The Titanbone Frontier

002

Eron didn’t remember most of the run.

Later he would recall fragments—the crunch of bone shards beneath his boots, the razor air cutting his lungs, the way the sky seemed too close and too heavy at the same time—but in the moment there was only one command pounding in his skull.

Run.

The land around the fallen titan was still convulsing from impact. Chunks of shattered bone jutted from the earth like broken spears. Clouds of dust drifted in strange, slow vortices. Lightning crawled lazily along the titan’s spine, l*****g between vertebrae like a predator tasting its prey.

Eron darted through the chaos, slipping between ribs the size of trees, sliding down slopes of petrified cartilage, leaping across fissures that glowed faintly with residual titan-fire.

More of the wolf-things—bone-beasts, he realized dimly—stirred around the corpse. Some were just skeletal shapes twitching feebly. Others stood fully, shaking off centuries of dormancy. Their eyes glowed with the same golden light that now pulsed beneath his skin.

None of them came for him.

They watched him. Heads tilted. Nostrils flared.

But they didn’t attack.

He wasn’t prey.

He was something else.

He didn’t stop to test what.

When he finally cleared the shadow of the titan’s vast chest and scrambled down its collapsed arm to solid ground, the world felt too small. The titan’s hand had formed a cliff at the edge of the bone fields; beyond it, the land sloped down into more familiar terrain.

Old gods.

Dead titans.

Static bones.

Home.

The double heartbeat in his chest slowed—just enough for him to think again.

He staggered behind a jag of ribstone and bent over, bracing his hands on his knees. Sweat stung his eyes. His breath came in ragged pulls that didn’t feel like they belonged entirely to him.

“Okay,” he gasped. “Okay. You’re alive. That’s… step one.”

Carefully, he pressed his palm to his chest.

Thump-thump.

His heart.

Thrum.

The other one.

He gritted his teeth.

“Are you… going to say anything else?” he muttered.

Silence.

No whisper this time. No command. Just the steady, unnatural warmth under his sternum.

“Right,” he said. “Steal a divine heart and it suddenly goes shy. Makes sense.”

He straightened slowly, testing his limbs.

They felt wrong.

Strong—but wrong.

His muscles thrummed with energy, like someone had strung molten wire through them. Every sound in the bone fields seemed sharper: the distant crackle of residual lightning, the rumble of falling rubble, the mournful groan of the titan’s corpse settling into its final resting place.

Far behind him, voices rose—dozens now, maybe hundreds. Faint shouts, carried by the wind.

Scavenger bands had reached the titan.

Soon, the tribes would follow.

They would tear the corpse apart, harvesting ichor and bone, carving sanctuaries into its skull, forging new weapons from its ribs.

They worshipped dead titans.

What they did to the living remnants inside them, Eron didn’t want to imagine.

He turned away from the fallen god and started toward the valley.

The walk back to the settlement of Dunhallow should have taken half a day. He covered the distance in three hours without meaning to. His legs moved faster. Hills didn’t tire him. Jagged bone spines that once slowed him to careful climbing now felt like minor obstacles.

Once, he misjudged a jump across a ravine.

His foot slipped. His body pitched forward into empty space.

He flung out a hand—

—and something inside him reacted.

Golden light flared around his fingers. For a heartbeat, the air thickened beneath his palm, becoming solid enough to push on. He shoved himself sideways, landing on the far ledge in a messy roll.

He lay there, panting.

Then swore quietly.

“Great,” he muttered. “Now I’m… bouncing off the air.”

His voice echoed off the bone walls.

No answer.

By the time the jagged silhouettes of home came into view, the sun sat high and harsh. Dunhallow clung to the inside of a titanskull, its houses and halls built into the bone like barnacles. Ropes and bridges connected teeth turned to watchtowers. Smoke curled from chimneys dug into the jaw.

To outsiders, it would look like the maw of a god preparing to bite the horizon.

To Eron, it was just where he’d always lived.

And where, if anyone noticed what had changed inside him, he might never live again.

He paused on the rise overlooking the settlement, forcing his breaths to slow. The double heartbeat inside him tried to push faster, but he focused on his own rhythm, tamping the other down.

“Quiet,” he whispered under his breath.

The second pulse dimmed slightly.

Not gone.

Not obeying.

But… listening.

He adjusted his coat to hide any strange glow that might seep through his shirt and started down toward the skull-gate.

Two bone spears barred the main entrance, crossed to form an X. Kade and Hullen, the morning sentries, lounged in their shadows.

Kade noticed him first.

“By the broken jaw,” she said, straightening up. “Eron? You’re still alive?”

Hullen squinted. “We had you dead in three different betting pools.”

Eron tried to smile. “Sorry to disappoint.”

“When the sky split, you ran toward it,” Kade said. Her dark hair was braided tight against her scalp, beads of carved bone clicking softly when she moved. “Nobody sees a titan fall and thinks, ‘I should go poke that.’”

“Somebody had to see where it landed,” Eron said. “Better me than Lorn’s drunk cousins.”

