The Ballad Continues…
CHAPTER 13
Cage knew something was wrong when he arrived and Smoke didn’t.
The sixth arena was empty.
There was lava, and fire, and platforms of stone and bone, but there wasn’t her.
There wasn’t his sister.
Frantic, he glanced around. Magma burbled below him. Underground cliffs shone orange with greasy light. Tunnels, spires, and staircases to nowhere crowded the immense cave, but besides the undead ghosts and wandering skeletons, those puppets of darkness, not a single living thing appeared.
Except for him.
If he was actually still alive.
That remained to be seen.
“Smoke,” he cried. Fog swallowed his voice.
Her name ripped from his throat, shredded him raw, again and again and again.
Cage didn’t know how to be without Smoke. She was his other half, shared the blood in his veins, burdened with the same tragic flaw. Life. Salvation. A savior for slaughter. No one else understood. No one else was made to die, a tool for gods to use then discard. Humans died, of course, but they weren’t made to die, forged by the fist that would crush them in the end.
“Smoooookeeee,” Cage screeched, a feral plea.
His voice bounced off stone, consumed by the underground dome. Lava poured around him in molten threads. Rock crumbled into magma lakes.
Hysteria gripped him like a viper nest. Cage squirmed beneath the smothering weight, shrieking till blood trickled from his tongue. He collapsed to his knees, a stringless marionette. Bruises bloomed on his knuckles as he punched the crimson stone over, and over, and over again.
His heart tripped, somersaulting in his chest. His lungs wrinkled into useless raisins. He couldn’t get enough air, dizzy, hyperventilating, breathing with the force of a runaway train. His chest sputtered, sagged, as sob after sob wrenched free of his teeth. He needed her. Violently. Viscerally. Not even fate could keep them apart. Not permanently.
“Smoke,” he said, a whisper now—the faint, keening wail of a broken heart. Sweat drenched him. He was feverish, undone. Curling on his side, rocking back and forth, the scarlet cave a gory fort, he sought her voice: how she sounded, what she’d say.
It’s okay. I’ve got you. And you’ve got this.
Cage cracked open, a flowering eggshell, a brittle awakening beneath the lava sun. Pain was the catalyst to change, and so he hurt, and so he changed. An idea surfaced within the rapids of his mind, a technique Smoke had taught him years ago.
He hummed. Poorly. It was a song he had learned in the space between stars, a pocketed melody of loneliness. The gods had crooned it at night, when they hadn’t thought he’d remember, when they’d prayed he’d forget. But he hadn’t forgotten the song. He hadn’t forgotten anything. So he hummed more and more, soothing his mind. Music blanketed him, surrounding him with calm. His heart slowed. His breath steadied. He returned to himself, a ship washed ashore, though guilt lingered. He had tried for so long not to panic, to quiet his nerves, but after one single jolt, he was back at the start.
Panic isn’t a sign of failure. It’s a sign of success, that you care, and that you’re doing everything you can possibly do to improve.
Smoke had told him that in the cottage, after a sleepless night huddled under the covers, begging his heart to ease its stampede.
“Smoke,” he whispered again.
“She’s not here,” a booming voice answered.
Cage leaped to his feet, startled but not shipwrecked.
A planet of a creature emerged from the fog. Large as the cave. Massive as shadows. Forged from rock and lava. Building-sized slabs covered his arms and legs. Every footstep was an avalanche, every breath a hurricane. Magma veins pumped through his charcoal skin. His heart glowed in his titanic chest, a butterfly trapped within a beast. Metal scales rippled over his broad shoulders and skull.
But his face was the true nightmare. Chiseled. Handsome. Eyes like diamonds, shining like stars. His mouth parted in a smirk, gray lips pulled back over blocky, quartz teeth. A jawbone that could carve ice. Eyebrows that could grow forests. Ropes of ghostly black hair.
Typhon’s beauty was his greatest weapon.
“I’ve been waiting for you, Cage,” he said, his voice louder than the birth of time. “I figure you deserve your sister’s fate, too. Wouldn’t want to play favorites, of course.”
Dread coiled in Cage’s gut. He was at once too hot and too cold, boiling alive and freezing to death. He shuffled backward over crimson stone, his saber scratching against craggy rock. His back hit a wall, and he coughed, choking on fear.
Typhon laughed. His laugh shivered through the netherworld like a gong. Rocks fell from the ceiling. Lava hardened and shriveled around him. He slapped his skyscraper thighs and shook his moon-sized head. “At least your sister fought back. She only screamed at the very end.”
