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.