The Skarn did not charge; it flowed. Its multitude of limbs, some crablike and armored, others sinuous and tentacular, propelled its barrel-shaped body across the cavern floor with terrifying, scuttling grace. Its maw yawned, emitting a subsonic drone that vibrated in Kaelen's teeth and made the shallow water ripple.
Instinct, a primal cocktail of his father's combat training and his mother's predatory legacy, screamed at Kaelen to move. He threw himself sideways as a barbed tentacle, moving faster than sight, lashed out where he'd stood. It struck wet stone with a crack, sending chips flying.
Pain from his severed wing-muscles shrieked in protest, but Kaelen forced it down, rolling to his feet. He had no weapon. No armor. Only the strange, simmering energy in his core—the Aethel. It felt like a caged star, volatile and untamed, responding to his adrenaline and fury.
The Skarn corrected its course, its single, lidless eye—a pool of oily blackness—fixing on him. It lunged again, this time with two pincer-tipped limbs snapping for his torso.
Kaelen didn't think. He reached. Not with his hands, but with the raw will that had kept him silent on the executioner's platform. He grabbed at the Aethel inside him and shoved it outward, towards the threat.
A pulse of tarnished-silver energy, shot through with veins of abyssal black, erupted from his chest in a concussive wave. It had no form, no finesse. It was pure, desperate rejection.
The wave hit the Skarn. It didn't blast the creature back. Instead, the creature's forward momentum simply… stalled. The air around its front third thickened, grew viscous, as if reality itself had become syrup. The snapping pincers slowed to a dreamlike crawl. The subsonic drone choked off into a gurgle of surprise.
Kaelen stared, panting. He had done that. The Aethel had listened.
But the effort was a drain like he'd never known. A cold hollowing-out behind his navel. He tasted copper and static. He couldn't hold it.
The viscous field collapsed. The Skarn, enraged by the strange resistance, redoubled its attack. A tentacle wrapped around Kaelen's ankle with bruising force and yanked. He hit the water hard, the breath knocked from his lungs. He was dragged, scrambling, towards the spiraling teeth.
No. Not like this. Not eaten in the dark.
His rage found a new focus. Not just on Solaris, not just on Lyra, but on this thing, this mindless gullet that dared to end him before he'd even begun. The Aethel responded to this sharper, hotter emotion. It didn't pulse outwards this time. It channeled.
Kaelen's hands, scrabbling for purchase on the slick stone, began to change. The scales on his forearms darkened, thickened. His fingernails elongated, curving into cruel, black talons that scraped sparks from the rock. A snarl ripped from his throat, lower and more resonant than a human's.
He twisted, ignoring the tearing sensation in his leg, and slammed his new claws into the tentacle holding him. They sheared through rubbery flesh with shocking ease. Ichor, black and smoking, spurted from the wound.
The Skarn recoiled with a shriek, its limb whipping back. Kaelen surged to his feet, standing chest-deep in the icy water. He felt the transformation in his hands—a partial, instinctive shift. It was painful, like bones cracking and re-knitting in an instant, but it was power. His power.
"Interesting," Valerius's voice floated from the darkness where he stood, observing like a patron at a gruesome theater. "The Aethel responds to your emotional state. Rage shapes it. Fear disperses it. You must learn to wield it, not be wielded by it."
Easy for you to say, Kaelen thought, but he had no breath to spare.
The wounded Skarn was cautious now, circling him, its eye blazing with malicious intelligence. It had under-estimated its prey. It would not do so again.
It changed tactics. It stopped trying to grab him. Instead, it began to hurl pieces of shattered stalagmite and globs of acidic phlegm from its maw. Kaelen ducked and weaved, the talons on his hands useful only for close combat. The Aethel flickered in him, but without focus, it was just a battery running dry. A chunk of rock grazed his temple, and he saw stars.
He was losing. The cold of the water was seeping into his bones. The hollow feeling from using the Aethel was growing. He was a novice, and this creature was a veteran of the Pits.
