Yethyr could feel me in his head. He tried to disentangle his thoughts from mine but found himself tugging on that unbreakable chain between us every time.
“I should have known,” he muttered irritably, but he paused his attempts to escape me.
He first had to escape Hell.
He glanced down at the body that attacked him, now split in two. It looked vaguely like blackened flesh that had been molded into some wall-skittering creature.
There were more coming. Many. They could be heard from the corridors behind, skittering and scratching.
Faintly, Yethyr could hear the deathsong that went along with it.
It filled him with dread and before, that would have been all I felt. Now that I was properly in his head, I was taken along on a whirlwind of thoughts.
When I listened to music, I translated their meanings instinctually. Songs of binding, songs of calling, songs of killing. I never contemplated why I knew what they meant and what they did. I just knew.
Yethyr approached music with much more precision, analyzing the exact pitch, the exact chord progression, and the exact meaning.
He considered the fast approaching deathsong’s composition—what was its form—where he had heard those chord progressions before—how they were related to the song Z’krel had used to puppet him—how they were different, less focused, meant to puppet many more, but simpler things. He considered ways to add a disruptive harmony or preempt the melody or change the rhythm. He calculated if he had enough voices in his pendant to do it through sheer volume or if he needed to start a subtle counter melody.
All that calculation took no more than two seconds and I felt like I had just run through the frenzy of the siege all over again.
Yethyr thought fast, faster than any mind I had ever shared. In a split moment, he had heard deathsong from whatever approached, recognized it, schemed to oppose it, and felt dread.
And then anger.
“You dare to invite Spryne’s creatures to come claim me!” he glared at the watching skull lanterns.
“Spryne and I are old friends,” Z’krel said from the walls. “I invite his entourage all the time.”
“And we are grateful,” a voice rattled from the next room.
A thing that I could generously call a woman stepped into the hall, though she had to stoop her head to get through the doorway.
Her upper half was that of a normal if severely undernourished woman, but her bottom half looked like a giant spider made of bone. I had never seen a spider, but Thured had been terrified of them.
I had a sudden memory of my father’s apprentices running around the forge, trying to catch a spider that had slipped into the forge and frightened Thur.
This…skeleton spider woman could not be caught in a mug.
She could barely fit in the hallway, towering over Yethyr, twice his height at least. Her leering smile somehow felt even bigger.
“Hello, Yeth.”
“Umbara,” he replied with loathing.
“We so rarely meet in the flesh,” her voice rattled, harsh and mocking. “My lord could not pass on the opportunity to welcome you to Hell.”
More of those fleshy spider creatures burst in from behind her, skittering across the walls and the ceiling.
“His entourage leaves much to be desired.”
Umbara’s strange spindly bone legs clicked against the stone floor. “You wound me, my dear, you really do.”
“Come closer and I’ll wound you more.”
I braced myself, eager for the slaughter of demon blood that would sign Yethyr’s will away.
But his thoughts took a different path. He unleashed a new deathsong, one of freezing, one of stagnation, one of stillness. It was utterly counter to the melody that he used to move himself, and he very carefully conducted the dead choir within the pendant so that the bones encasing him wouldn’t get caught up in it.
The flesh spiders slowed and for a moment, froze entirely.
Umbara herself stumbled, her legs moving as if through water. “You insolent wretch!”
She sang back, turning the music of stillness into one of motion, explosive motion.
“Leap,” she sang to the dead, “fly at him!”
Yethyr joined his strength to her song immediately, lowering the octave just enough to change the meaning.
“Fall.”
The flesh spiders all dropped from the ceiling as one.
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Umbara roared, but Yethyr was not interested in hearing her response.
He ran, which was not to my benefit at all.
“I could probably kill them all with the sword,” I said in his voice, but he ignored my false thought, following the red stream of light that could lead him from Hell.
I should have known. He felt what happened when he killed with me; he was going to avoid doing it again.
I soothed myself, knowing I just had to wait for another opportunity. He had notably not sheathed me. He ran through the corridors, letting me hold myself aloft.
I went to fix his hand position to realize it was already correct.
Oh.
That was interesting.
I had to correct the blacksmiths’ and Erjed’s forms when they held me because none of them had wielded a weapon before. With his weakness, I had assumed that Yethyr would have been the same.
But even as he ran down corridors in a panicked frenzy, the Prince’s fingers remained perfectly placed on my hilt with unthinking ease.
He had wielded a sword before then. When, I wondered?
Clearly, he hadn’t always been this weak.
