A deep, monolithic groan came from the bedrock.

  The polished floor hissed. Fractures raced across the stone, spiderwebbing out from the center of the chamber. Dust puffed from the cracks, followed instantly by the acrid stench of sulfur and superheated rock.

  From the abyss, the Red God rolled onto its paws. The motion created a tectonic shift that snapped the cavern's spine.

  The walls groaned, shedding layers of ancient sediment that crashed down like artillery fire.

  The ground opened.

  A dorsal fin of living Red Metal, the size of a warship’s sail, surged between them. Rocks showered the ceiling and walls as it sheared through the cavern floor.

  The floor heaved as the titan tunneled through solid rock as if it were water. Massive stalactites sheared from the ceiling, exploding against the floor.

  The Armored Dog scrambled against the heaving stone. Its claws gouged deep white furrows to anchor the climb. Jaws clamped on Dawn’s wing, and it hauled the dazed rooster up the scree slope while stalactites shattered against the floor like mortar fire.

  It reached the threshold and stopped.

  A fissure zigzagged across the path, widening into a glowing chasm between the gods and the team.

  The dog turned its massive, armored head. Brown eyes locked onto Trenn through a curtain of falling dust.

  Debris rained down, bouncing off its white armor.

  The dog let out a single, resonant bark—a farewell swallowed by the sound of the collapsing mountain. It turned and dragged its charge into the dark.

  Zeen shoved the One-Eye’s broken shell into his belt pouch as the cavern floor snapped. The massive slab beneath him tipped forward, pitching forty degrees into the abyss. It became a sleek, black ramp that fed directly into the grinding wall of Red Metal.

  Zeen scrambled on all fours, boots sliding uselessly on the polished obsidian.

  To his left and ten feet up the slope, the Crusher clung to the lip of the exit tunnel. Ezy had driven the machine's hydraulic claw into the stable bedrock, anchoring the torso while the damaged leg dangled over the widening fracture.

  Zeen shoved the One-Eye’s broken shell into his belt pouch as the floor pitched sixty degrees. He scrambled on all fours, boots scrabbling uselessly against polished stone.

  To his left, a severed hydraulic hose trailed from the Crusher’s leg. The heavy rubber line was dragging against the stone.

  “Zeen! Quick!” screamed Ezy.

  Zeen saw the fracture line racing toward him from the right. The slab he was on was about to detach.

  Zeen steered his slide, digging a heel into a fracture to angle his descent toward the trailing hose. He intercepted the line. He hooked an elbow over the greasy rubber and scissored his legs around the tube, locking his ankles in a friction hitch. The hose snapped taut, arresting his fall as the rock beneath him vanished.

  "Pull up!" he commanded, already hauling himself hand-over-hand toward the chassis.

  The Crusher clawed its way into the tunnel, pulling him out of the hole.

  Mara’s seven-foot frame stood on the far side of the tear. The floor under her boots was disintegrating.

  Trenn lay sprawled on the floor. The White Metal shield pinned his left arm to the ground while his right fingers twitched, barely retaining a grip on the God-Bone club. Skate was a trembling puddle of purple goo wedged between his neck and the leather pauldron, creeping onto his head.

  The crater in his side was a slurry of charred meat and black rot. Thick golden ichor welled from the center, hissing as it touched the gangrenous edges. It bubbled, hardening into resin to wall off the infection.

  On his back, the deep furrows wept gold that sizzled against the dead, grey flesh of the claw marks.

  Mara crouched. She wrenched the God-Bone club from his slack fingers and jammed it into her belt loop. She hauled his arm over her shoulder to lock it behind her neck.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  "Get up!" she hissed.

  She yanked him up, holding his bulk against her side and pinning him with an arm around his waist.

  Trenn groaned in pain. His burnt flesh tore as he was pulled to his feet. His eyes were wide, bleeding gold, fixed on a world that wasn't there. Behind them, his massive golden tail dragged in the debris.

  He mumbled, a delirious plea lost in the roar.

  The Earth shook. Mara drove her boots into the fracturing stone. Rocks fell from overhead. She clamped him tight and marched.

  The floor buckled. Mara gambled on a step forward.

  The ground pitched beneath her feet. Her ankle rolled under the sudden torque. She fell onto one knee, Trenn’s dead weight dragging her sideways toward the floor.

  "Come on!" she roared, heaving against his bulk.

  The cavern rocked. The mountain screamed as it split in two, unleashing a violent tremor that threw everyone to the floor.

  A serrated ridge of Red Metal, massive as a fortress wall, sheared through the ground behind them. The heat was a physical blow; the sound was the shriek of bedrock being pulverized by a living saw.

