The spiral stair carved into the core of the Sun-Pyramid was three miles of unbroken black basalt, wide enough for ten armored men to march abreast.
With every fifty paces of vertical ascent, the air grew noticeably hotter, but it was no longer the dry, radiant warmth of the sun. It was an oily, suffocating heat that tasted of melted tallow, burning cinnabar, and the heavy, sweet rot of calcified immortality.
Lyra led the climb, her small hide boots making no sound against the polished glass steps.
Her antler knife was tucked into its sheath, the blade still warm from severing the Cord of the Noon. Her dark combat braids were plastered to her neck with sweat and cistern spray, but her hazel-grey eye and her starlit violet eye were wide, dilated, parsing the fluctuating vibrations in the stone beneath their soles.
Beside her, Gideon walked with the slow, measured stride of a wounded tiger.
His left ribs were bound tightly in strips of linen torn from Malic’s white-samite cloak, through which a dark, rusty stain of dried blood had seeped. The searing wound from the crystal scimitar had been packed with crushed wintermint and starlit ash, dulling the agony to a steady, manageable throb. His left hand rested flat against the small of Lyra’s back—not for support, but to keep her anchored against his side, his thumb stroking the curve of her hip with unyielding, possessive rhythm.
Behind them climbed Varis, Talia, Korina Drake, and the twelve surviving Void-dancers of the Ember guard.
The four Sun Wyrms had remained in the flooded cistern below, their massive bodies coiled defensively around the shattered ruby sphere, securing their rear against any reinforcement from the subterranean aqueducts.
"Two miles up," Talia whispered, her breath ragged, her fingers resting lightly on the pommel of her left rapier. "The air is so thin my eye is watering. How does that golden bastard live up here without suffocating?"
"He doesn't breathe air," Korina replied grimly, her boarding machetes drawn and resting across her forearms. "For two hundred years, Ignis-Vael has lived on a diet of pressurized alchemical vapors. He’s more machine and mercury than flesh."
Ahead, the black basalt steps ended at a landing of pure, translucent honey-amber fifty paces wide.
Standing in the center of the landing was a set of double doors forty feet high, forged from solid, beaten sun-gold, embossed with the horrifying history of the Southern Empire: thousands of tiny, screaming figures carved into the metal, their hands reaching upward toward a central, colossal sun that wept molten droplets into their open mouths.
The doors were already cracked an inch open.
From the seam between the golden panels drifted a scent that stopped Lyra in her tracks.
It was not the scent of an enemy army.
It was the scent of her mother.
Lyra froze, her breath catching in her throat, her knuckles whitening as her hands dropped instinctively to her sides.
Gideon’s claymores cleared their sheaths with a synchronized, quiet rasp, his massive frame shifting instantly to form an impenetrable wall between the doors and his queen. His amber-gold eyes flared with lethal suspicion, his nostrils flaring as he tested the draft.
"Lyra?" Gideon rumbled, his voice low, vibrating with sudden alarm. "What is it?"
"My mother's cedar," Lyra choked out, her voice barely a whisper, trembling with a sudden, agonizing confusion that she hadn't felt since the cellar days of the Blackwood pack. "Her oil... the resin she used to braid into my hair when I was an infant before the slaughter."
Varis stepped forward, her ancient face turning pale as bone beneath her silver braids.
"Impossible," the old commander breathed, her hand going to the hilt of her executioner's blade. "Sovereign Vespera died nineteen winters ago on the high parapets of the Ash Citadel. I watched her throat open under the Five Alphas' blades! I saw the pyre burn for three days and three nights!"
"Her body burned, Varis," Lyra whispered, her violet eye igniting with blinding, celestial fire as her Weave-sense reached through the crack in the gold doors. "Her bones turned to ash. But her soul-thread..."
Lyra looked at Gideon, her face pale, her jaw trembling with raw, furious grief.
"Her soul-thread was never released into the Moon Mother's cradle."
She stepped past Gideon’s protective shoulder, placing her bare palm against the massive sun-gold doors.
She pushed.
The forty-foot golden panels swung open with a hollow, mournful groan that echoed through the top of the pyramid.
The Throne Room of the Eternal Noon was an amphitheater of blinding, golden madness.
The chamber was circular, a hundred paces in diameter, open to the bruised sky above where the shattered, darkened shell of the Eye of the Noon hung suspended from three massive iron gantries.
The floor was a mosaic of white marble and red cinnabar, depicting the celestial map of the southern hemisphere. Lining the perimeter were fifty towering columns of fluted gold, each carved in the likeness of a Sun Wyrm weeping liquid mercury into channels that flowed toward the center of the hall.
And in the center of the room, seated upon a massive throne carved from a single, gargantuan block of crystallized volcanic amber, was Emperor Ignis-Vael.
The Sun-King did not look like his decaying satrap, Aurelius.
He looked ageless.
He appeared as a tall, slender male in his early thirties, with skin the color of burnished copper, high aristocratic cheekbones, and long, straight hair that fell like liquid gold across a mantle of pure woven electrum. His eyes were not quartz; they were solid, swirling pools of molten gold with no pupils and no iris.
Across his lap rested a massive two-handed great sword forged from pure volcanic glass, its blade five feet long, smoking with a dull, suppressed crimson heat.
And floating in the air directly behind his throne, suspended inside a cage of pulsing, golden soul-wire, was a radiant, incandescent orb of pale-violet starlight.
Inside the orb, curled in an eternal, weeping sleep, was the preserved, glowing spirit of Sovereign Vespera Morvath.
Connecting the Emperor’s chest to the glowing spirit of her mother was a thick, braided tether of dark blood-sorcery—a parasitic leash through which Ignis-Vael had been siphoning the true starlight of the Ash Court for nineteen winters to maintain his ageless, golden youth.
The Emperor looked up as the doors opened.
His molten golden eyes locked onto Lyra, sweeping over her star-iron circlet, her bruised face, and the antler knife at her waist with an expression of gentle, terrifying amusement.
"Welcome home, daughter," Ignis-Vael spoke.
His voice was like warm honey poured over hot brass—smooth, melodic, carrying the ancient, hypnotic weight of an absolute god.
He rose from his amber throne, the volcanic glass great sword sliding effortlessly into his right hand, its tip resting against the cinnabar floorboards with a soft, ominous sizzle.
"Your mother was stubborn," the Emperor said softly, taking a slow step down the dais. "When the northern wolves surrounded her citadel, she wept. She begged for an empire to save her child. But she refused to kneel to the Sun."
Ignis-Vael tilted his head, his golden gaze shifting to Gideon, taking in the warlord’s scarred frame, his bloodied bandages, and the two star-iron claymores humming with violet starlight.
"So I took her soul," the Emperor purred. "I kept her marrow warm in my cage, waiting for the day her seed would grow strong enough to complete the treaty."
He pointed the black-glass blade directly at Lyra’s heart.
"Kneel, Ashhound," Ignis-Vael commanded, his voice vibrating with such catastrophic sovereign pressure that the marble floor beneath their boots began to crack. "Surrender your marrow to the Sun... or watch me feed your mother's ghost to the fires of the deep."
Gideon didn't wait for her to answer.
The northern warlord let out a roar of pure, apocalyptic fury that shattered the amber panels behind them.
His star-iron claymores cleared the air in a blur of whistling starlight.
"I’LL FEED YOUR GUTS TO MY DRAKE FIRST!" Gideon bellowed.
And the King of the North charged the Emperor of the Sun.
The final hunt had begun.