Chapter 222 A Cry For Help
(Caelum Ashborne)
He vanished again, emerging near the old armoury galleries—a mistake the moment he arrived. The shadows here were thin, restless, disturbed by constant movement. Hell’s soldiers moved in steady streams now, armour half-fastened, weapons humming as they woke from disuse. Steel whispered. Chains clicked. The air vibrated with enchantments being coaxed awake like sleeping beasts.
One of them glanced his way. Caelum snapped back into shadow so fast it burned, the recoil sending pain through his temples—a reminder that even darkness had a price when it was forced.
His breath came sharp, clipped, barely controlled. Not here. Not near the pits. Apollo would feel it. Apollo would feel him reaching outward like a scream.
He moved again, deeper, higher, angling upward through the palace’s spine where corridors narrowed, and stone grew older, rougher, closer to the mountain’s heart. His pace quickened, shadows tearing and reforming around him in jagged bursts that cost more power than he could spare.
Stairs bit at his thighs. The air cooled, degree by degree. His lungs burned, not with heat but with thinness, as if the mountain rationed breath to anyone who dared climb toward its crown.
With every failed attempt, panic ratcheted tighter. Adelaide is alone with him. The thought struck like a blade each time it surfaced. He tried to bury it beneath calculation, beneath training, beneath the cold discipline that had kept him alive for decades.
It would not stay buried. Apollo had looked at her like a puzzle he meant to solve by breaking it open. Apollo had smiled. Caelum remembered the smile too well. Apollo’s smiles were never comfort. They were weather. They meant change was coming.
Caelum emerged near a collapsed stairwell and braced himself against the stone, head dropping for half a heartbeat as he forced air into lungs that felt too small.
Focus. Find height. Find distance. Find quiet that still belongs to the mountain, not the court.
The wards. That was the next problem. He could feel them now, heavier the higher he climbed — vast, ancient things wrapped around the mountain like iron ribs. Leaving the palace grounds would instantly light them up. Apollo would feel it like a pulled thread in his spine. The wards weren’t just magic. They were law. The kind of law carved into stone by a king who did not tolerate escape.
I cannot leave, Caelum thought, frustration biting deep. Not without being seen. Not without being felt.
His fingers curled, nails biting into his palm. Think. The mountain peak. The thought came unbidden, sharp and sudden. Not outside the wards, but at their highest point, where the palace thinned into stone and sky, where few demons bothered to go, where the wind scoured magic thin and scattered sound.
He moved before doubt could argue.
The ascent was brutal. Shadows thinned as altitude rose, clinging reluctantly, forcing him to rely on his own body—lungs burning, muscles tightening as he climbed stair after stair carved into the mountain’s spine. The air cooled, carrying the sharp tang of sulphur and cold stone instead of incense and heat.
His boots scraped frost-slick grit. His palms stung where stone had skinned them. The cold made his knuckles ache, a cleaner pain. His breath clouded faintly. Good. Cold meant fewer watchers.
By the time he reached the highest peak within the wards, his hands shook openly. He ignored it, forcing his body down into a narrow depression carved in the stone—a long, shallow channel worn smooth by something older than footsteps.
Once, this had been a river. Not of water. Of fire.
He knelt in the hollow where Hell’s veins once ran hot and bright, where molten flame flowed freely when the Queen reigned, and the mountain lived in a way it no longer dared. The stone beneath his knees was blackened and glass-slick, scarred by ancient heat, imprinted with memories the mountain refused to forget.
The channel carried a faint smell of old lightning, like storms burned into rock. In its slick surface, the torchlight didn’t reflect so much as drown, swallowed by a darkness that remembered brightness and hated it.
Now it lay cold. Empty. A firebed stripped of flame.
Caelum pressed himself into it anyway, lowering his profile, letting the dead channel swallow his outline. If anything still remembered how to hide secrets, it would be this place. A scar left behind when the world had been cut open and then sealed shut.
He extended his senses outward, listening with everything he had. Nothing. No footsteps. No magic flare. No living presence close enough to taste.
The wind wailed low and constant, tearing at his cloak, scattering sound into nothing. Above him, the sky churned — ash-clouds stretched thin, stars faint but present through the veil. Though the stars looked wrong here, like unholy eyes peering through soot, watching Hell pretend it could be roofed.
The mountain slept. Not dead. Just waiting.
Caelum exhaled slowly, pressing his palm to the stone where fire once obeyed a queen’s will.
This will have to do.
Caelum no longer had to force it. That was a whole other problem.
He crouched low in the dead channel, stone cold beneath his knees, wind howling above, and fought the urge to let his power rise. It pressed against him from within, impatient and volatile, a living thing that had tasted kin and more, and now refused to starve again.
It was not hunger for violence. It was hunger for answers. For belonging. For the sound of another flame calling his name through the dark.
Not long ago, summoning his Emberflame had been agony. A grinding effort. A discipline of pain and restraint and careful expenditure. Now it crowded his skin. It warmed his veins like blasphemy. Like a benediction spoken by the wrong mouth.
He felt Adelaide’s echo everywhere—not memory, not residue, but a presence burned into him. Along his forearms, behind his ribs, in the hollow at the base of his chest where magic gathered when it wanted to be seen.
The leash was gone. Not severed, but burned through. Without it, his power surged like a river breaking stone. He hated how good it felt. He hated how right.
Caelum clenched his jaw, breathing through his nose as the flame coiled tighter, hotter, brighter than he dared allow. It wanted to reach, to answer, to rise and roar across the mountain and declare the bloodline was no longer alone.
No, he thought. Quiet. Stay quiet.
Apollo’s wards pressed down from all sides, dense and suffocating, attuned to infernal fire — but not blind. Anything that flared too high, too wild, would flow through the stone like a scream.
Caelum did not summon. He contained. Slowly, carefully, he opened his hand.
The ember bloomed instantly—not weak, not hesitant, but tight and furious, a compressed coil of gold-deep flame that snapped and writhed above his palm as if angered by restraint. It burned hotter than anything he had called before, its colour rich and layered, streaked with pale light that caught his breath.
It lit the scar-channel like a small altar, turning black stone to glass. The wind tried to steal it. The flame clung anyway, stubborn as blood.
Her. The flame recognised itself through him.
Caelum dragged a hand through his hair, pulse racing. “Easy,” he murmured under his breath, more plea than command. “Not yet.”
The ember fought him, not to escape, but to connect. Then, slowly, it obeyed. The fire folded inward, surface smoothing, heat tightening until the flame became less weapon and more conduit. The air thickened, pressure building like a held breath. The dead channel beneath his knees vibrated, stone remembering what it once carried.
The image formed faster this time. Clearer. Too clear. Arkael’s presence slammed through the flame like a blade through cloth.
The suddenness made Caelum’s shoulders tense, as if he’d been struck. The ember flared, then steadied, holding the shape of a face with terrifying precision.
“You should not be calling me like this,” Arkael said immediately.
His face burned into the fire — ash-dark reddened hair pulled back, eyes bright and severe, lines carved deeper than the last time Caelum had seen him. The flame reflected off his features, catching the iron tension in his jaw, the restrained violence in his stillness.
Behind him, Caelum saw only suggestion, not place: darkness, movement, the faint impression of distance and war.
Caelum did not bother with protocol, with greetings or reconnections. There was no time.
“He’s seen her.” The words tore out of him, a confession ripped free of teeth.
Arkael’s eyes sharpened. “Seen what?”
“Enough,” Caelum said, panic threading his control no matter how he fought it.