Hullen snorted. “Fair.”

Kade’s gaze swept over him, sharp and assessing. “You’re not burned. No cracks. No lightning scars. You make it sound like you strolled through a titanfall like a bone market.”

Eron kept his shoulders loose, his expression mild.

“Got lucky,” he said. “Everything was still… settling when I got close. I didn’t stay long.”

Not a lie.

Just not the whole truth.

He shifted his weight casually, managing not to wince when the other heartbeat thrummed harder in protest at the half-truth.

Kade studied him another second, then stepped aside.

“Well,” she said. “The elders will want to hear anything you saw. And Captain Merrow’s been pacing the jaw since dawn. You’d better go let him shout at you personally.”

“Can’t wait,” Eron said dryly.

Inside the skull-gate, Dunhallow buzzed like an anthill kicked by a god.

People crowded the main paths—traders, hunters, bonecarvers, priests in their heavy bone masks. News of the titan’s fall had already reached them. Eron caught fragments as he passed:

“…they say its hand smashed a whole valley…”

“…bones still glowing—”

“…if the Heartguard get there first, we’ll never see a shard…”

“…the sky looked like it was bleeding…”

Heartguard.

The word made his skin crawl.

He forced his expression neutral and headed for the upper jaw, where Captain Merrow usually barked orders and pretended the settlement wasn’t perpetually on the edge of falling apart.

He didn’t get that far.

“ERON!”

The shout hit him like a thrown stone.

A blur of wild curls and flailing limbs crashed into his side. Lysa, his younger sister, latched onto him with surprising force.

“You’re alive!” she said, voice muffled in his coat. “You i***t, you Void-cursed, skull-brained, titan-chasing i***t!”

He stumbled but managed to stay upright. The second heartbeat spiked, then steadied, as if curious.

“Good to see you too,” Eron said, hugging her briefly. “You’re crushing my ribs.”

“You deserve crushed ribs,” Lysa said, pulling back to glare at him. She was shorter than him by a head, eyes the same dark gray as his, but where his features were sharper, hers still held some softness. “Do you have any idea how many people saw you run toward the fall?”

“A few?”

“The entire east ridge,” she said. “Mom nearly walked into a bone pillar when someone told her. She thought you were ash.”

“Mom’s fine?” he asked quickly.

“She’s at the clinic,” Lysa said. “Patching people who were dumb enough to look up when the sky cracked. Your name may have come up.”

He winced. “I’ll… go see her.”

“Not before Captain Merrow sees you,” another voice cut in.

Eron sighed inwardly.

Captain Jared Merrow strode toward them, jaw set, eyes narrowed. His armor was made from overlapping plates of titanrib, his cloak lined with the hide of some long-dead beast. Scars crossed his cheeks like pale lightning.

He looked like he’d been carved from the same bone as the settlement.

“Vale,” Merrow said. “Care to tell me why every scout on the ridge reports you sprinting toward a falling god in the dark?”

“Curiosity,” Eron said.

“Curiosity,” Merrow repeated flatly.

“And maybe poor impulse control,” Eron added.

Lysa elbowed him in the ribs.

Merrow’s gaze flicked over him, as Kade’s had, checking for burns, fractures, anything out of place.

“You look intact,” he said. “That worries me.”

“Would you prefer I came back missing limbs?” Eron asked.

“Preferably you’d have stayed behind the gates like everyone with functioning survival instinct,” Merrow said. “What did you see?”

Eron hesitated. Words crowded his throat.

A living heart.

A tendril of godflesh.

Golden power soaking into his bones.

He swallowed them whole.

“It’s… big,” he said instead. “The titan. Larger than the last fall. It landed half in the valley, half across the Old Spine ridge. Bones are still… hot.”

Merrow grunted. “Any sign of Heartguard?”

“I didn’t see their banners,” Eron said. That, at least, was true.

“Others?” Merrow pressed. “Scavenger clans? Bone raiders?”

“Not when I was there,” Eron said. “But they’ll come.”

“They always come,” Merrow said. “We’ll have to move fast if we want a claim.”

“So we’re going?” Lysa asked, excitement creeping into her voice.

Merrow gave her a look. “We are not going. You will stay in Dunhallow and do whatever your mother tells you, or I will personally tie you to a molar.”

Lysa scowled. “I can fight.”

“You’re thirteen,” Merrow said.

“I killed a marrow-wolf last month.”

“It tripped and impaled itself on your spear,” Eron reminded her.

“That counts,” Lysa said.

Eron managed a small smile, but tension coiled in his gut.

Going to the titan meant more people near the heart chamber. Near the place where he’d bound himself to something that had no business inside a human body.

“Do you want me on the expedition?” he asked Merrow, trying to sound casual.

Merrow studied him for a long moment.

“You were there before anyone,” the captain said. “Luck or foolishness, that means you know the terrain better than the rest. So yes—I want you on the approach team.”

Every rational part of Eron screamed no.

The other heartbeat in his chest pulsed once, hard.

Yes.

