The Ossuary's Price
title: "Chapter 11" wordCount: 2740
I grabbed Asheron's arm and yanked him backward as the fissure widened, swallowing the spot where he'd been lying half a second before. The bedrock groaned like something dying, and dust geysered up from the crack in choking clouds.
"Move." I didn't wait to see if he followed. The covenant bond pulled taut between us as I scrambled toward the temple's outer wall, away from whatever was opening its eyes in the darkness below. My hands left bloody prints on the stone floor.
The eyes—if they were eyes—burned with a light that had nothing to do with fire. Cold and silver and utterly wrong, like staring into the heart of a dying star. They tracked our movement with an intelligence that made my skin crawl.
"The data suggests we're fucked," I said.
"An accurate assessment." Asheron was on his feet now, moving with that preternatural grace that should have been impossible for someone who'd just survived a temple collapse. Blood matted his hair where falling debris had caught him. Through the bond, I felt his pain as a distant echo, muted but present. "That is Tiamat."
"Tiamat is a myth."
"So was I, three weeks ago."
Fair point. I pressed my back against the wall, trying to get as much distance as possible between us and the thing in the fissure. The hieroglyphs on my arms burned cold, responding to whatever power was emanating from below. "Tiamat was supposed to be dead. Marduk killed her in the Enuma Elish, used her body to create the world—"
"Marduk bound her." Asheron's voice was flat. "There is a difference."
The fissure widened another foot. I could see more of the thing now—scales that reflected light like oil on water, a shape too vast to comprehend all at once. My brain kept trying to make sense of it and failing, sliding off the edges of perception like water off glass.
"How long has she been down there?"
"Since the beginning." He moved closer, and I felt the bond tighten, a physical sensation like a rope pulling taut. "The temple was not built to honor Inanna. It was built to reinforce Tiamat's prison."
"And we just destroyed the altar that was part of the binding." My laugh came out jagged. "Let's table that for now and focus on not dying."
The floor buckled. I went down hard on one knee, and Asheron caught my arm before I could pitch forward into the widening crack. His grip was iron-strong, and through the bond I felt his fear—not for himself, but for me. it dawned on her like a physical blow.
"The outer wall," he said. "If we can reach the courtyard—"
"She'll just follow us." But I was already moving, because staying here meant dying, and I'd spent too many years digging through the past to die in it now. We ran for the archway that led to the temple's outer sections, and behind us something vast shifted in the darkness.
The sound it made wasn't a roar. It was older than that, deeper—the sound of tectonic plates grinding together, of mountains being born and dying. The hieroglyphs on my skin flared hot enough to hurt, and I stumbled.
Asheron's hand found mine. "Stay with me."
"Not planning to leave." The words came out breathless. We burst through the archway into what had once been a processional corridor, now half-collapsed and choked with rubble. Moonlight filtered through gaps in the ceiling, painting everything in shades of silver and shadow.
Behind us, the fissure's light grew brighter.
The courtyard was a disaster. Half the outer wall had collapsed, and the fountain at the center—the one I'd photographed just yesterday, intact and beautiful—was now a crater filled with broken stone. My equipment was scattered everywhere, crushed under fallen pillars.
"My notes." The words escaped before I could stop them. Three months of research, documentation, photographs. All of it buried under tons of rubble.
"Mira." Asheron's voice held a warning.
"I know." I did know. Notes could be rewritten. We couldn't. But the loss still felt like a physical wound, sharp and immediate. I'd spent so long building my career on careful documentation, on preserving the past, and now—
The ground beneath the courtyard cracked.
We ran for the outer wall, or what was left of it. My lungs burned. The covenant bond was doing something strange, feeding me energy I shouldn't have had, keeping my legs moving when they should have given out. I could feel Asheron's determination bleeding through the connection, his absolute refusal to let me fall.
We cleared the wall just as the courtyard collapsed inward.
The desert stretched before us, empty and vast under the moon. Behind us, the temple was sinking into the earth like a ship going down, pulled under by whatever was rising from below. I bent double, hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath.
"How far—" I started.
The sand erupted.
Tiamat rose from the earth like a nightmare given form. She was serpentine and massive, her scales catching moonlight and throwing it back in fractured patterns that hurt to look at. Her head—heads, I realized with dawning horror, she had multiple heads—swayed above us, each one the size of a building.
"This is not possible," I said. "The binding should have held. Marduk's magic—"
"Was weakened when you and I formed the covenant." Asheron's voice was very quiet. "We drew on the same power source. The same ley lines that fed Tiamat's prison."
