There was only blood, bones and fire.

  The blood came from the dozens of Khador students that had fallen down the obelisk. There were empty faces, shattered limbs, apprentice robes bathed in scarlet. The bones came from Cain’s ancient corpses, the limbs and skulls littering the circular room like reeds in a marsh. The fire came from Soren’s body—she had fallen face first into the stone floor, and her black eye shined like a diamond next to her split open skull. Her back was still burning, the bones she had used as armor appearing like branches in a bonfire. Her hand remained tight around her cutlass.

  Isaac’s boots filled with blood as he reached the bottom of the obelisk. He tried not to notice how warm it was. Swinging the torch around the blackened room only revealed more of the carnage—more bones, more empty eyes, more parasite sigils. He wondered if he had seen any of these students before. Some of them must’ve lived outside the college dormitories. Some of them might’ve been visible as they walked back to their homes after a day of classes. His tower window had always been too high to make out their faces, but he was usually able to remember some features. General height, robe length, hair color. Some of these corpses held a vague sense of familiarity.

  Outside the obelisk, somewhere in the dark, a colossal tremor ripped through the earth. The blood quivered at his feet. Much of what came was the sound of collapsing rock. All of it was brimming back and forth in intensity, coming from different directions. Like thrashing.

  Zaria loosened her grip on him and trudged her way over to Soren’s body. She bent down, unwrapping the bunny’s fingers from the hilt of her sword. “Sorry, capt. You know the rules.”

  Isaac gazed over the blood and bones. “Father?”

  “Isaac.”

  A human skull laid against the broken arm of a Khador student, its eye hole caught on the exposed bone. Isaac stumbled over, nearly losing his balance as he crouched, and had to grasp the skull in his slinged arm, lest he lose the torch.

  “Is Berith . . . ?”

  The skull squirmed in his hand, managing to tilt forward and back.

  A roar surged through the masonry around them. Outside, there was an overwhelming sensation of falling rock, rumbling like the stampede of a million horses—through it all, he heard the roar, and it was the worse sound of them all. The skull had been above the surface. By now, they were very deep in the earth. If he could hear its cry, it must’ve been incredibly loud. A roar of that magnitude could flatten buildings. It could level villages. It could pulverize people like rotten fruit.

  On the walls, ancient reliefs depicted a colossal beast of bone, smashing cities and mountains and all that stood in its wake. The necromancer flag was draped over the dead and conquered. There was worship mixed with fear.

  “We got some plan worth sharing?” Zaria asked, wielding her captain’s bloody cutlass.

  “Isaac,” the skull said.

  Isaac gently lowered the skull back into the blood. When he stood back up, his slinged arm shook inside the cloth. He gasped, struggling to keep his balance.

  “Isaac,” the skull said. Around it, all the other bones began to swim through the blood. Limbs tumbled, pelvises rolled, and all the skulls twisted until their scarlet red faces pointed up towards the ceiling. They all began to hiss his name.

  “Isaac.”

  “Isaac.”

  “Isaac.”

  “Isaac.”

  “I’ll see you soon, father,” Isaac said, and made his way towards the exit.

  The door to the obelisk stood open. It was made of arms, and the doorway itself was as black as his uncle’s robes. Of course, Berith’s robes had been designed to blend the wearer into darkness. He had worn them many times in his long career of slaying evil necromancers. His colleagues did not refer to him as the Bone Hunter with little reason.

  Another roar seemed to rupture the earth. It felt like the planet was being split in twain.

  Zaria stopped him as he made his way through the door. “Squire, hate to break it to you, but I don’t think this,” she raised the cutlass, “is gonna do much against a giant.”

  “We don’t need to kill the giant,” he said. “Just the person controlling it.”

  “And how you proposin’ we do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A lack of good ideas is no cause for pursuing bad ones, love.”

  “Z,” Isaac said.

  She looked at him, the knife in her eye glinting with the torchlight. “Aye. Right. One of us had to say it aloud, I suppose.” She flicked her head towards the darkness. “Ready when you are.”

  In the darkness, he saw his face. The shaved head, the square jaw, the well-worn lines where a scowl often rested. Somewhere out in the cavern, through the rumble and roars, he almost heard the shouts again.

  Isaac thought of all the people that been sacrificed. The Khador students, the citizens of the necropolis. Himself.

  He stepped through the doorway, and Zaria followed behind.

