Through one of those tattered lacerations, a single glistening globe peers at me, snatching my breath and the frayed tips of my stubby heartstrings.
That slit in my chest widens, a lump swelling in my throat that’s hard to breathe past as I study the wounded creature—a quarter the size of Slátra’s moon. As I take in the hole gouged into its saddle beneath the stirrups. The trail of blood weeping from deep, fleshy wounds.
My knees threaten to give way, my fizzing, spitting rage yielding to ribbons of icy sadness that bind around my brittle ribs and chill me to the core.
Somebody has wheeled a barrow of chunked-up meat close to the dragon, not that it appears to have been touched. Same goes for the copper trough of water that’s still filled to the brim, the surface rippling with each rumbled breath the creature releases.
A crackling boom rips across the sky, and I draw on the sweet scent of impending rain, a single drip plummeting past my ear. Splatting against the ground.
The sky is crying for you …
“I have them too,” I whisper, and the Moonplume blinks.
I swallow the swelling lump in my throat and study those welts, moving forward a step.
Another.
“You can’t see mine,” I rasp, stepping over a web of hairline cracks in the ground. “Not anymore.”
I release my truth like a charred skeleton dredged up from the shore of my icy lake, spat on the stone beside this beautiful, broken creature.
I steal another step toward the trembling beast.
Another.
“The pain … it never goes away. No matter how hard you pretend.”
My voice cracks on the last word, memories of my own burning flesh shoving up my nose, muddying my lungs. Making my gut clench, the muscles beneath my tongue tingling with a surge of nausea.
“I used to believe the Creators were punishing me for something.”
I move closer still, more drops of rain splashing upon my shoulders and weeping down my skin, recalling the memory that struck me on the cliff and almost tore me to my death. A jagged blade now wedged in my chest as I dip inside myself, lift the memory from the obsidian shore within, and put it where it’s meant to be.
In my chest—where I can feel it always.
Forever.
“I think that might be true,” I sob past the pit in my throat growing bigger with each tentative step toward the beast still staring at me. Like she’s taking me in, weighing my words, my actions. She sniffs at the air, perhaps pulling my scent into her lungs.
“I think I failed my Moonplume Slátra many phases ago,” I admit with soul-crushing certainty, like finally chewing a splinter from my hand that was rooted deep, the flesh around it swollen.
Infected.
The admission … it feels right.
So heartbreakingly right.
Another tear slips down my cheek as the sky continues to weep. As I draw close enough to the trembling beast to settle my hand on an untarnished patch of cold leathery skin—
A thump pulses through my spine, like somebody tore the cord of bones from my body, whipped it against the stone, then threaded it back through me.
This brisk, flesh-biting cold … It feels like home.
The creature blinks, a truth settling in my marrow, deep and yearning.
Vulnerable.
A truth that’s both frightening and abrupt.
“I think you and I were supposed to find one another,” I whisper, peering into the Moonplume’s glimmering globes as another tear slips down my cheek. As a promise plunges between the calloused ridges of my heart like a thorn—straightening my spine. Reinforcing my bones.
My resolve.
Like an icy sun just crested the horizon in my chest and filled my lungs with the first full breath I’ve pulled since I woke in this strange, foreign reality of pain.
“No one will ever hurt you again.”
Barely any light threads through the mouth of the cave, the storm rattling the sky outside, howling against the din. Heavy clouds that blocked the sun long enough for three hutchkeepers to help me coax the Moonplume into the shadowy burrow.
They told me her name is Líri. That she’s just shy of adolescence, based on the length of the tendrils dangling from her jowls, but that she’s very small for her age. She certainly looks it—curled up in the middle of the lofty cavern. A delicate loop of interlacing runes surrounds us, creating a chilled environment that makes every soft word I sing expel with a puff of milky air.
My hand circles over the wide curve of Líri’s nose, her flesh an icy nip against my palm that calms something inside me.
She blows a cold, rumbling breath across my leg, lids threatening to sink shut over her gloomy eyes, and my gaze drifts between her and the Imperial Stronghold’s Fleshthread.
“This one will hurt,” Agni says, her words muffled past the thick woven material bound around her head, keeping her warm.
She’s crouched beside one of Líri’s half-stretched wings, sketching a preliminary path of runes around a gaping hole in the largest panel of membrane—doused in the glow emitting off Líri’s hide.
She flicks me a dubious look. “It’s a tender spot, and the tear is—”
“Large.”
She nods. “There’s a lot of flesh to be remade with a single bind of runes, but I really didn’t want to have to repeat the process more than once in this spot. So … we’re going to try.”
I reach behind me for the hard, wiry tuft of ghorsi grass, cracking some of the stems to release the sedative stench and resting it against my thigh—right before Líri’s left nostril. Running my hand up between her eyes, I give Agni a tight nod.
She dips the sharp tip of her etching stick in a jar, gaze nipping at Líri before she tucks her head and begins carving the runes.
Líri’s lids pry open to slits, her upper lip lifting from a row of piercing sabers as her eyes narrow on Agni. The long muscles in her lanky neck bulge, tendons tightening, as though she’s deciding whether or not she wants to whip her head around and snap.
Agni pauses, stare set on the snarling creature.
“Hais te na veil de nel, Líri.” I crack more fronds of ghorsi grass, slicking my palms in the milky residue and rubbing it across her snout. “Hais te na veil … catkin de nei.”
Líri’s muscles soften, and her upper lip stops wobbling, nostrils flaring. She blows a cold plume of breath on me, and I give the signal to continue.
“You know how to speak in the southern tongue?” Agni asks, resuming her tedious task.
Still rubbing my hand across Líri’s snout, I look up. “Not that I’m aware.”
She peers at me. “That’s what you spoke right now. My mah used to be an emissary. She had to be familiar with the language because some folk south of the wall choose only to speak in the southern tongue. Especially in some of the communities south of Arithia.”
Huh.
I hadn’t considered the words that were coming out of my mouth—simply spoke them.
“Did I speak it fluently?”
Agni nods, pausing to dip her etching stick in her tincture again, passing me a gentle smile. “Like you’ve been speaking it for a long while. Have you spent much time in The Shade? That you can remember?”
That you can remember.
My thoughts sink down that coiled staircase beneath Kaan’s sleepsuite, into a cavern pregnant with a luminous, icy tombstone—the weight of which I can suddenly feel beneath my ribs.
Weighing me down.
I let the silence ruminate between us, cracking more ghorsi grass upon my hands to smooth over Líri’s nose. Agni clears her throat and continues etching her runes, her own lids appearing to grow just as heavy as her patient’s.
Hardly surprising. She’s been working nonstop since she got here almost an entire aurora cycle ago, during which neither of us have slept nor barely even eaten. The entire time, the storm has raged, clapping the sky into luminous shards, rumbling like a caged beast. Like Rayne is overflowing with teeth-gnashing anger—a similar storm churning within the confines of my chest cavity.
But I’m mindful.
Uncharacteristically, painfully patient.
A thud-umping boom rattles the cave. Rattles the very air we breathe as Agni completes the misshapen loop. She lifts her hands, and we both still as the hole’s tattered circumference illuminates—tightening.