The words took a moment to penetrate. When they did, I turned to stare at him. "You're saying we did this."
"I am saying the covenant required power. We took it from the only source available."
"You knew." My voice came out flat. "When we formed the bond, you knew this could happen."
He met my eyes. "I knew it was a possibility."
"A possibility." I wanted to hit him. Wanted to scream. Wanted to do anything except stand here while a primordial chaos goddess loomed over us, freed because we'd been stupid enough to play with forces we didn't understand. "You should have told me."
"Would you have chosen differently?"
The question hung between us. I thought about the moment in the chamber, Asheron bleeding out on the altar, the choice between letting him die or binding myself to him forever. The answer should have been simple.
It wasn't.
"That's not the point," I said.
"It is precisely the point." He stepped closer, and one of Tiamat's heads swung toward us, tracking the movement. "You made your choice with the information you had. I made mine. We are both responsible for what comes next."
"How very noble." The voice came from behind us, cultured and amused. "Though I must say, darling, your timing is absolutely exquisite."
I spun. Severin stood on a sand dune twenty feet away, looking like he'd just stepped out of a gallery opening rather than a apocalyptic disaster. His suit was immaculate, his smile sharp.
"You." Asheron's voice dropped into a register I'd never heard before, cold enough to freeze blood. "You orchestrated this."
"Orchestrated is such a strong word." Severin descended the dune with careful steps, his shoes somehow staying clean despite the sand. "I merely... facilitated. You two did all the heavy lifting, quite literally. The covenant, the altar, the binding—all I had to do was wait for you to tear down what took Marduk centuries to build."
My hands curled into fists. "Why?"
"Because, sweet thing, Tiamat is the mother of monsters. The source of all chaos magic. And chaos magic is the only thing that can break the Conclave's hold on our kind." He gestured at Asheron. "Your lover there has been playing by their rules for three thousand years. I thought it was time for a regime change."
"She will destroy everything," Asheron said.
"Eventually, yes. But first, she'll destroy them. And in the aftermath..." Severin's smile widened. "Well. There will be opportunities for those clever enough to seize them."
Tiamat's heads rose higher, blotting out the stars. Her mouths opened, and the sound that emerged was language—ancient and terrible and somehow familiar. The hieroglyphs on my arms burned in response.
"She is speaking Sumerian," Asheron said. "The old tongue. Before the Conclave standardized our language."
"What is she saying?"
He was quiet for a long moment. "She is asking who freed her. She wishes to... reward them."
The way he said 'reward' made it clear the word was a euphemism for something much worse. I looked at Severin, who had gone very still.
"Ah," Severin said. "How delicious."
Tiamat's nearest head swung toward him. Her eyes—all of them, across all her heads—fixed on him with an intensity that made the air itself seem to warp. She spoke again, and this time I didn't need a translation. The intent was clear in every syllable.
Severin ran.
He was fast, inhumanly fast, but Tiamat was faster. One of her heads struck like a snake, jaws closing around empty air where he'd been standing. He reappeared fifty feet away, and I realized he was teleporting, blinking in and out of existence in desperate bursts.
"We need to leave," I said. "Now, while she's distracted."
"She will come for us next." Asheron's hand found mine again. "The covenant marks us as power sources. She will want to consume what we carry."
"Then what do you suggest?"
"We run. We hide. We find a way to bind her again before she destroys everything in her path." He pulled me close, and through the bond I felt his fear, his determination, his absolute certainty that we would survive this. "Together or not at all."
"That's becoming a theme with us."
"I have noticed."
Severin screamed. The sound cut off abruptly, and I didn't look back to see why. Tiamat's attention would turn to us soon enough.
We ran into the desert, leaving the ruined temple and the chaos goddess behind. The sand swallowed our footprints, and overhead the stars wheeled in their ancient patterns, indifferent to the catastrophe unfolding below.
We made it three miles before I collapsed.
My legs simply gave out, all the adrenaline and covenant-borrowed energy finally depleting. I hit the sand hard, tasting blood where I'd bitten my tongue. Asheron caught me before I could fall completely, lowering me down with careful hands.
"I need—" I started, but couldn't finish. My lungs felt like they were full of ground glass.
"Rest." He settled beside me, his back against a rock outcropping that provided minimal shelter. "We are far enough for now. She is still occupied with Severin."
"Is he dead?"
"I do not know. I do not particularly care."