  The air of the cavern was cool, dusty and stale, like it had never tasted a breeze. His torch barely managed to illuminate the ground in front of him. It was concrete, gray and craggy, and there were no markings to form a path. Sound was his only source of information, and the sound that reached him now spoke of unimaginable weight and purpose. Colossal bones ripped through the earth like one might emerge from a bath.

  In the distance, through the darkness, he caught a flicker of purple. It was the only thing he could see through the miles of black around him. There was a figure standing in the purple soul light, almost lost in the radiance. Isaac clenched his fists. He almost forgot his pain.

  The purple light shifted, growing in intensity, and a massive tremor shuddered from every direction at once. There came a shockwave of rushing air, full of dirt and sand. The darkness seemed to churn.

  When he looked again, he saw sunlight.

  The golden rays pierced through the cavern ceiling in soft, slanting lines. They hurt his eyes. He had not seen the sun in over two days, and his vision had grown used to the darkness. As the rumbling continued, the sunlight only grew brighter. The ceiling of the cavern was being torn apart like a piece of cloth, and all the golden rays were studded with the steady tumble of boulders, gushing showers of dirt, entire waterfalls of sand falling from high above their heads.

  The sunlight illuminated structures in the dark. At first, still squinting through the sudden light, Isaac thought he was staring out at a bed of white moss that ran over the bumps and hills of massive tree roots. It seemed to go on for miles.

  When he looked again, he realized it was bone. A sea of bone.

  It was ossein, specifically—the tangle of fibers that made up all skeletal tissue. Instead of being arranged in a solid matrix, the bone had grown for miles in all directions, in much the same way that spindles of mold would grow on a piece of bread. As far as he could see, there were thick fibers of ossein that wrapped and slithered like vines, collecting into knolls and mounds and hillocks. It was so thick and layered that it might’ve appeared like the head of a forest canopy. At the very least, it was almost the size of one.

  Isaac remembered the pipes. There had been retention tanks. Filtration screens. The extraction chamber had also harvested the meat of its victims—muscles, skin, and blood. Only the bones had been left behind.

  All of the pipes had fed down into the earth. Staring out over the festering ocean of bone, Isaac thought of fertilizers and systems of irrigation. Farming techniques.

  He felt sick to his stomach, and it wasn’t solely from the pain.

  Above their heads, great wounds of sunlight continued to be smashed through the cavern ceiling, illuminating more of the vast, empty space around them. Aside from the overgrown blanket of ossein, and the thin crest of purple soul light on the other side, the cavern was devoid of anything but miles of concrete. Its walls were carved from bedrock. They were taller than mountains.

  Suddenly, a colossal leg rushed from the darkness, the femur slicing through the rock above them like a giant meteor scouring the sky. An enormous foot steadied itself on the concrete, surrounded by a shower of spilling earth. Every bone of its digitigrade toes would’ve filled a castle moat. The shockwave blew off forests of ossein. The sheer magnitude of the footstep sent a quake heaving through the earth, splitting the cement open in a rushing line. Dust and dirt assaulted his face. The world spun around him.

  “Isaac,” Zaria said. “I’m starting to regret meetin’ you.”

  He took his eyes off the colossus. Instead, he focused on the soul light. The figure standing within.

  Out there, past the sea of ossein, there was a pyramid. An open-air temple, surrounded by pillars of granite and gold. It had all the appearance of a ceremonial stage. There was a bank of metal devices, crudely connected with pipes and copper and the merging clouds of souls. Even from this distance, he could see the power. Collecting. Surging.

  “I’ve got a plan,” Isaac said.

  “Wisest of them all, I’m sure.”

  He pointed over towards the pyramid. “I’m going to—”

  The rumbling intensified. The ground heaved and roared. Above them, past the giant shape of the obelisk, an avalanche of earth was falling from hundreds of feet in the air, boulders the size of palaces tumbling in sprays of dirt and stone. Isaac could see the remnants of the necropolis—split open skulls, broken pelvis wings, the streets that had been paved with fingers coming down like a deluge of snow.

  While it had rested, the corpse of the giant creature had cleaved a diagonal path through the earth. The obelisk had been built below the pelvis, and, by now, that same pelvis was rising like a cloud, letting in shafts of light through the holes of the sacrum. The necropolis, however, was still directly above their heads. Its ruin had become a storm of earth in the sky.

