Drawing close to the fallen beast, I feel smaller than I ever have. A hatchling in comparison to its vast size.
Bulder continues to hum, the heavy baritone an audible cradle of droning comfort so complex it’s impossible to grasp. Like looking up at the stars and trying to work out what’s in the dark gaps between those distant prickles of light.
He’s a nest, I realize. Can almost picture him crouched, hands cupped before his chest, curled under this beautiful moon while he looks down upon it.
Treasures it.
Nurtures it.
My throat thickens so much it’s painful to swallow …
I reach forward, brushing my hand across the Moonplume’s once-leathery hide now fossilized. So hard and cold it’s like caressing a frosted mound of ice.
“Your moon,” I rasp, a small smile picking up the corner of my mouth as a tear slips down my cheek that I’m swift to bat away.
“Her name was Slátra,” Kaan says, a rawness to his voice that I’ve never heard before. “I’m yet to find her final shards. You can’t see on this side, but there’s a small crevice around the back of her I still need to fill.”
A chill climbs my spine, and I trace a hairline fissure with the tip of my finger, looking up to see so many more webbed across the metallic beast—proving she smashed into thousands of shards upon impact. Shards that have been painstakingly pieced together in this rounded tomb.
“You did this?” I ask, my voice wobbly.
“I did, yes.”
I shake my head, realization gushing down my throat like a drowning shove of water.
My rage—my rabid thirst for revenge—was blinding. I thought Kaan was a tyrant. A heartless monster. But he has such a big, warm heart I’m surprised it fits in his chest.
“Why?”
“Because it hurts knowing she’s not whole,” he rasps, casting another sweep of sting across the backs of my eyes.
I step around the dragon, pausing at the spot where Slátra’s head is nuzzled deep into the tuft of her tail.
My heart stills, breath catches. A bludgeoning bang inside my chest almost makes me lose my balance.
Ignoring the sounds of splitting ice ratcheting through me, I ease up onto my tiptoes, peering over the cleft of her wing to the small hollow it’s shielding. Not sharp and jagged like bits are still missing, but a smoothed ingress close to the tip of the beast’s wide nose, as though Slátra gave her final breath cradling … something bundled within the silken tendrils of her once soft tail. Shielded by her cupped claw.
My brow furrows, stare pouring into that snug hollow, almost feeling its clefts and bulges nudged against my body.
Cradling me.
Almost feeling the cold expanse between her slit nostrils pressed against my brow, the solidified tuft of her tail cushioning my … chest—
I stumble back a step … another … sucking breath into lungs that seem to have forgotten how to work.
No—
“You’re familiar with it,” Kaan says, his baritone wrestling the silence like a rockslide.
Battering me.
“I—”
My thoughts tunnel to a memory I discarded long ago, its corpse laid out on the shore of my internal lake, stripped of all the frilly emotion I plucked from it, leaving only the bony skeleton of something that might’ve hurt one time.
Felt heavy in some way.
I allow myself to assess the remains from an angle of relative disconnect:
A strange trundling sound had roused me from my eternal sleep. I’d blinked my eyes open for the first time, taking in the world I’d been born into through the iron bars of what I now know is called a cage.
My brutal waking was fraught with confusion while I tried to work out how I fit inside my body. How it worked and moved. Why everything was blurry.
Warm.
Yet I trembled—violently. I thought it was the heat, but now I know that’s not the case.
My soul was shuddering from the inside out.
I’d reached forward, finding something heavy and cold clamped around my wrist, an item I now know to be a shackle. I’d clung to the bars in the effort to steady myself in this strange existence where I had hands that moved, lungs that breathed, and eyes that could see—my stare narrowing on the source of the sound that had drawn me into existence.
A cart being wheeled down the length of a dusky burrow, past my place of waking.
In its deep hollow sat jagged shards of silver brightness that gave off a lapping chill I wanted to splash upon my face.
The shards were so beautiful against the dim of my surroundings that I was immediately certain my place of waking was not good, but bad. Because no matter how hard I grunted and screamed, trying to beg the creature that was pushing the cart to please bring it closer so I could have a proper look at the pretty, pretty shards I desperately wanted to touch, he did not so much as look at me.