  Mara scrambled to Trenn. She grabbed his belt just as the floor shattered, tilting into a steep, grinding slope.

  Gravity took them. They weren't falling; they were sliding down a disintegrating chute of rock.

  She dug her fingers into the dirt. She reached for her necrotic talons to anchor them, but the magic sputtered and died. Almitad was too far.

  Her nails broke, scraping uselessly against the sliding stone.

  Trenn went limp. The reptile brain took over.

  The massive golden tail lashed out. It grinded into a granite outcrop with a violent spray of white sparks and a shriek of scales that vibrated through Trenn’s spine. The drag slowed their fall and leveraged their trajectory, pivoting them away from the jagged wall and flinging them into a vertical secondary fissure.

  Mara’s shoulder slammed into a granite outcropping, her breath hitching in a strangled sob as her recently knit ribs groaned under the torque.

  They plummeted through the darkness, the air thick with the abrasive tang of pulverized stone. Mara’s shoulder struck a granite outcropping, a dull thud that vibrated through her mended ribs and sent her spinning.

  The chute constricted. Trenn tumbled through a slurry of gravel and dirt. Skate sheathed his skull, muffling the force into dull thuds whenever his head hammered against stone outcroppings. The White Metal shield caught on jagged spurs, wrenching his torso in violent arcs as they tumbled down the steep slope of broken rocks.

  Almitad floated beside the Red Metal monolith as it bled heat into the cavern.

  Something stirred below. The serrated wall lurched before ripping deeper into the stone wall, digging a ten-foot-wide corridor through the mountain.

  The mountain’s very soul seemed to recoil from the titan’s passage. As the Red God ripped a new throat through the bedrock, it created a violent back-draft—a pressurized wall of superheated grit and grinding mana that roared up the slope like the breath of a furnace.

  This hammer of wind seized Almitad's weightless form. Her teal robes snapped and billowed like sails in a hurricane, and she was catapulted upward, a scrap of bone and silk tossed into a jagged fracture in the ceiling.

  Her senses flared in a blind panic as the Mana Bloom within her chest pulsed a frantic, erratic warning, its light flickering against the rushing stone walls of the natural chimney.

  She tried to slow herself, but momentum drove her into the narrowing stone funnel. Her left arm struck a granite shelf, snapping the limb at the elbow. Her forearm vanished into the falling debris as her body was spat out of the fissure, into the sky above.

  Grey dust coated her robes. In the distance, she heard the Red God’s dorsal fin leave the mountain and plow through the misty forest.

  Almitad tilted her skull toward her chest. The makeshift cage of ribs held, but the impacts had taken a toll. Inside, the undead Mana Bloom flickered.

  Its necrotic light dimmed as a single, black-veined petal detached.

  The petal drifted through the gaps in her ribs. It slowly disintegrated as it drifted in the breeze. Almitad tracked the soot as it vanished.

  "Two," she whispered to the dark. "Only two left."

  As the machine breached the threshold, the suffocating atmospheric pressure of the Red God vanished, replaced by the damp, biting chill of the Morning Mist. The sudden change made Zeen’s lungs seize.

  The Crusher’s hydraulic talon dug into the turf outside the tunnel, dragging its damaged leg with a screech of metal.

  He looked at the mountain.

  The cave mouth was gone. An avalanche of stone had sheared the tunnel shut, leaving only a jagged scar of fresh rubble.

  The rooster’s crow had finally stopped. For the first time in weeks, the air was silent. There was no vibration in the earth, no heat in the wind. Just the smell of wet dirt and the slow, rhythmic hiss of steam escaping the Crusher’s ruptured cooling lines.

  The cave mouth was gone. The Red God had sheared the tunnel shut, leaving only a jagged scar of fresh rubble.

  Zeen stared at the sealed cliff face.

  "They're buried alive," Ezy whispered. "And we're the only ones left."

  Zeen reached into the shredded remains of his pocket and pulled out the cracked black sphere. It was cold. Dead.

  The violent memory that had haunted him since the Wayrest was gone, replaced by a dull, hollow emptiness.

  He had his revenge. The One-Eye was a smear of ash on a cave floor a mile beneath the rock. Its broken body was between his fingers.

  "It’s over, Gil," Zeen whispered, his voice cracking. He gripped the ivory stock of his musket, but there was no spectral warmth to answer him. No triumphant surge. Just the weight of the metal and the silence of the fog.

  He looked at the wall of rubble. Somewhere behind those millions of tons of stone, Trenn and Mara were buried. Almitad was gone. The alliance was a memory.

  "We won," Zeen said, and the words tasted like poison. He looked at Ezy, whose eye was fixed on the mountain. She exhaled slowly. Stunned. Staring at the rubble.

  "No. This is not how the bards will end this song."

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