  “Run!” Zaria shouted.

  They ran. They ran through the growing canyons of rubble, they ducked through the exploding chunks of skulls, they stumbled over a ground of ancient concrete that split and heaved beneath them. Isaac ran until it didn’t even feel like it his feet were hitting the ground. He ran until all he could see in front of him was a tide of boulders and a sea of spindling ossein.

  Most of all, he ran after Zaria. She was faster than him, and her outline of fur and leather was the only beacon he could see through the blizzard of earth and stone.

  She went right for the sea of ossein. Without slowing down, she sprinted towards a large mound of bony vines, braced her shoulder, and smashed her way into the tangle. She disappeared beneath the canopy of fibers, leaving only a black hole behind. Isaac dashed as fast as he could, the ground seeming to flip beneath him, and dove headfirst through the open curtain of bone.

  He landed on metal. With the sling on, he wasn’t able to move his arm in time, and the knives carved new wounds into his flesh as he bashed them across the floor. The world became pain, blood, and gasps. He rolled on the floor, his tattered robes sliding along a thin, corrugated sheet of metal. It felt like ages before he was able to breathe again.

  “On your feet, squire!”

  He was yanked back to standing. For the most part, he managed to stay there. A thick flail of copper strands was dangling in front of him, dancing with the repeated shockwaves. He grabbed a fistful of the thin metal lines, leaning his weight and gazing around.

  They had entered what could only be described as a metal tunnel. It was both tight and small—Zaria almost had to crawl on her hands and knees—and it extended out a short ways before ending in a small, bulging room, like the entire structure had the shape of a mushroom. Most of the tunnel walls had clearly been disassembled. There was only a thin metal frame with a few patchwork sheets of metal still remaining on the ceiling and walls, and it was all veined with copper strands that were wrapped in some kind of thick spongy substance. Ossein had overtaken much of the structure, growing through the cracks and gaps.

  Despite the shade, Isaac could see a single word painted on the wall of the bulging room. It was written in the old necromancer language, but he had translated enough of their signs to guess what it said.

  AIRLOCK

  He had no idea what that was supposed to mean. What could possibly—

  Outside, there was a roar. If they had not been protected by the layers of metal and bone, it would’ve deafened them. The metal tunnel groaned. Sunlight began to leak through the canopy as layers of ossein snapped and shattered.

  Zaria grabbed his wrist and yanked him deeper into the tunnel, bashing her way through metal sheets and entire bushes of ossein. The tunnel began to pitch and yaw, threatening to tip over. She jumped into the bulging room, finally able to stand straight, and kicked the wheel on the circular door. It groaned against its frames, barely coming out through the dense layers of ossein outside. They might as well have tried to open the door through a garden hedge. The material was off-white, the fibers so thick that it could only be described as craggy and porous, like it had almost formed a solid bone.

  And, yet, as he watched, it started to move. The vines quivered and cracked. The matrix began to recede, pulling back into the larger canopy. After a moment, the thicket of bone had become a thin membrane of fibers. Zaria kicked the door again. The metal swung outwards, and the sounds of the ossein cracking reminded Isaac of the thralls breaking their limbs.

  “Squire,” Zaria said. “Explain.”

  “My father?”

  “You sure about that?”

  Around them, the bristles continued to squirm. A path was clearing itself ahead, seeming to beckon them forward. Isaac remembered the souls aiding him in the obelisk. He thought of how many bodies had fed this overgrowth.

  Perhaps it was—

  He was yanked again. Sunlight returned.

  Underneath a canopy of bone, there was a graveyard of metal. Much of it had been buried inside nests of the white, spindly fibers. He caught glimpses of other metal tunnels. There were hollow cylinders, thick entrail piles of copper. Occasionally, there was a hint of red stripes through the vines of ossein—the symbol of the necromancer’s gods.

  Isaac had read about dry docks. Places where old and damaged ships would go to be disassembled. There would be entire fleets lying in piles of wood, iron and canvas, waiting to be butchered. This all looked similar, if in a strange way.

  Why was there ossein growing all over the metal? Why was it growing like a fungus at all? Furthermore, why would anyone make ships out of metal? They couldn’t possibly float. The water displacement—

  The sunlight vanished. There was only shadow.

  “Isaac!”

  He looked up.

