The lightning kept hamring into her, and the world around the crater stopped being a place anyone else could stand.
The magic tearing off the little dragon’s body wasn’t staying contained — it chewed the earth wider with every passing second, the ground splitting in spreading veins of scorched black, the air itself too charged to breathe near.
Daniel dragged Veronica back by the arm. Lucian retreated with them, shielding his eyes.
Only Kanary held her ground, one hand thrown forward, glowing the sa deep blue as the armor.
She was trying to keep the connection alive — to feed the Sea Knight’s armor and hold it stable, to keep the water between Ebony’s body and the lightning for as long as the spell could last. Her arm shook with the effort. Her jaw was clenched white.
Then the armor began to crack.
The blue plates fractured under a charge no water was built to carry, spider-lines racing across the surface, and Lucian made the call she wouldn’t. He scooped her up around the waist and hauled her backward.
"No!" Kanary fought him, heels dragging. "I have to stay close, I have to hold it — if I let go the armor fails and she cooks —"
"If you stay there you cook!" Lucian didn’t slow down. "It’s too much! For her, for you, for anyone! There’s nothing more you can give it!"
He carried her clear, and she kept reaching back the whole way.
In the heart of it, Ebony held on.
Her body was being healed and electrocuted in the sa instant — cooked and knitted, split and sealed, an unbroken loop of ruin and repair — and sowhere under the pain a door she kept locked ca open.
The mory of dying. Her other death, the first one, the one that had ended a different life in a different world and dropped her here. It rose up through the agony with terrible clarity.
She didn’t let it take her.
She fixed on one word and scread it like it was the only word that had ever existed, the only thing keeping her tethered to the world.
"Heal!"
And then the pain got too big for her to stay inside it, and her consciousness folded inward, and she went sowhere she hadn’t been in a very long ti.
The dark place.
It was quiet here. It always had been. The empty inner space she hadn’t visited since the early days, when this body was still new to her and the two of them had not yet learned to be one person. And she was not alone in it.
Her other self stood across from her.
The sa face. The sa body. But paler — grayer, drained of color, like a photograph of Ebony left too long in the sun. The girl this body had belonged to before Ebony had ever opened these eyes. She looked at Ebony with sothing patient and sad and ancient.
"Are you ready," the gray girl asked, "to face the consequences of your hatred?"
Ebony grinned at her. Bloody, exhausted, and absolutely unbroken.
"That’ll be when I decide I’m ready," she said. "Not when I die. Not this ti. Not in this life." Her grin sharpened.
"Because I’ve still got a filthy little fox to find first — and I am not dying before I get my hands around its smug throat."
The gray girl said nothing.
But sothing almost like a smile touched the corner of her mouth before the dark place dissolved.
.
.
.
Ebony woke.
Minutes had passed. Or hours — she couldn’t tell. The light was different.
She was sitting in the bottom of a crater that was still warm beneath her, the stone fused glassy in places by all the lightning that had poured through it, and her clothes were gone.
Burned to ash and flaked away, leaving her in scorched rags that barely covered anything. And cradled against her chest, fast asleep, was the little dragon.
2480b. It was breathing slow and even. Spent. Empty of storm at last.
She looked around the crater, and her stomach tightened — none of her friends were there. Not at the rim, not nearby, nowhere. (Where are — )
The dragon stirred against her.
It yawned, enormous for sothing so small, exactly the way a cat yawns — jaw cracking wide, tongue curling — and then it blinked up at her with eyes that had gone from searing yellow to a soft, warm gold. It studied her face for a long mont.
Then, in a small, piping, unmistakably childlike voice, it said:
"...Mama?"
Ebony let out a breath that took half the tension in her body with it, and sat back against the warm stone. So. It had imprinted. Of the two terrible options, it was the one that didn’t end with her being eaten — and right now she would take it.
"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, I’m your mama."
The dragon launched itself at her face and started licking it with frantic, delighted affection.
"Okay — okay —" Ebony peeled it off by the scruff, holding it at arm’s length while it wriggled. "Behave. We’ve got a lot to talk about, you and I, starting with not licking people."
She climbed out of the crater on unsteady legs.
Day had co — full morning light slanting through the broken trees — and that made the absence worse, not better. Wherever her friends had gone to wait out the lightning, there was no reason for them not to have co back the mont it stopped. And it had clearly stopped a while ago. The crater was already cooling.
The little dragon scrambled up her body and perched on her shoulder, tail curling for balance.
"Will you give a na?" it asked. "I want to know who I am."
Ebony blinked at it. (It’s barely hours out of the shell and it’s asking existential questions. Storm dragons. Of course.)
"...Yeah," she said. "Yeah, I’ll give you a na." She thought about it as she scanned the treeline. "Storhal." A beat. "Though I’ll probably just call you Stor most of the ti, because I’m not saying the whole thing every ti you do sothing stupid."
"Stor," the dragon repeated, trying it out, pleased. "Stor."
They started into the trees together, Ebony searching the ground for any sign of which way the others had gone.
"Who are we looking for?" Stor asked. "And why? I’m here now. I’m more than enough to take care of you, and you seem very strong for a human, so I don’t see why we need anyone else."
(Spoken like a true dragon.) Ebony rembered, distantly, the thing she’d read once — that dragons were profoundly solitary creatures, that they loathed crowds, that a pack of dragons was a contradiction in terms. It was already in him, that instinct, hours old.
