with soot, his tunic torn to ribbons, dried blood crusting his jaw and throat, but his amber eyes burned with that fierce, unvarnished devotion that had anchored her through the void and the fire.
"We have an empire to rebuild, warlord," she said softly, her lips curving into a tired, triumphant smile.
Malakor’s large, calloused hand came up, his thumb brushing a streak of ash from her cheek, his fingers lingering against the soft curve of her jaw.
"Let the clerks rebuild the empire, Aurelia," he murmured, his voice dropping into a low, possessive rumble that sent a delicious shiver straight to her core. "You and I have a warm bed, a barrel of spiced wine, and three days of unfinished business waiting in the High Citadel."
Aurelia laughed—clear, bright, and free of the weight of dead gods—and let him pull her toward the waiting horses.