  The sky was gone. In its place, a skull was leering down at them. Its empty eyes loosed avalanches of dirt as they tilted forward. Waterfalls of sand spilled from its jaws. Its skinless face was bleached white, smoothed with wind and time. Barely two days ago, Soren had blasted that skull with cannonballs and entire barrels of black powder, and it did not appear to have done any damage whatsoever.

  There was a snout that could’ve swallowed rivers. There was a cracked nasal cavity that ran deeper than a mineshaft. At the sides, there were two holes in the skull. The colossus was a diapsid. A reptile. Some ancient beast from beyond recorded time.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  For a long moment, Isaac made eye contact with a creature that an empire of necromancers had worshipped like a god.

  Then, it shifted its head, and the sun returned. The beast was scanning the ground, every sweep of its jaws shaking the colonies of vines that grew from its sockets. Isaac realized that it hadn’t seen them. They were shaded underneath the canopy of ossein, and the two of them were less than ants in comparison to such a titanic creature. The odds of it actually spotting them underneath all the bones and metal were slim. For a moment, he felt relieved.

  Then a gust of wind slammed into the canopy. Ossein rained down upon them like a storm of arrows. The wind had been a delayed squall from the beast turning its head—the creature was so spectacularly massive that shifting its snout to the side had redirected the weather around it. A roar from its jaws would’ve been able to scatter the clouds. A careless sweep of its leg would upend a fleet of the metal ships around them. He could only imagine the destruction it would sow if it actually wanted to strike.

  Being hidden would not save them. Their only chance was to kill its master.

  Zaria was already running. The ossein continued to recede in front of her, pulling back like the white foam of a wave, and she used the cutlass to cleave a path whenever it did not retreat fast enough. Isaac followed behind at a stumbling pace, keeping pressure on the knife in his chest. Blood leaked in streams.

  They made their way through the cemetery of ancient ships. Zaria slammed her weight through the curtains of ossein wherever they were thinnest—when they grew too thick, like an actual bone, she guided him through the remnants of the boats. They varied wildly in size, and many were obviously the detached compartments of even larger vessels that had been butchered into pieces. He passed by dead instrumentation, narrow hallways that seemed impossible to navigate except by crawling, crew decks that were still dotted with welded bunks and privies. Most of the dry dock was lost beneath the colonies of festering bone. It spilled and wrapped and crawled.

  Eventually, the receding ossein lead them towards another vessel—the entrance was overflowing with bone, but the fibers on the wall were crawling back, and they managed to squeeze through the gaps. Inside, they found a command deck. There was a row of devices and instruments along one wall, and a few metal chairs in the center of the room. Isaac wasn’t sure how a captain could possibly command a ship from inside the deck, as this module appeared to have been, but he was in no mood to speculate.

  Outside, the titan was still searching. Its growls were the size of thunderclaps. Despite the constant cover of bone and metal, Isaac was always keenly aware of where the beast was looking, solely by the massive shadows it cast and the gusts of wind that were left in its path. At the moment, the quakes in the ground were telling him that the beast had moved its search far to the right. The colossus was shifting its weight. Bending down. Hunting.

  “You doin’ alright, love?”

  Isaac collapsed into one of the metal chairs. He was finding it more and more difficult to breathe, and it wasn’t solely from the knife jutting above his lung. He had casted dozens of spells in the last few hours alone. His body was beginning to fail.

  Zaria threw the cutlass to the floor. She pulled out the last of their shawls and wrapped a section of the fabric around the blade. Finally, she drew her flint and began to strike them together, creating rapid bursts of sparks.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Cauterizing.”

  The sparks caught. The flames grew tall on the sword. She came over, kneeled in front of him, and gripped the hilt of the knife in his chest. The slight touch made him gasp. “Gotta come out. You’re bleedin’ too much.”

  The ground shook beneath them. He had no time to argue.

  She began to pull. He would’ve screamed if he had not lost his breath. He might as well have been impaled on a javelin, for how long the blade seemed to be. When it was out, she retrieved their rations, wiped a thick crust of salt off the meat, and stuffed it in the wound. This time, he did scream. His scream grew even louder when she pressed the searing hot cutlass to his skin.

  He must’ve fallen unconscious. The next thing he knew, he was on the floor, and Zaria was groaning as she pulled the knife out of her eye. It came in two ragged jerks. She threw it into a cluster of ossein, pressed a hand to her face, and made a noise just barely above a sob.

