The drop without the Weave-Aura was an assault of pure, crushing gravity.
The moment their bodies sliced through the black surface of the Drowned Teeth, the freezing Atlantic brine slammed against Lyra’s skin like a wall of wet lead. The water here was devoid of warmth, light, or air—a dense, pressurized medium that immediately sought to compress her chest and force the breath from her throat.
She didn't choke.
Gideon’s massive left arm had locked around her waist the instant they hit the water, hauling her flush against his broad chest. He didn't swim like a mortal; with powerful, coordinated kicks of his muscular legs and the driving momentum of his two-hundred-and-sixty-pound frame, he propelled them downward into the shadow of the sea-stacks like an descending anchor.
Through their conjoined chest-plates, the true-mate bond roared to life.
Without the protective violet skin of the Weave-Aura to signal their approach to the fortress wards, the furnace heat of the Drake bloodline radiated directly from Gideon’s flesh into hers. His core temperature spiked to forge-heat, creating a thin, microscopic film of superheated water against their bare skin that turned the biting brine into a harmless vapor sheath.
Lyra held their shared breath within her lungs, her sovereign Weave-sense locking onto the microscopic dissolved oxygen in the sea around them, feeding it in a continuous, silent cycle through Gideon’s veins and into her own.
Three hundred paces below the surface, the foundations of the Obsidian Enclave loomed through the gloom.
The sea-cliffs of the fortress did not end at the waterline. They descended into the ocean in sheer, vertical walls of dressed basalt, reinforced with massive buttresses of rust-streaked star-iron that anchored the fortress to the continental bedrock.
Carved directly into the submerged face of the rock were three colossal intake tunnels—each twenty paces wide, barred with heavy iron grates that choked with weeping kelp. The tunnels were drinking the sea. A massive, artificial current rushed toward the center tunnel with the force of an underwater cataract, dragging silt, schools of blind fish, and dead drift-timbers straight into the bowels of the mountain.
The intake for the Drowned Forge, Lyra's voice projected directly into Gideon’s mind, calm and clear despite the crushing depth. It pulls the cold seawater into the lower magma chambers to fuel the inversion engine.
Then we ride the draft, Gideon thought back, his feral bass rumbling through the link with grim amusement.
He didn't bother looking for a broken grate or a hidden drain. As the cataract seized their bodies and threw them toward the center tunnel at terrifying speed, Gideon reversed his grip on his star-iron claymore and drove the heavy cross guard forward like a battering ram.
The five-foot blade struck the center of the rust-streaked iron grating with concussive force.
Fed by his unbridled Alpha musculature, the strike sheared the century-old rivets clean out of the stone. The iron grate buckled inward with a muted, metallic screech, and the surging current sucked them both through the breach into the black throat of the mountain.
The tunnel plunged down at a forty-five-degree angle through the solid basalt foundation.
Around them, the walls were lined with thousands of thick, pulsating veins of black core-glass—identical to the material that had killed the fishermen on the northern shelf. The glass was weeping clear, caustic brine that hummed with that same nauseating, ultrasonic resonance, vibrating against their teeth and rattling the bones of their skulls.
Ahead, the tunnel widened into a subterranean sea-cavern of staggering proportions: the Drowned Forge of the Obsidian Enclave.
It was an enormous, vaulted amphitheater carved beneath the sea-level foundation of the fortress.
High above, arched iron catwalks hung from the dripping stone roof, crowded with hundreds of southern crossbowmen and black-robed overseers carrying electrified shock-pikes. Along the perimeter of the cavern, half-submerged in the steaming black water, were dozens of heavy iron cages—holding hundreds of gaunt, branded slaves who were forced to shovel massive blocks of raw abyssal core-glass into the gaping maws of twelve smelting furnaces set into the walls.
And rising from the center of the flooded floor was the Third Anchor.
It was an immense, four-sided pyramid of polished black obsidian, sixty feet tall, submerged halfway beneath the churning water. At the apex of the pyramid sat a massive crucible of liquid, white-hot star-iron that refused to burn.
Suspended directly above the molten crucible, bound by twelve thick chains of runic silver that pierced through his collarbones and thighs, was a colossal wolf-shifter.
His pelt was pitch black, his massive limbs corded with heavy muscle, though his ribs showed through his scarred hide from months of starvation. His head hung low, a muzzle of spiked iron clamped shut over his jaws, his amber eyes clouded with milky, unnatural blindness.
Every time the forge below him drank the heat from the molten iron, a pulse of freezing, violet lightning surged up the silver chains, tearing into the chained Alpha’s flesh and ripping a muffled, agony-choked howl from his throat.
Lyra’s inner Void-wolf paced violently behind her ribs, its fur standing on end in pure, territorial outrage.
Alpha Conlan, Lyra breathed across the link, her heart clenching.
The former High Alpha of the Western Timber—Gideon’s uncle, who had vanished during the southern borders skirmishes four winters ago. He had not been killed in battle; Kenneth had dragged him into this lightless pit, using the unyielding vitality of an elder Drake bloodline to keep the inversion forge perpetually stoked.
Gideon’s mental link went dead silent.
The quiet that followed was not hesitation; it was the terrifying, bottomless stillness that came before an extinction-level event.
Gideon broke the surface of the flooded cavern floor forty paces from the obsidian pyramid.
He stood in the waist-deep, boiling water, his massive shoulders rising like an island of iron from the foam. He did not seek cover. He did not reach for a stealthy strike.
With a roar that shattered the glass lanterns along the upper catwalks and sent a concussive shockwave of displaced water washing against the slave cages, Gideon drew both of his star-iron claymores.
"KENNETH!" Gideon bellowed, his voice echoing through the subterranean vault with the force of an avalanche.
The hundreds of guards on the catwalks froze, their crossbows lowering in stunned disbelief.
On the high observation platform overlooking the molten crucible, a tall figure in gilded obsidian plate stepped to the iron railing. His long, silver-blond hair was tied back with gold wire, his cruel, patrician features twisted into a triumphant, arrogant sneer as he rested his gauntleted hand on the pommel of a rapier forged from black glass.
High Alpha Kenneth.
"Well, well," Kenneth called down, his smooth, cultured voice carrying effortlessly over the hissing steam. "The mountain dog comes to retrieve his kin. Did you really think you could unseal the North without paying the ferryman's toll, Gideon?"
Kenneth raised his left hand, and the twelve sorcerers standing beside him lowered their staffs toward the silver chains holding Conlan.
"You're too late, boy," Kenneth mocked, his eyes gleaming with cold malice. "His core is almost entirely drained. One more cycle of the forge, and his bloodline belongs to the deep."
Beside Gideon, Lyra stepped forward through the churning water, her dual-colored eyes locking onto Kenneth with lethal, unblinking intent.
Her star-iron circlet blazed with blinding celestial violet light.
"He isn't here to retrieve his kin, Kenneth," Lyra said, her voice dropping into that terrifying, double-toned cadence of the Ash Court that made the guards on the catwalks begin to tremble.
She drew her mother's star-iron daggers, their blades smoking as her inner fire flooded the metal.
"He's here to feed you to him."