Pandora’s Flame by Helen Scott

I’m spending the starmetal in my body just to keep them alive. I’m not sure how long I can keep it up.
The Underworld doesn’t just disorient. It unmakes. The silence has weight here, and it’s eating them alive, pulling Flynn into phantom hunts, dragging Thane into the iron, snuffing Kaelen’s fire, unraveling Elias thread by thread. I’m the only thing anchoring them to who they are.
It’s killing me. We keep moving forward anyway.
Hades was supposed to be our guide. He’s barely solid enough to hand us a map. No one is ruling this place, the Devourer has seen to that. It feeds from the Soul-Well and it doesn’t just destroy. It erases. Names. Faces. The thread of a life, unspooled until it never happened.
If we fail, we don’t die. We become the silence.
They fight to save me. I fight to save them.
We didn’t come this far to be erased. We came to end it.