  A shockwave ripped through the room. Metal sheets detached from their rusted frames, flying and tumbling across the floor. For a horrible moment, the room itself seemed to lift off the ground, as if it would pitch over and begin to roll, but the thick jungle of bone kept it secure.

  Still clutching her face, Zaria sunk to the floor and began to shakily tear the last of their shawls into bandages. She whimpered every time she had to move her hand. After a moment, despite every breath feeling like the knife was entering his chest again, Isaac crawled over to help. He wrapped the cloth around her eye, and she managed to loop the rest around his shoulder and armpit. Both times, the white fabric was immediately stained red.

  “Isaac,” she said. “Your uncle’s a cunt. Have I said that before?”

  He tried to speak, but his voice did not come. Instead, he pointed at her face.

  “Sure, love, I’m feelin’ grand. All set to join a tourney, as it happens.”

  He nodded, beginning to push himself off the floor.

  “We can’t keep this up much longer,” she said.

  He gripped the seat in front of him, trying to stand. He did not get far. “I have a plan.”

  “Aye. You said that. Not sure I want to hear it.”

  “If we can get close—”

  “Isaac!”

  The voice came from far away. It echoed across the cavern. Even now, after all he had done, it still made him flinch.

  “Come out!” Berith shouted. “I know you’re in there!”

  Around them, the earth quivered. Metal groaned. Bone shattered.

  “The resurrection is complete! The titan is mine!”

  He could hear the wind shrieking outside. It did not sound natural. He imagined a fist the size of a small city, screaming like a meteor.

  “There is no need for this! Only the Archons wanted you dead! And they will listen to me now!”

  A silence came through the air. It was the kind of silence that begged for a reply. Isaac took several breaths, gathering his strength.

  “Come out!” Berith shouted. “Join me!”

  Isaac gripped the armrest of a chair.

  “I offer mercy! Protection! This offer will not be made again!”

  His knuckles went bone white on the metal.

  “You can still come home, Isaac! Take revenge with me! Help me teach those old codgers exactly what their conspiracies have earned them!”

  Another silence came. Again, it waited for a reply. Zaria was looking at him with something close to apprehension. He shook his head. She nodded, squeezing his shoulder.

  “If you don’t show your face, then you will be crushed! I’ll sweep this boneyard apart like a field of chaff! There won’t be enough left of you and your pirate to fill a petri dish!”

  The earth rumbled. The wind shrieked. Around them, the shade thickened, like a blanket falling across the sun.

  “You have five minutes! Five minutes to emerge from wherever you’re hiding! I will not hesitate a second longer, boy!”

  His words echoed out through the cavern. Isaac could imagine the scene. His uncle standing before an ancient altar, surrounded by thralls and a cloud of bone. Waiting in the shadow of his titan with a sneer on his face. His patience was always thin when punishment was due.

  “Help me up,” Isaac said.

  Zaria pulled him to his feet. She leaned over, checking the knives still in his arm. Instead of removing them, she tightened the splints and bandages. “Likes to talk, does he? Seems like the sort that’d piss in some wine and expect praise for the vintage.”

  “You get used to the taste, I suppose.”

  She snorted. “Something about a plan, you were saying?”

  He thought about distances. How far away Berith’s voice had sounded. The ground they would have to cover through the dry dock.

  “I don’t think you’re gonna like it,” he said.

  “Was I supposed to be liking all this in the first place?”

  “We need to get close. If I can—”

  Ossein snapped. Someone entered the room.

  It was a blur, at first. In the shadow of the colossus, the room was dark, leaving only a vague impression of bone and steel. After a moment, Isaac saw blood. There was a glistening red curtain dripping down a torso, clinging to a motley collection of leather and fur. There was a jaw that had disconnected at one end, dangling like a broken horseshoe. And, finally, there was a satchel of black powder clutched tight to a chest. The fuse was small, and the bag was packed to the edge of bursting. It was enough to vaporize all three of them.

  Zaria dashed forward, nearly knocking him over. “You got some fucking allergy to death, captain?”

  Soren gurgled, spilling something wet across the floor.

  “Try it. Bet I’ll be flossing your guts ‘fore you spark the flint.”

  Soren took a lurching step forward. Her leg was limp and painting the concrete. Her grip on the bomb was tight.