Think. You are not just a beast. You are a prince. A tactician.
His father's lessons in battlefield geometry surfaced through the panic. Exploit the environment. Use the enemy's strength against it.
The Skarn was heavy, low to the ground. The cavern floor was uneven, littered with debris and slick with algae. The water, while shallow, was a hindrance to movement.
As the Skarn scuttled forward for another rock-hurling volley, Kaelen didn't retreat. He charged towards it, a short, desperate sprint. The move surprised the creature. It reared back slightly, preparing to bring its mass down on him.
At the last second, Kaelen dropped, sliding on his back through the water underneath the Skarn's elevated front section. He saw the pulsing, softer underbelly—a patch of grey, membrane-like flesh between the armored plates.
His taloned hands shot up.
He did not simply claw. He poured every ounce of his remaining will, his biting hatred for his predicament, into the Aethel in his core and focused it down his arms, into his talons. They glowed with that same tarnished-silver light, humming with chaotic power.
He ripped upwards.
It was not a clean cut. It was a savage eruption. His empowered talons tore through the membrane, plunging deep into the Skarn's vitals. The Aethel-energy discharged inside the creature. There was a wet, crunching sound, followed by a muffled whump as something internal ruptured.
The Skarn's shriek was deafening. It convulsed, its limbs flailing wildly. Ichor and foul-smelling viscera poured down onto Kaelen, hot and reeking. He held on, grinding his talons deeper, until the creature's movements slowed, then ceased. Its massive body slumped, half in, half out of the water, pinning Kaelen beneath it.
Silence returned to the cavern, broken only by Kaelen's ragged gasps and the drip of water. The talons on his hands retracted with a sickening, fleshy sound, leaving his human hands bloodied and trembling. The Aethel in his core was a dormant, aching ember. He felt utterly spent, more drained than after his execution.
A slow clap echoed through the gloom.
Valerius stepped into the dim fungal light, picking his way daintily around the spreading pool of black ichor. "A brutish, inefficient victory. But a victory nonetheless. The first is always the sweetest, even when it tastes of filth."
Kaelen shoved against the dead weight of the Skarn, managing to wriggle out from under it. He stood, swaying, covered in gore and shivering. "What… was that? The claws?"
"A superficial manifestation," Valerius said, circling the corpse with an academic air. "Your draconic heritage, given form and force by the Aethel. You are a shapeshifter without a stable form, Aethelborn. Your body is now clay for your will and your power. But clay is fragile. Expend too much, shape yourself too violently without the strength to sustain it, and you will break permanently." He stopped and looked at Kaelen. "You are nearly broken now."
Kaelen knew it was true. A deep, soul-level exhaustion threatened to pull him back under the dark water.
"Why help me?" Kaelen coughed. "You watched. You could have let it kill me."
"A fair question." Valerius's blood-red eyes gleamed. "The Pits are a hierarchy of desperation. The strong dominate the weak, consume them for scraps of power. But sometimes, the weak possess a unique… key. Your blood, your Aethel-touched soul, is such a key. There are vaults here, warded by divine and draconic magic, that have been sealed for millennia. You may be able to open them."
"So I'm a tool," Kaelen stated, his voice flat.
"You are a potential ally," Valerius corrected smoothly. "All relationships here are transactional. I offer you knowledge, protection of a sort, and a path to regaining what you lost—and more. You offer me the potential to access relics of my own past power. A fair bargain."
Kaelen thought of the Sunlance. Of his shattered wings. Of the impossible gulf between him and the God-King. He had nothing. No army, no kingdom, no power. Only this dark place and its monstrous inhabitants.
"What do you need me to do?" The words tasted like ash, but they were the only ones he had.
"First, you need to not die before dawn," Valerius said. "The Skarn's blood will attract scavengers. The Gloomgulls and Carrion-Worms are already stirring." He gestured to the darker tunnels where skittering sounds were indeed growing louder. "My demesne is nearby. It is… secure."
It was not an invitation; it was a condition.
