Chapter 99: THE SOLARFLARE HOUND
The warmth came up Aiden’s arm, into his chest, and kept coming.
The years poured through the bond.
He had spent months learning to open the bond and empty himself down it. He had gotten good at it. You get good at any wound you keep reopening.
He knew what it felt like when the bond gave years back. He had felt it before with Miasma. But never like this.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[ TIER EVOLUTION COMPLETE ]
Beast: Cinder
Affinity: Solar-Type
Tier: 1 → 2
Form: Ember Wolf → Solarflare Hound (Tier 2 Apex)
Lineage: D (restored)
Lifespan Return: +45 Years
[ CURRENT LIFESPAN: 46.3 Years ]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
He read it on his knees, hand still on Cinder, the steam still roaring.
The heat should have cooked his hand. It did not. The bond kept Cinder’s fire from harming him while the evolution ran through her.
Forty-six.
I haven’t had a number like that since I was a boy who thought he’d get a whole life.
1.3 years. He had started with 1.3. He had expected to spend every last day of it.
The sums were wrong.
The lifespan came back before the evolution ended. Nobody told me that was possible.
A laugh broke out of him. Then another. He bowed his head, shaking.
Forty-six years.
Cinder stood over the dying cold.
She was enormous, bigger than the white-gold Hound at the tree.
No. The same size. The same shape. Only younger.
Her coat had gone white-gold all through, giving off the same light that had come off the Hound under the lightning tree.
Along her shoulder blades, two ridges of fire rose from her spine.
The air around her was warm. Not sink-warm. Summer-warm, a bubble of August in a frozen hole under a city in spring.
There she is. That’s what Harken had and threw away.
The Ice Heart went on humming on its cradle. Cinder’s heat melted the frost before it reached her. Ice ran down the walls and gathered in streams around the cradle.
Cinder turned her head and looked at the cold room.
Aiden waited for her to burn it.
Everything in him expected it. The burned den. The cold room. The year she had spent afraid of what came next.
His hand tightened against her flank. He wanted to burn it himself.
Go on. Melt it. You’ve earned that.
She did not.
She looked at the Ice Heart like a grown woman looking at the room where she was hurt as a child and finding it smaller than she remembered.
Then she turned her white-gold back on the room and walked out of its cold, toward the man on his knees.
She isn’t afraid of it anymore. She doesn’t need to kill it.
Aiden found he had been crying, a little. He blamed the steam.
"Show-off," he managed.
Cinder set her head against his chest with a gentleness that had no business in something that size. The same move she had made as a dying wolf in the undercroft. Her body had changed. The way she came to him had not.
It should have knocked him flat. It did not.
He almost laughed again. Stronger, bigger, changed in every way that mattered. And she was still Cinder.
She licked his cheek. Once. Gently, her heat going into him.
Then the trait landed.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[ TRAIT INHERITED — SOLAR PLEXUS ]
Core temperature spike (5s).
Cold immunity.
Burning to the touch.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Heat rushed through his chest. His whole body temperature spiked.
For five seconds, Aiden burned from the inside.
The cold reaching him stopped at his skin. His breath no longer clouded in front of him. The chill left his bones. His limbs felt lighter.
He looked at his hand. It was steaming faintly in the cold air.
Cold can’t have me. No more heavy coats and trembling hands in bad winters.
"Okay," he said, unsteady. "Okay. We’re going to talk about that later. No more winter gear. That’s going to save me a fortune."
Across the sink, the young handler was still down.
He was conscious. He stared at the white-gold wolf. Then at the steaming man. Then at the dark shape that had eaten his lamp. He closed his eyes and acted dead.
He understood that everything in this room was above his pay. Now he was trying to be forgettable.
The old handler had crawled to the stairs while Aiden was watching Cinder evolve. He was halfway up already, his ruined throat the only thing stopping him from shouting. He was going for the hook-men, the slate-man, anyone above who might believe him.
Nyx came out of the dark before Aiden could say go.
Then it stopped at the foot of the stair.
The stair rose into lamplight. Nyx would have to leave the dark to follow him.
It would go anyway. It would go if Aiden sent it.
And how does it come back? With Vane men chasing it? No.
"Leave him," Aiden said. "He’s got no voice and a long crawl. We’ll be gone before he finds anyone who believes him."
Nyx eased.
Then it stepped into the dark and reappeared in front of Cinder.
It looked up at her. Cinder looked back.
The heat pouring off Cinder’s coat made Nyx pull its face away.
Then it nodded once and went back into Aiden’s shadow.
Good. You’re back. Now stop blinding me.
Aiden stood, steadier than he had any right to be. Forty-six years. His knees should have been weak from the evolution, but his body felt stronger than it had in years.
"Besides. Let him tell Harken. Let him climb up there and explain that the dead Ember Wolf came back gold." He wiped his face. "That she turned her back on the Ice Heart like it was furniture."
Miasma came down off the ledge.
She crossed the wet floor to Cinder’s forefeet and looked up at her a long moment.
The corner of her mouth twitched. It was as close as she came to a smile.
She turned and went to the mouth of the slanted tunnel and sat there, waiting for the slow ones to catch up.
"Right," he said. "Right. We’re going."
The cat came down off his shoulder. It looked up at the new height of Cinder’s shoulder. Then it looked at Aiden.
"You’ll adjust," he told it. "She’s the same, just bigger and brighter."
Cinder folded herself down. The cat climbed back to her shoulder.
It settled without hesitation. It had ridden Cinder when she was dying, then recovering. Now it rode a Solarflare Hound. Its position had not changed once.
Aiden took them up the tunnel, where nobody watched.
Behind them, the Ice Heart sat in a chamber full of running water. A week of careful work undone in a quarter of an hour.
The tunnel narrowed near the top. Cinder had to drop her shoulders to fit it.
Aiden put a hand on her flank to guide her through and left it there after she cleared.
Forty-six years.
I came down here to spend the last of me on you, and you didn’t take any. You gave me more. I still don’t understand how.
She pushed her head under his arm without breaking stride.
He walked the rest of the way up with one hand on her burning shoulder, toward the smith’s heat.