  Zaria snarled and charged.

  “Stop!” Isaac shouted.

  The hyena stopped, if only because Soren took another step forward, and her face entered the light. Her skull was split wide-open. There was only a ruin where her snout had been, and pinkish brain was spilling over the empty socket of her eye. Beyond a doubt, she was dead.

  With a gurgle, she waved the bomb back and forth, stumbling on unsteady legs. She walked like she had forgotten how to do so.

  “I know that’s you, father,” Isaac said.

  Soren nodded frantically, her jawbone snapping like a broken door jamb. Zaria released a growling huff and let her pass. After a drunken limp into the room, the bunny pointed outside, in the direction that Berith’s voice had come from, and shook her head.

  Isaac leaned on a chair. “I’m not going out there.”

  Soren nodded, raising the bomb in her hand.

  “Well,” Isaac said, “not yet, anyway. We have to get closer first.”

  Zaria stepped to her captain’s side. “Come again?”

  “That’s my plan. I go out there and distract him. You run around the side and stab him in the back.”

  Both pirates stared at him. There was only the distant sound of falling rock.

  “Thoughts?”

  Soren stepped forward, shaking her head so hard that her jawbone snapped back and forth. She raised the bomb again, gurgling.

  “Shut up,” Zaria said, stepping forward. “Squire, do you see this?”

  She gestured at the standing, half-headless body of her captain.

  “It had caught my attention,” Isaac replied.

  “Good. Do you see this, as well?”

  She pointed at the wet bandages covering her eye.

  “Is that the fashion amongst noblewomen these days?”

  “Aye, sure, got it while sucking on tarts and honey. Do you see the rest of this?”

  She waved at the ancient command room. She waved at the spilling mounds of ossein. She waved in the general direction of the earthquakes and squalls, where the colossus was roaming.

  “Isaac,” Zaria said. “A week ago, I was nicking purses off a frigate crew, and my only concern was whether my top bunkmate was shedding lice again. Now, I’ve just ran through a black ruin of evil, places where bones are growing out the fucking walls, and there’s this giant cunt the size of a mountain sniffing around for me, and I’ve just lost a fucking eye, and it’s all real fucking frightening, is it not?”

  “A little, sure.”

  “And, now, after all the shite I’ve gone through on your behalf, after doing all this with the understanding that your arse-wiping wizards are gonna hunt me for it, you’re telling me that your plan is to offer yourself to the graveyard harlot you call an uncle?”

  “. . . yes.”

  “No,” Zaria said, towering over him. “You’re not doin’ it. Quit being daft.”

  “It’s the only way.”

  “I don’t care if it’d cure cock rot and famine—you’re not bloody doin’ it.”

  “Do you have a better solution?”

  “No! And I don’t need one to call yours stupid!”

  “We need to do something!”

  “Something smart! Not what you’re proposin’!”

  “I’m doing it, with or without your help!”

  “No! I forbid it, squire!”

  “I’m not your fucking squire!”

  Soren stepped between them, waving frantically. After a moment of gurgling, she dropped the bomb to the floor. She formed a heart with her fingers, waving it back and forth between the two of them.

  “Fuck off!” they shouted together.

  Soren made the heart again, nodding insistently.

  “Look,” Isaac said. “He’ll hesitate. I know he will. He could’ve just killed me himself, before I’d even entered the desert, but he didn’t—he tricked me into getting swallowed by dragons. He said that he didn’t want to see my body. That it would break his resolve.”

  A earthquake ripped through the command room. There had been a footstep outside. The rumbling was enough to crack the concrete.

  “He spared me in the extraction chamber. He refused to stand and fight when I was chasing him. Now, he’s offering me a chance to live when his titan could just sweep us away like dust.”

  One of Soren’s teeth clattered to the floor.

  “He doesn’t want to kill me,” Isaac said. “At least, he’s too much of a coward to do it himself. He’ll hesitate. I know he will.”

  Zaria did not seem convinced. “And what happens if he spots me skirting the sides? What’re you gonna do then?”

  Isaac pulled out the dagger she had given him earlier. Below the sheath, there was a glint of steel.

  Soren shook her head.

  “I’ve always been prepared to die for my mission. That hasn’t changed.”

  Zaria flexed her hand, hissing through the pain.

  “If you’ve got a better plan, now’s the time.”