He swallowed.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll go.”

Lysa opened her mouth.

“No,” Merrow said before she could speak. “You stay.”

She crossed her arms. “This isn’t fair.”

“Nothing about titanfall is fair,” Merrow said. He clapped a heavy hand on Eron’s shoulder. “Eat. Drink. Tell your mother you’re not dead. We leave at dusk.”

He turned away, already barking orders at a cluster of hunters.

Lysa glared up at Eron. “You promised you’d take me when there was another fall.”

“I promised nothing of the sort,” Eron said. “You promised you’d sneak out. Completely different.”

“Same result,” she muttered.

“Lys…” He hesitated. “This one is different.”

She caught the change in his tone. Her frown softened slightly. “Different how?”

He thought of the living heart. Of the messages carved into bone: You are a Heartbearer. And they will come.

He thought of the bone-wolf that had scented him and obeyed some instinct older than their entire settlement.

“Bigger,” he said finally. “More dangerous.”

She studied him, then nodded reluctantly. “Fine. Come back in one piece, or I’m going to be very angry at your grave.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.

She gave him one last brief, fierce hug, then stalked off, muttering about unfair captains and hypocritical brothers.

Eron watched her go, the tightness in his chest not entirely caused by the extra heartbeat.

He turned toward the inner skull, where his mother’s clinic was carved into the left cheekbone.

His mother, Mira Vale, did not throw anything at his head when she saw him.

This worried him more than shouting would have.

She stood over a patient when he entered—a man with a bandaged face and blistered arms, likely from staring at the falling titan too long. The room smelled of burnt herbs and boiled bone marrow.

Mira’s hair, once black, had gone almost entirely silver at the temples. Fine lines traced her face like small rivers. Her hands, though, were steady—moving with practiced precision as she adjusted the bandages.

“Hold that,” she told her assistant, then turned toward the door.

Her eyes found Eron.

They flicked over him. Found no obvious wounds.

Then she walked up and pulled him into a hug so tight it hurt.

“You reckless child,” she said into his shoulder. “You stupid, wonderful, infuriating boy.”

He closed his eyes, breathing in the familiar smell of smoke and clean cloth and bitter herbs.

“Hi, Mother,” he said.

She pulled back enough to look at him properly.

“When the sky split,” she said quietly, “I thought: ‘That i***t is going to run straight toward it.’ Then Kade told me you already had. There is not enough bone wine in the world for this.”

“I’m fine,” Eron said.

She tilted his chin up with two fingers, studying his eyes the way she studied fever patients.

“Are you?” she asked.

For a terrifying moment, he thought she saw it.

The extra light in his pupils.

The subtle pulse in the veins at his throat.

The way his skin felt too warm.

But she only sighed.

“You look tired,” she said.

“I climbed inside a god’s chest,” he said. “It was a long walk.”

Her hand tightened briefly on his jaw.

“Eron,” she said carefully. “Did you touch anything you shouldn’t have?”

His heart lurched.

He forced a lopsided smile.

“Define ‘shouldn’t,’” he said.

Her look said she was not amused.

He softened. “I didn’t bring anything back,” he said truthfully. “No shards. No ichor. I know the rules.”

The heart throbbed inside him, as if offended at being dismissed.

Mira watched his face another moment, then nodded.

“Good,” she said. “The Heartguard will scour anyone who looks suspicious when they arrive. I don’t need them sniffing around my son.”

Eron swallowed. “You think they’ll come here?”

“A fresh fall?” she said. “They always come. They’ll claim it’s about ‘safeguarding divine remains,’ but they only care about power. Hearts, especially.”

The word hung between them like a blade.

He tried to keep his expression neutral. “I’ve never seen a heart survive a fall.”

“Because you haven’t seen what happens to the ones that do,” she said quietly. She glanced back at her patients, then lowered her voice. “Listen to me, Eron. If anyone—Heartguard, priest, captain—asks you if you saw a living organ in that titan, you say no. You say you saw nothing but dead bone and ash. Do you understand?”

His mouth went dry.

He nodded.

“Good,” she said. She squeezed his shoulder. “Now get out of my clinic. I have real patients who didn’t sprint toward gods.”

He managed a smile and turned to go.

As he stepped back into the corridor, the second heartbeat in his chest pounded once, hard enough to make him sway.

A whisper curled through his mind again, clearer this time.

They will smell me on you.

He braced a hand against the wall.

“Who are you?” he whispered under his breath.

The answer came like the echo of a roar across a canyon.

I am what they killed.

I am what fell.

And you…

The heartbeat thundered, syncing with his.

…you are the thief who will drag them down.

Eron straightened slowly.

Outside, bells began to ring in the jaw-towers—Dunhallow’s signal for assembly. Word was spreading. Plans were being made.

The titan had fallen.

The scavengers were gathering.

The Heartguard were coming.

And somewhere above the clouds, something enormous stirred again, feeling the absence of its kin.

Eron took a breath.

He was a boy who had stolen a god’s heart.

The world just didn’t know it yet.