"Because this world is enormous, Stor," she said aloud, deciding the lesson was worth starting early.
"Bigger than you can imagine right now. And no matter how strong you are, you can’t watch every direction at once. Nobody can. Sotis you just need help getting out of a ss." She ducked under a branch. "That’s why you make friends. That’s why you find people you can trust. That’s why you build a family."
"What’s a family?"
Ebony opened her mouth, and then had to actually think about it, because the first thing that ca up was her own childhood — her own mother — and that was not a clean or simple thing to hand to a newborn.
"...A family," she said finally, picking her way over a root, "is people who stay with you. Even when they hurt each other.
Even when it’s hard. They stick around, and they try to take care of each other with whatever they’ve got — a lot or a little, it doesn’t matter. That’s the part that counts. They give you what they have."
Stor was quiet, turning it over. "I don’t think I understand that yet."
"That’s all right. You’ve got ti." She almost smiled. "More than most."
Then she found the first sign.
A scrap of blue cloth, snagged on a low branch. Lucian’s — she’d know that shade anywhere. Her almost-smile died.
"(Why would he leave a piece of his clothes behind. Unless — )"
The thought arrived ugly and complete: the traffickers. Hrazfel ca back with what was left of his crew while I was busy not dying, and he took them. If that was true, this had beco sothing far more dangerous than a lost dragon.
She moved faster.
The trees thinned again, and she stepped out into the camp — and her dread curdled into confusion, because the camp was exactly as she’d left it. A disaster, churned and scorched and scattered, all of it Stor’s doing in his first newborn minutes.
But undisturbed since. No sign of a fight here. No sign of anyone dragged off.
She found her spare pack intact and pulled on fresh clothes with shaking hands, grateful for the small rcy of not facing whatever ca next half-naked.
And then sothing snagged at her sense of the place.
"(I don’t rember the camp being this far.)" She turned a slow circle, getting her bearings, and spotted it — a second crater, off near the camp’s edge, smaller than the one she’d woken in. She rembered that spot.
That was where she’d launched her plan, where she’d co down on the dragon. So why had she woken up so far from it? Why were there two?
More questions than answers. She pushed them down and kept searching, because the friends were the priority and the geotry could wait.
Then she heard it.
A sound of pain. Barely a sound at all — a thin, labored breath, the kind a body makes when breathing is the only thing it has strength left to do.
Ebony ran toward it.
And found Kanary.
She was pinned upright against a withered, dead tree, both arms raised above her head, held there by sothing driven through her hands. Scraps of cloth were all that was left of her clothing.
Her body was a map of bruises and cuts, dark and swollen, dried blood down every limb. And her hair — the long, carefully kept hair of a governor’s daughter — had been hacked off short and uneven, matted with her own blood.
For one horrible instant Ebony couldn’t move at all.
"Oh, that’s terrible," Stor said brightly from her shoulder. "Soone left good at out to spoil. Is it all right if I have just one little bi—"
The look Ebony gave him made the dragon shrink down small against her neck and go very, very quiet.
She crossed to Kanary fast and gentle, and looked at what held her up. A spike — black iron, crude and heavy — driven straight through both of Kanary’s raised hands and deep into the dead trunk behind.
Ebony took hold of it and worked it free as carefully as she could, easing Kanary’s weight into her other arm as the girl ca loose from the tree.
"Kanary. Kanary, look at . Who did this?" Ebony’s voice was steady because she was forcing it to be. "Who did this to you?"
Kanary’s eyes fluttered, barely there, barely conscious.
"...the monks," she breathed. "It was... the monks."
(Monks?) It ant nothing to her. None of it ant anything. But the explanation could wait; the bleeding could not. Ebony lifted her into both arms and carried her back to what was left of the camp.
She laid Kanary down and went to work.
She had gauze packed for exactly this kind of ergency, and she used all of it. For hours she cleaned and wrapped — every cut, every gash, the ruined hands, working with the cold precision of soone who had learned field dicine the hard way and the trembling hands of soone doing it for a friend.
By the ti she finished, Kanary was wound nearly head to toe in bandages, a mummy of white cloth, breathing shallow and slow from all the blood she’d lost. But breathing.
Ebony sat back on her heels and looked at her friend, and the fear that had been driving her all morning curdled, finally, into sothing hotter.
Rage.
Whoever the monks were, whatever this was — soone had done this.
Soone had taken a girl who’d walked out of a sewer under her own power, who’d sealed a soul-pact to save a city she loved, and they had nailed her to a dead tree and cut off her hair and left her to die slow.
A sound ca from the trees.
Ebony’s head ca up.
A figure stepped out from between the trunks — a boy, young, barely into his teens. White hair. Pale skin pulled tight over a thin fra, his torso bare, walking barefoot across the scorched ground.
His knuckles were wrapped in clean white bandages.
Ebony rose slowly to her feet from where she’d been kneeling, and the green fire was already lighting at her hands, and the smile that crossed her face had nothing kind in it at all.
"Perfect," she said.
The boy said nothing. He simply settled into a stance — weight dropping, bandaged fists coming up — and as he did, a magic symbol blood to life across his bare chest, glowing pale against his skin.
Ebony rolled her shoulders, the purifying fire climbing higher up her arms, and the fury in her eyes burned brighter than any of it.
"I’ve been dying," she said, "for sowhere to put all this anger."
User Comments
0 comments from readers