Kaelen nodded, too weary to argue. As he took a step, a sudden, sharp sensation lanced through the center of his chest—not physical pain, but a tug, a psychic ping of cold, clean energy. It was the same sensation he'd felt as he fell from the execution platform. The silver thread. For a fraction of a second, his mind was flooded with an incongruous image: Princess Lyra, not on her dais, but in a secluded garden, staring at her own hand with a look of profound confusion, a faint, silver shimmer fading from her fingertips.
The image vanished as quickly as it came, leaving him disoriented.
"What is it?" Valerius asked, his predatory eyes missing nothing.
"Nothing," Kaelen growled, burying the disquiet. A hallucination born of exhaustion and trauma. It had to be. "Lead the way."
Valerius's "demesne" was a series of interconnected caves higher up one cavern wall, accessible by narrow, natural stairs. It was devoid of comfort but showed signs of grim order. Stone shelves held strange, preserved fungi and jars of unidentifiable substances. The air was dry and carried the faint, iron-and-dust scent of old blood.
"Rest here," Valerius said, indicating a flat stone shelf with a pile of dry, lichen-like material for bedding. "I will keep watch. The first lesson of power in the Pits is learning to steal moments of peace."
Kaelen didn't need telling twice. He collapsed onto the shelf, his body a tapestry of agony. But as he lay there in the dark, sleep did not come immediately. His mind replayed the fight. The feel of the Aethel. The shocking ease of the transformation.
He held up a hand, willing the talons to return. Nothing happened. The Aethel ember in his core only flickered, dormant and unresponsive. It was not a muscle to be flexed, but a wild thing to be coaxed or commanded.
Valerius spoke from the entrance, his back to him, watching the cavern below. "The power you used is raw creation and un-creation. The gods used it to build realms. The Titans used it to forge mountains from chaos. You used it to make your fingernails pointy. A humble beginning."
"How do I learn to control it?" Kaelen's voice was a hoarse whisper.
"Through pacts," Valerius said. "The Aethel is the source, but it is formless. By forging pacts with the entities here—the Fallen Titans, the Old Demons, the Forgotten Gods—you borrow their understanding. Their concepts. A pact with a fire-demon might allow you to shape Aethel into flame. A pact with a goddess of secrets might let you weave it into illusions. You will not merely gain their power; you will gain the lexicon to speak your own."
"And the cost?"
Valerius finally looked over his shoulder, his smile thin and sharp. "Always the right question. The cost is a piece of your sovereignty. A vow. A service. Sometimes, a physical change to reflect the bond. Every pact leaves a mark, on the soul and the flesh. Make too many, or choose your partners poorly, and you will become a patchwork monster, torn apart by conflicting wills. You must be the architect of your own ascension, not a temple built by a thousand contradictory hands."
Kaelen absorbed this. It was a path, but a perilous one. A road of compromises leading to a throne of shadows.
"We start tomorrow," Valerius stated, turning back to the dark. "There is a spirit, an old one, trapped in the Whispering Galleries. A minor entity of stone and memory. Its pact is simple, and its concept—endurance, resilience—is a fitting cornerstone for what is to come. It will help solidify your form, make you harder to break." He paused. "Sleep, Draconian. Dream of your vengeance if you must. But when you wake, think only of the next step. The mountain is climbed one treacherous handhold at a time."
Kaelen closed his eyes. He did not dream of vengeance. He dreamed of a single, unbreakable thread of silver, stretching across the infinite dark from the depths of hell to a sun-drenched garden, humming with a tension that felt like fate.
In the darkness, Valerius listened to the young Aethelborn's breathing even out. He glanced at his own pale, elegant hand, flexing his fingers. A tiny, dark smirk played on his lips. The boy was strong, and his connection to the celestial princess was… deliciously unexpected. A tool, indeed. But perhaps a more versatile one than he had hoped.
The game in the Abyssal Pits was ancient and complex. And a new, rage-filled piece had just been placed on the board.