Chapter 205: The Teeth Will Sing
They didn’t stop running until the first light broke over the ridge.
The sun crept over the jagged horizon, but it didn’t warm them. Not here, not beneath the shadows of the Singing Teeth. The air remained thin, laced with iron and ash. It chafed every breath like they were breathing history itself and the ancient violence buried with it.
Isla collapsed to her knees just outside the fractured cave entrance, hands shaking, mouth dry. Magic still sparked at her fingertips, her veins burning as though molten gold ran under her skin.
Cassian was still humming.
Aryia crouched beside him, gripping his face. “Cassian. You need to stop now.”
But it seemed as if he no longer could hear them. His pupils had narrowed to pinpricks and though his lips moved with the song, no breath escaped him.
It was more than a melody now. It was a resonance from deep within. The rocks were humming with him.
The Singing Teeth were singing back.
Damian stepped forward, blood still dripping from his arm, his Umbrazin pulsing faintly in his grip. “It’s not just coming from him. Look.”
They followed his gaze.
The spires of the Singing Teeth, the towering, jagged peaks that formed the northernmost reaches of the mountain range, were glowing. Faint lines of red-gold etched themselves across their stone faces, like veins awakening under skin. The same symbols Isla had seen in the Cradle. The same symbols Raven had found in Marcus’s study.
Brienne stood with her hand on her blade. “We woke them.”
“No,” Isla murmured. “They were never asleep.”
The ground beneath them shifted. It wasn’t an earthquake. It was breathing.
That is when Cassian let out a scream,not of pain, but release. His mouth opened wide, and from it came a single, sustained note. It wasn’t his voice, it was more ancient than that. Something that made the crows scatter from the peaks and the winds fall dead.
Aryia tried to hold him, but a pulse of energy knocked her back.
Isla didn’t hesitate.
She stepped forward, pressed her hands to Cassian’s chest, and forced her power into him. Her intention wasn’t meant to bind, nor to silence, but to translate.
Cassian’s body went still, his eyes fluttering shut and Isla saw.
The vision came like lightning in her mind, fast and scorching:
A temple swallowed by sand, where voices whispered in a circle of stone. A chained figure kneeling at the center. Three others watching. One held fire. One held shadow. The third…
She gasped.
The third wore her face.
Then she was back, panting, and collapsing to the rock.
Cassian blinked awake, coughing profusely.
Aryia rushed to him, pressing her forehead to his. “You’re back. You’re back!”
Raven knelt beside Isla. “What did you see?”
“They’re trying to use the Cradles to rewrite the seals,” Isla rasped. “It’s not just about waking the old gods. It’s about binding us to them.”
Brienne’s jaw clenched. “You said there were two more sites.”
“Yes. Ironvale and Velhareth.”
“And we believe Marcus was one of the Sealholders,” Damian said. “But we can’t be sure…”
“Valkan,” Isla whispered. “He wasn’t just a vessel. He chose to be changed. He gave himself to the Elders willingly, as a gift, amongst them.”
Vincent’s voice broke through, cold and brittle. “Then we have a problem.”
They all turned.
He was holding the last scroll from Marcus’s study, one Raven hadn’t opened.
A blood-stained seal cracked under his thumb. The parchment unfurled in the wind.
Scrawled in an almost fevered hand, written in a mix of Sombrosi and the old tongue:
“The third seal breaks beneath the Teeth. The fourth will fall in fire. The last shall bleed willingly in Velhareth. Only one can silence the song, if she dares.”
Isla’s stomach twisted.
“She,” Raven said softly.
Isla looked down at her hands. Magic still sparked under her skin.
“I think they mean me. I just don’t understand what Elysia’s role is in all of this. She’s just a baby.”
A silence followed.
Even the wind seemed to pause.
Then Brienne said, “We’re wasting time. If Ironvale is fire…”
“We need to beat them there,” Damian finished. “And we need allies.”
Isla stood slowly, vision still spinning. “And what about Cassian?”
Aryia looked up, fiercely protective. “He goes where I go.”
“He’s a conduit now,” Raven warned. “We don’t know how stable that makes him.”
“Neither am I,” Isla said quietly. “But we can’t leave anyone behind.”
They all knew what she meant. Cassian wasn’t the only one who had changed, throughout the whole messed up circumstances… Isla could still feel the voice of the void in the back of her skull. It whispered not in words but in urges. In hungers and half-buried truths.
Sje knew what came next.
“Ironvale,” she said. “We go there. We stop the third Seal. We find the second god-touched.”
“And after?” Alaine asked.
“Then we bleed,” Isla said. “Before Velhareth makes the choice for us.”
Damian stepped beside her. His hand brushed hers, a tether, a promise.
“We’ll stop it,” he said.
She wanted to believe him. But deep inside, she already knew the truth.
The Teeth would sing again and when they did… it wouldn’t just be gods that woke.