The ascent was a violent blur of boiling foam, fractured currents, and screaming ballast.
The elder Sun Wyrm surged upward through the lightless column of the Black Chasm, its massive golden fins beating against the churning seawater with desperate, concussive strokes. Behind them, the subterranean amphitheater was collapsing into itself. Deprived of the Heart of the Weeping Tide’s harmonic tension, millions of tons of shattered abyssal core-glass and fractured basalt slid down the continental slope in a roaring, underwater avalanche that sent concussive shockwaves rattling against their teeth.
Gideon kept his massive arm locked tight around Lyra’s waist, his boots wedged deep into the saddle-stirrups of the elder wyrm. His chest was an immovable wall against her back, radiating raw, furnace-hot vitality into her chilled spine.
Even through the adrenaline and the bitter tang of sea-spray leaking past the edges of the Weave-Aura, he could feel the tremor running through her small frame. Holding the pressurized starlight skin across seven warriors while channeling the thermonuclear strike that shattered the keystone had pushed her Weave-sense to the knife-edge of exhaustion. A thin trickle of crimson still dried against the pale skin beneath her left nostril, caught in the stubble of his jaw as he pressed his face into the curve of her throat.
"Breaching in three... two..." Gideon muttered, his deep voice a grounding rumble against her ear.
With a deafening explosion of white spray, the four Sun Wyrms punched through the surface of the ocean.
Cold, gray daylight hit them like a physical blow.
Above the open water, the sky was no longer a stagnant sheet of slate-gray fog. The sonic shockwave of the keystone’s detonation had ripped a ragged, circular wound through the cloud cover three leagues wide, allowing pale, watery shafts of northern sunlight to lance down onto the churning sea.
Circling directly through the break in the clouds was Cinder.
The volcanic drake let out an earth-shattering roar that scattered the lingering sea-mist for miles, banking his sixty-foot obsidian wings in a steep dive. He swooped low over the foaming wake of the Sun Wyrms, trailing sulfurous heat, his horned head tilting down to scan his riders. Seeing Lyra upright in the saddle, the drake released a short, celebratory burst of cobalt-blue fire into the sky before climbing back to altitude to maintain the aerial perimeter.
Around them, the sea was littered with drifting debris.
Thousands of shards of black core-glass—now dull, brittle, and lifeless as slag—bobbed in the gray swells alongside severed tendrils of purple kelp that were rapidly rotting into harmless brown mulch under the touch of the wind.
Talia and Commander Varis brought their wyrms alongside the elder beast, their mounts blowing noisy spouts of vapor from their blowholes as they leveled off into a cruising glide.
Varis pulled back her bull-hide diving cowl, her silver braids plastered to her weathered face by salt. She wiped the brine from her eyes, her gaze flicking across the horizon toward the Silver Coast.
"Look at the headlands," Varis said, pointing her short-blade toward the granite bluffs in the distance.
Along the three leagues of coastline visible from the chasm, the change was immediate. The three colossal, triangular spires that had breached the shallows that morning were breaking apart. Deprived of the abyssal resonance from below, the black rock was crumbling under the relentless battering of the ordinary tide, sliding into the surf in heaps of broken stone.
"The resonance collapsed," Talia said, a fierce, feral grin breaking across her scarred features as she sheathed her executioner’s blades. "The coast is stable."
"The coast is safe for today," Lyra corrected softly, her voice raspy.
She turned in Gideon's grip, resting her palms against the broad plates of his leather brigandine. Her hazel-grey eye was dark with exhaustion, but her violet eye remained fixed on the south-southwest, where the deep horizon met the sea in a line of unnatural, bruised purple darkness.
"That heartbeat we felt at the end..." Lyra continued, her hand shifting upward to rest over Gideon's chest, feeling the steady, fierce rhythm that anchored her spirit. "It wasn't a death throe from the keystone. It was an awakening."
Gideon’s amber eyes narrowed into dangerous slits. His hand came up, his thick, calloused fingers cupping the side of her face, his thumb brushing away the speck of dried blood beneath her nose with infinite gentleness.
"The Abyssal Mother," Gideon rumbled.
"She felt the cord snap," Lyra said. "The Keystone Spire in the chasm was only the first link. The outer gate. The ancient texts in the High Hall called them the Seven Pillars of the Silt. If Kenneth and the Black Coven have allied with the Drowned Courts, they haven't just placed one anchor. They’ve laid a chain that stretches all the way from our northern waters down into the Abyssal Trench off the Cape of Tears."
"Then we don't sail back to the Citadel to drink ale and count dead fish," Gideon said, his low tone absolute, dripping with the raw authority that had conquered the mountain warlords.
He raised his head, looking toward Varis and Talia.
"Signal the fleet in the harbor," Gideon commanded, his voice carrying effortlessly over the crashing breakers. "Tell Jarek to keep forty dreadnoughts on defensive patrol along the outer shelf. Have the remaining thirty refit with star-iron rams and deep-sounding ballistas. We don't wait for the next spire to rise on our doorstep."
Varis nodded sharply, her jaw set. "And our course, General?"
Gideon looked down at Lyra, a dark, possessive hunger burning in the depths of his golden gaze.
"We take the Sun Wyrms and Cinder south along the trench line," Gideon said, his fingers curling into the fur at Lyra's collar, pulling her closer until her breath mingled with his. "We hunt every anchor they've planted. And when we find the throat of this Mother... we shove a mountain of dragon fire down it."
Lyra smiled—a sharp, cold, lethal curve of her lips that answered the predator in his blood.
"Let them taste the embers," Lyra whispered.
Gideon leaned down, claiming her mouth in a searing, possessive kiss that tasted of salt, iron, and unyielding fire, sealing the vow before turning their mounts toward the dark horizon of the south.