It was curious. There was much I didn’t know about his past. For one, it was clear he had heard this Umbara demon sing before and often.
He knew how she improvised, predicting the flow of her orchestration and preemptively redirecting it to suit his needs, much to her wrath. Their spontaneous musical tug and pull echoed through Z’krel’s halls.
She was more powerful. Her voice, ringing and ancient, guided the deathsong humming from her willing spiders with a control Yethyr could not hope to match. Datrea’s unwilling dead trapped within the pendant was a chaotic rabble next to that eerie demonic unity.
Yethyr knew that. He didn’t even try to overpower her song. Instead, he embraced it, changing it subtly enough to slow her chase through the halls of Z’krel.
He needed every moment he could spare.
He had no idea how long it would take to find an escape from Hell. Every door that the red luminous string passed through raised his hopes, but inevitably, they only led to more corridors and more brainless dead serenely ignoring their commotion.
And he was running out of time.
Umbara had tricks of her own. Softly, amid her song, she directed a single spider at a slightly faster tempo than the rest, urging it out ahead.
The faster spider’s deathsong was swallowed up by the cacophony of the musical duel, unheard, undetected.
Almost.
I heard. I detected.
Sensing an opportunity, I didn’t warn Yethyr about it. I waited for the spider to grow nearer and nearer and nearer.
Yethyr entered a new room. He heard his pursuers further back, unaware that there was one entering behind him.
Just when it was primed to strike, I shared my awareness with Yethyr’s mind.
He whirled around. There was no time to do anything, but swing. He had to use me; he had to kill with me again.
I cut through the air with glee, and then he turned his wrist, forcing me to slice the creature’s legs and not kill it.
It shrieked; it writhed, and Yethyr held me back from finishing it off.
He stopped me from killing it, denying my attempt at deepening our bond.
“Settle,” he commanded me and I settled. I had been foiled. It was better to just accept it and pretend to be obedient. There would be time. If he escaped that is.
“Are you struggling with a new bone, Yeth?” Umbara called from the next room, which was far closer than before. “Trying and failing to command bones that don’t belong to you is one of your many talents.”
Yethyr ignored her. “Are we at least close?” he asked the little mote of light that was attached to the endless ghost red yarn.
“Very.”
Two corridors later they came to a locked door. The red light passed through it and Yethyr was ecstatic.
If Hell was barring the way, he thought, it probably meant this was exactly where he was supposed to be.
He swung me at the door and I zeroed in on the steelsong humming from the lock. When we touched, the force of my makers’ voices within me shattered it.
Yethyr shoved the door open and we were immediately blasted with heat.
He hesitated. The way back was swarming with flesh spiders.
The mote of light pulsed. “Just go through!”
“Leaving so soon?” Umbara’s voice rattled his ear.
Yethyr threw himself through and we landed on hard warm metal. His body ached from the force and that, more than anything else, told him he was out of Hell.
He did not even have to look to know he was back in his world. The world where his body was always working against him. His deathsong jerked him to his feet. It came across as a lonely song now. The ambient deathsong that had characterized the very air in Hell could no longer be heard.
Yethyr looked back. Whatever door he had taken to step out of Hell was gone.
We were deep in Daened’s forge. I recognized the massive bubbling lava pool where I had almost been destroyed and the piles of coal that had once been surrounded by coal shovelers like Erjed.
I could see the gash I had made in the corpse iron defending the Heart of the Forge.
The space was quieter than I remembered. The songs that I passively heard reverberating through the walls had fallen silent.
To Yethyr’s confusion, there was no corpse in sight.
“Your body is here?” he asked. The little red mote was gone from his hand, but the voice was still with him.
“You are close enough. Call me. Raise me. I am willing.”
Yethyr released his composition of calling and I was confused. All the steelsingers had died in the forge of my birth. They were too busy making me to be down here—
Oh.
Oh no.
Too late, I realized who Yethyr was calling, and his song was answered from the molten lake before I could even try to stop him.
With horror, I watched a skeleton, all flesh long since burned off, claw its way out of the lava. Twin motes of red flames gleamed angrily from those empty sockets.
At me.
I had just helped the resurrection of the one wielder that tried to drop me in lava…the one steelsinger who wanted me destroyed,
Yethyr had raised Wes.
Thank you so much for reading! I really appreciate all the support I have gotten during the transition to move this story to Royal Road. Do tell me what you think! I love comments and often respond to them
I will be posting a chapter every day until July 30, 2025. Make sure to follow the story and come back to read more!
Wes tried to unmake Bonesong once, but he helped make Bonesong before that. What do you think he will be now?