“No.” The word erupted from Cage, a bullet of denial. Smoke wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be. His sister was too full of existential rage to die without an apocalypse at her hands.
“Yes.” Typhon walked closer. The world shook with him.
Cage flattened against the wall, a pancake on a stove. He would burn for this—burn, and die, and disappear within history’s pages, a failed rebellion against insurmountable odds.
Monsters won.
Always.
“Behave, and I’ll make it quick,” Typhon grumbled. His voice was soft now, calming, like buttery sugar. He was kind, gentle, and that made him all the more lethal. Because he thought himself right when he was wrong, strong when he was weak. He was insecure, unstable, and would lash out at the slightest provocation.
But Cage wasn’t here to provoke him.
Cage was here to kill him.
And that would not go unpunished.
“Kneel,” Typhon said with a lullaby lilt.
Cage knelt. His knees punched stone. His saber toppled from his limp fingers. He pretended to be weak, or was it pretend? All this time, had his strength been make-believe? No, that was what Typhon wanted him to think.
The colossal beast smiled, smug. “You think I’m the villain here, that I’m the monster, but you could not be more wrong. Did Fei send you? Did she say you matter? That you’re important? A wannabe savior?” He snorted. Lava curled around his legs, but he was unharmed. “That’s cute.”
Cage knew Typhon spoke lies, knew he twisted language into a thousand knots till truth was invisible to the naked eye. The monster was shutting him down, breeding doubts, sniping and painting falsehoods as facts. The more Cage was diminished, the less he could fight back. The more incompetent he thought himself, the frailer he became. It was manipulation. Coercion. His brain could label that, but his heart tumbled in his chest, a sugar-spiked ball, and he couldn’t calm his nerves enough to breathe, think, live, be.
“That’s it, let go,” Typhon said with the croon of a mother’s love. His tree-sized fist hovered over Cage. He’d crack the boy’s head like an egg. The giant lowered himself before Cage, face to face. “You tried. I’ll give you that. Better than most, yet still not best.”
Cage opened his mouth to reply, but movement caught his gaze. A flicker of eyes like black pearls. Starlight hair. Slate gray skin. A forked tongue. Death in every step.
Smoke perched on Typhon’s skull, nestled among his black hair. She was safe. Alive.
Cage realized he was safe and alive, too.
Tears flooded his eyes.
“I know it’s scary,” Typhon said, mistaking relief for grief, “but it will be over soon.”
Smoke grinned. “Yes, it will be.” She dug her dagger into Typhon’s skull and carved a circle atop his crown.
Surprised, and enraged at being surprised, Typhon whirled around, but Smoke held on and waved to Cage.
“Up!” she shouted, throwing him a black rope of oily hair. “Climb up!”
Cage didn’t hesitate. He trusted his sister with a ferocity reserved only for her. After a running start, he grabbed his saber, then jumped. Typhon clawed at his face, his head, roaring for them, but he was so big, and they were so small, and all the times Cage had shrunk himself down, had made himself small, came in handy for this sliver of time. Though never again.
Never again.
Cage climbed Typhon’s hair. Smoke reached down and hauled him up by his collar. Together, they stabbed the circle with his saber. Indigo light pulsed from the monster, Ti Chrome.
Typhon roared one last time.
Smoke and Cage fell together. As they did, his sister screamed at Typhon, “You’re pathetic, and I pity you. No one will remember you. No one will care that you’re gone. I will laugh in the echo of your loss.”
Cage spiraled into darkness, clutching his sister’s hand. She faced him, a silhouette of power, and whispered, only for him: “He tried to break you, because he knows that at your full power, you will bring the universe to its knees and destroy all in your way. Monsters target you, because you are a weapon of infinite love and inescapable revenge, but no one can shatter the god you have become.”
Cage wanted to reply, yet he had no words. No sharp, jagged barbs. Smoke could weaponize anything, could make the air itself a sword and shield. Instead, he squeezed her hand, following her into the dark.
Right before shadows claimed them both, Smoke added: “And to any who try to hurt you again, I will eviscerate them with a smile on my face and blood on my tongue.”
Yes!!! The imagery here is amazing, and I was terrified that Smoke had left him somehow, but then that twist with Smoke on the giant. Fantastic!!! DESTROY THEM ALLLLLL!!!!
Hysteria gripped him like a viper nest. 😱😱😱 this is brilliant. YOU are brilliant.