Chapter 63: 63. The Tentacles Don’t Lie
She looked at him, and the thought that had been on her mind for a while and that she wasn’t sure she was ready to let go of settled between them.
"Yes, I have," she said.
"What’s happening?"
He thought she might change it because she was quiet for so long. After that, she looked at her hands, and the tentacles were very slightly visible on her lower back.
This was her body’s way of showing how she felt without saying it.
"I told myself that what I felt for you was motherly." She said, "Protective..."
"Living for hundreds of years makes you look at a young person and feel the kind of care that is about them, not about you." She stopped. "That was nice."
"It was easy to hold on to and easy for me to understand."
"But," he said.
"But." She let out a breath. "It isn’t maternal."
"It hasn’t been for a while, if it ever was. I know what that feels like, and I know what this feels like, and they aren’t the same thing." She looked him straight in the eye, and her ocean-blue eyes had no teasing in them. "I love you, Lucian. Not like I love this family, though I do love it. I love you in a way that doesn’t make me too old, too ancient, or too strange to feel for someone."
He said, "I don’t think there’s a version of too old for that."
"I do." Her voice was steady, filled with a conviction that resonated throughout the room.
As the weight of the moment settled in, she felt an overwhelming sense of joy and anticipation for the journey ahead.
"Well, I don’t." He reached over and took her hand.
The tentacles moved a little when he touched her, which she couldn’t help but do. "Me too."
"Something has been changing between us since Hesten, and it’s not just the bond mechanics; it’s something deeper than that." He looked at her. "I love you, Octavia."
When he told her the truth, Octavia’s heart raced and a warm feeling spread through her as she looked into his eyes for honesty.
"Ara... I didn’t think you would say that so quickly," she said softly. The words felt both exciting and scary as they hung in the air between them, making their connection stronger in ways that words alone could never describe.
"Well, yeah, it might not be as strong as Glacielle’s love yet, and it might be different from what’s going on with Marshal, but it’s real and it’s mine and it’s for you."
Her heart raced at his confession, a mixture of warmth and vulnerability washing over her.
"I appreciate that," she replied, her voice barely above a whisper, as she pondered the depth of their bond and what it could become.
"But..." Her breath came out slowly and in an uneven way. "You’re not being nice, are you?"
"I’m not being nice when I can be honest with my own feelings too," he said, and she laughed, a quiet sound that showed how happy she was.
"You’re right," she said. "But you’re also not."
She kissed him, and for a brief moment, the kiss felt uncertain, but then it became confident. The tentacles did what they had done in the clearing after Hesten, wrapping around them both in a protective and intimate way that was completely hers.
She was crying when they stopped kissing, which she was clearly embarrassed about, so he pulled her close until she stopped.
"After the battle," she said against his shoulder, "when we’re done—"
"Anything you want," he said.
Glacielle watched this from the door of the armory with a look that she would have called "happy for them" if someone had asked her. Marshal, who was next to her, didn’t say anything, but she had always shown her approval by what she didn’t say instead of what she did.
The bond level notification showed up at the edge of Lucian’s sight.
[Bond Level Went Up: Octavia’s Hearts Went from 3.0 to 5.0.]
[Relationship: Romantic Partner (Getting Better).]
He ignored it and kept going for a little longer.
...
The western gate was just like the southern gate, but worse because the Devourer was worse. The Harvester was scary in a specific, understandable way, but the Devourer was scary in the way that big, hungry things are scary: basic and without anything that could be reasoned with or admired.
It came up from the ground two hundred meters outside the gate, slowly and steadily like a rising tide. Its mouth was so big that Lucian’s first real thought was that "mouth" wasn’t quite the right word for something that big.
It ate ten soldiers before he could even think about what it was.
It did not attack them but swallowed them whole. After the first moment, there was no more screaming.
Instead, a sound resembling silence echoed, and ten people who had once lived vanished, leaving no trace behind.
"We need the belly," Marshal said, looking at the hide that her test strikes were bouncing off of. "Scales are thinner there."
"It’s not possible to get through yet, but it’s easier to get through."
Seraphina was using up a lot of magic to test the same idea from the other side and get the same answer.
She said, "It’s still too thick."
Her voice sounded like someone who was trying to get back on track. "I need a clear target before my fire can get through."
The Devourer’s next attack was not the same as the first. It opened its mouth so wide that it seemed impossible for the structure to hold it.
The vacuum pull that came out of it wasn’t a breath; it was a condition that changed the physics of the area around it and pulled everything without an anchor toward the opening.
The soldiers were sliding. Lucian’s boots were slipping, so he threw an ice anchor into the ground with Glacielle’s help.
He reached into the shared space and pulled the technique through. When he grabbed the spike of ice that burst from the ground two feet in front of him, it held.
He felt the stress of the two synchronizations right away, but he pushed through it.
"Grab the anchors now!"
"Everyone, grab them!"
Glacielle was already planting them in a wave pattern across the ground, and soldiers all over the area were diving for the closest spikes. Octavia’s barrier pushed back against the pull with all six tentacles spread and braced.
The pull was huge. It was the kind of force that made the idea of resistance seem like a joke.
"The core is in the throat," Lucian said. He could see the purple energy in the Devourer’s open mouth. It was the same color and quality as the Harvester’s core, but it was in a place where no one could reach it from the outside. "We need someone on the inside to freeze it."
There was a certain kind of silence.
"You want someone to eat you on purpose," Seraphina said.
"I want someone who can survive being inside it to freeze the core from the inside while someone hits it from the outside at the moment of maximum vulnerability." He looked at Octavia. "Can you live through that? In the form of water?"
Octavia stared at the Devourer. The Devourer kept pulling things in with its vacuum, ignoring them.
Octavia’s face changed quickly several times, and then it settled on something that Lucian remembered from the ambush on the bridge, just before the tentacles showed up. It was the moment when someone decided that what they are is less important than what they need to do.
She said, "Ara ara," and this version of it had pure bright adrenaline running through it.
"How delightfully painful."
The plan needed timing, so there wasn’t enough time to practice. Octavia hit the Devourer with all six of her tentacles, the water whip, and the water barrier at the same time.
The combined contact was enough for them to see her as a threat and turn toward her. It opened its mouth wider.
She let it be hers.
Lucian’s bond to her was stronger than the one to Glacielle, like a thread going too far through space he didn’t know, and for three of the worst seconds he’d ever had since a falling can, he couldn’t feel her well enough to know anything for sure.
Then Glacielle put both of her hands on his arm, and the channel opened wider than it should have been able to.
Ice magic flowed through their link, redirected outward via his synchronization with Octavia, who was finding the core in the darkness and wrapping her tentacles around it, creating six points of contact. The ice came through like water finding a crack and spreading.
The Devourer stopped.
It froze inside, and all of its muscles tightened up at once. Its mouth closed, its vacuum pull stopped, and it stood there for two seconds making the sound of something that had never been inside before.
"NOW!" Marshal’s Solar Step put her at the sealed throat in one move.
The two Dawn Reapers were at full power, and she hit the frozen core through the outside of the neck with a blow that released all of the stored solar energy at once, creating a nova that was too bright to look at directly.