Fair. I leaned against him, too exhausted to maintain any pretense of distance. Through the bond, I could feel his exhaustion mirroring mine, his pain from a dozen injuries he hadn't mentioned. The hieroglyphs on my arms had faded to a dull glow, barely visible in the darkness.
"You should have told me," I said quietly. "About the risk. About what the covenant might do to Tiamat's binding."
"Yes." No deflection, no excuse. Just agreement. "I should have. I chose not to because I was dying, and I wanted to live, and I did not wish to give you a reason to refuse."
"That's honest, at least."
"I have lived three thousand years by being many things. Honest is not always one of them." He shifted, and I felt him wince through the bond. "But with you... I find I do not wish to lie."
The admission hung between us, more intimate than any touch. I turned to look at him, really look at him, and saw the exhaustion written in every line of his face. The blood drying in his hair. The way he held himself like something might break if he moved wrong.
"You're hurt," I said.
"So are you."
"I'm human. I'm supposed to be fragile." I reached up, fingers hovering near the wound on his temple. "You're supposed to be immortal and indestructible and—"
"I am none of those things." He caught my hand, pressed it against his chest where I could feel his heart beating. Steady and strong and utterly real. "I am old, and I am powerful, but I am not invincible. The covenant proved that. You proved that."
"How?"
"Because I have not cared whether I lived or died for a very long time. And now..." He trailed off, but I felt the rest through the bond. The fear he'd felt when the temple collapsed. The desperate need to keep me safe. The way his entire existence had reoriented itself around the fact of my presence in his life.
It should have terrified me. Maybe it did. But sitting there in the desert, covered in blood and dust and the marks of a goddess we'd accidentally freed, I found I didn't want to pull away.
"This is a terrible idea," I said.
"Yes."
"We barely know each other."
"Also true."
"And we just unleashed an apocalyptic chaos goddess on the world."
"That is perhaps the most pressing concern, yes." His thumb traced circles on the back of my hand, absent and soothing. "But we are alive. We are together. And we will find a way to fix what we have broken."
"You're very confident for someone who just admitted he's not invincible."
"I am confident because I am not alone." He met my eyes, and the intensity there stole my breath. "I have not been not alone in three thousand years. It makes a difference."
I wanted to argue. Wanted to point out all the logical reasons why this was insane, why we should focus on survival and nothing else, why emotional entanglement in the middle of a crisis was the worst possible idea. But the words wouldn't come. Instead, I found myself leaning closer, drawn by something that had nothing to do with the covenant and everything to do with the way he looked at me like I was the only solid thing in a shifting world.
"Mira," he said, and my name in his mouth sounded like a prayer.
The sand beneath us trembled.
We broke apart, scrambling to our feet. In the distance, back toward the temple, I could see light—cold and silver and growing brighter. Tiamat was moving, her massive form silhouetted against the stars.
"She is coming," Asheron said.
"How long do we have?"
"Minutes. Perhaps less." He pulled me close, and I felt the covenant bond flare to life between us, stronger than before. "There is a safe house in Cairo. If we can reach it—"
"That's two hundred miles."
"I can transport us. But it will drain what power I have left, and the covenant will—" He stopped, his expression going very still. "No."
"What?"
"The bond. It is changing." His hand pressed against my chest, right over my heart, and I felt it too—the covenant mark burning cold, spreading like frost across my skin. "Tiamat's presence is affecting it. Warping it into something—"
Pain exploded through me, white-hot and absolute. I heard myself scream, felt Asheron catch me as my legs gave out. The hieroglyphs on my arms were glowing again, but wrong, the symbols twisting into shapes that hurt to look at.
Through the bond, I felt Asheron's panic. Felt him trying to sever the connection, to protect me from whatever was happening. But the covenant wouldn't break. It was changing, evolving, becoming something neither of us had agreed to.
"Stop," I gasped. "You're making it worse—"
"I will not lose you to this."
"You don't get to decide that." The words came out harsh, but I meant them. "We're in this together, remember? Together or—"
The pain cut off abruptly. I sagged in his arms, gasping, and felt the covenant settle into a new configuration. The hieroglyphs on my skin had changed, the symbols now matching ones I'd seen in the temple. In the chamber where Tiamat had been bound.
"Oh," I said. "Oh, that's bad."
"What is it?"
I held up my arm, showing him the new marks. "These are binding glyphs. The same ones that were on Tiamat's prison." My voice shook. "The covenant just rewrote itself. We're not just bound to each other anymore."
"Then what—"
The sand exploded upward as Tiamat's head burst through the ground directly beneath us, and I saw—