  Soren crouched down with a heavy wobble, picked up the bomb, and gestured at it.

  “I’ll need your help, as well,” Isaac said. “We need to get as close as possible beforehand. That bomb will be the perfect distraction to hide our approach.”

  Soren hesitated. After a moment, she pointed at a mound of ossein that was spilling into the room. It receded like a pile of soap bubbles being drained in a bathtub.

  “That was you?” Isaac asked. “Controlling the bones?”

  Soren nodded. She pointed at the two of them, then towards Berith. After that, she pointed at herself, and a direction perpendicular to the one they would take. Where she pointed, the ossein fibers started to move.

  “You can use the ossein to distract the colossus,” Isaac said. “That’s good. The bomb will be an even better diversion.”

  Soren shook her head, spraying some of her brain.

  “Something else?”

  She nodded. Pointed at the satchel.

  “Are you trying to say something with that bomb?”

  Another nod.

  “Bomb,” he said, like reciting a thesaurus. “Powder. Explosive. Heat. Energy—”

  Soren nodded at the last word.

  “Energy.” He paused. “You don’t have much energy left.”

  Another nod. With a jerk, she pointed at the way they had come.

  “The obelisk. All those souls were your power source.”

  The bunny peered at him. Blood leaked down her dangling jaw, already coagulating.

  “I need your help, father,” Isaac said. “Can you do this?”

  Soren straightened her posture. She looked down at the bomb. She looked back where the obelisk had been. Then, she stumbled forward and pulled Isaac into a hug. Her leather armor was bloody, her skin burned, her flesh cooling. All the same, Isaac returned the hug with his good arm. They stood together for a moment, surrounded by tremors, bone and metal.

  Soren pulled back. Clumsily, she wrapped a hand around his cheek, used her one eye to look into his, and nodded. Then, she lurched over to the side of the command deck. The pirate slammed her body into a half-soldered bulwark, fell through a pile of ossein, and vanished.

  “Let’s go,” Isaac said.

  Zaria smashed an opening into the opposite doorway. They squeezed through the bone, heading back into sunlight.

  A tunnel of ossein had already been dug ahead of them, and the fibers were still squirming, crackling backwards at the front and amassing at the walls. Zaria lead the way, keeping him close. He kept stumbling. His legs were beginning to stiffen. He left a trail of red droplets on the fallen white splinters.

  The ceiling of the cavern seemed to have finished collapsing. The day was bright and hot. While the canopy above them never moved, he could imagine it twisting at several places along the bony sea. Titanic shadows often raced overhead, buffeted with screaming winds. He could imagine the colossus craning its head back and forth, confused at the sudden movement. Concrete trembled with every shift of its weight, and these shifts were coming frequently. Whether that meant the colossus was merely leaning over to investigate, or getting ready to strike, he could not say. He just kept moving.

  There was an endless tide of butchered ships—hull casings, tempered glass, concave dishes. Alloys of unknown metallurgy. He saw the flag of the necromancer’s gods emblazoned on many of them, shining on metal that curved more finely than steel.

  He barely noticed any of it. He didn’t care.

  “Isaac!”

  Berith’s voice echoed across the dry dock. It was closer now. He could hear the practice with which it shouted his name.

  “Your father’s tricks won’t help you! Show yourself!”

  He continued through the shade of bone and metal.

  “Don’t test me, boy! I’ve spent decades preparing for this!”

  He gritted his teeth, breathing around the cauterized skin.

  “Do you think you’re being brave?” Berith shouted. “Do you think your father is worth your life?”

  Zaria held up a hand, slowing him to a stop. There was a gap in the canopy overhead, and no other way forward. Walking through it would expose them to the titan above, but the ossein fibers were not moving anymore. He wondered if Cain had finally run out of energy.

  “Why didn’t you leave, Isaac?” He imagined his uncle pacing back and forth, ready to lecture. “I thought you might, before you entered the desert. I hoped you would. There was nothing stopping you from abandoning your mission. You could’ve walked into the hinterlands with all your supplies and disappeared. I would’ve been powerless to stop you. But you never did. Even after you survived the dragons, you refused. You kept marching through the desert. No water, no scrolls. No hope at all.”

  He remembered the terror. The gnashing maws of the wyrms. The sand and thirst.

  “Why?” Berith yelled. “To rescue a man you’ve never met? To fight a necromancer you had no chance of defeating? I know you, boy. I know what you wanted. I could see it on every bout of idleness. Every training session, every book, every chore. There was sullenness. Disobedience! You didn’t want this! You wanted your freedom!”

  The sights he had seen. Rivers, hills, towns. Boundless skies.

  “What is driving you? What could you possibly want from all of this?”

  Father. Uncle.

  A dead mother.

  Family.

  “I had assassins shadowing my every move! Do you understand that? I had no choice! There was nothing I could do!”

  His voice echoed down the cavern. Only silence remained in its wake.

  “Isaac,” Berith said. His tone had softened. “You can still come home. I promise you. I will make the Archons pay for what they’ve done. You will be safe.”

  He had memorized every creak of the stairs. He had learned to listen for every footstep. He feared the swing of every door. He never felt safe.

  “Come home, Isaac.”

  An explosion came to his right. The shockwave ripped through the ossein canopy, snapping off splinters of bone. Immediately, a colossal shadow passed overhead. Zaria pulled him forward, and, for just a moment, he looked back through the gaps in the canopy, and he saw a skull that was as white and bulbous as the clouds behind it, opening its jaws.

  They moved deeper into the dry dock. The closer they came to Berith, the thicker the ossein became. It had formed solid bone in several spots, and, in other places, it was cracking open the hulls of the butchered ships like roots and vines would grow through stone. Zaria didn’t dare cut through the ossein when they were so close—the snaps it made were loud, like dry tree branches. Instead, they were forced to crouch and crawl, weaving through the thin tangles and scattered hull sections.

  Another shadow rushed overhead, going from sky to ground. When it landed, the earth seemed to heave. There was a shockwave of air pressure, nearly slapping the metal ships into a tumble. Sunlight hit his back. Ossein rained down on them like a broken granary.

  “I’m through playing games!” Berith shouted. “If you do not show yourself right now, then I will flatten this entire cavern!”

  Zaria slapped some splinters from her mohawk. “Here’s as good as any.”

  They were in a burrow of bone. To their left, there was a long, thick cylinder that ended in an open pathway of concrete. To their right, the ossein narrowed down into a flat tunnel that could only be traversed by crawling.

  “So,” she said, “we feelin’ good about this?”

  Isaac didn’t answer. He was watching the hole at the end of the metal cylinder. There was nothing but concrete and open air. He would be exposed.

  “I’ll be quick, love.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Still the dashing rogue you’ve fallen madly in love with, aren’t I?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “Not denying it, then?”

  “Z,” Isaac said. “I. . . .” He swallowed. His throat was dry. “I’m trusting you.” He looked into her eye. “I’m really trusting you.”

  Her grin was smeared with blood and vitreous fluid. “Have I ever given you cause for concern before?”

  He kept looking at her.

  “Right,” Zaria said. “Don’t answer that. Just . . . you sure about this?”

  He could imagine his uncle. There were bones on his black robes. There was sunlight on his shaved head. There was a pale tinge of parasite magic in his eyes. There was a ring of thralls surrounding him, a cloud of bone in the air, and a bank of metal devices at his hands, controlling a titan that rivaled the size of gods.

  “I’m not sure of anything anymore,” Isaac said.

  His arm remained useless in the sling. His legs were weak. Every breath was short and wanting.

  “Go,” he said.

  Zaria nodded, gave him a light slap on the back, and began to crawl through the tunnel of ossein, holding Soren’s cutlass tight in her hand.

  He stooped to a low crouch and slowly walked through the metal cylinder. His boots scraped over the residue of rotten liquid. There was carbon scoring on the walls. The metal smelled faintly of chemicals. He could not say what it might’ve been.

  At the end, the sunlight grew painfully bright. He stood on the edge of it, trying to adjust his vision.

  “Isaac!”

  He straightened his back. He adjusted his robes. He wiped his hair from his eyes. Every morning, he would follow the same routine before presenting himself.

  There was a quiet in the metal here, broken only by the squalls of air overhead. He remembered camping in the shadow of a slot canyon on his first night in the desert. He had rested in the shade, listening to the wind and imagining all the perils he would face in the tomb. He had imagined facing an ancient necromancer. A being of pure evil.

  He had been alone, then. Same as he was now. He always known that he would embark on his journey alone. Now, it seemed that he might end it that way, as well.

  He stepped into the light.