The Last Dragon of the East

Chapter 20

20

I stand slowly, a cautious hand stretched out before me as I place myself in front of Jyn. “H-hello there,” I stutter. “We, uh… seem to have lost our way.”

Jyn drags herself to her feet, then clings to my back. I can feel her trembling. “Sai, run .”

“Run, run, run,” the man echoes, his whole body jittery like a jumping spider. He stands naked, his limbs shriveled and each one of his ribs prominent enough to count. He’s more skeleton than human, whatever humanity he had having died ages ago. “Run from me? That… makes me so sad. So long since new friends came last. So long since dinner.”

There’s no calming my skittering heartbeat. Reaching back, I take Jyn’s hand in my own. “Please,” I say, trying and failing to keep my voice level. “We really must get going.”

“Four moons,” he croaks. “Four moons since the wisps trapped me down here. So… so hungry.”

My mind reels. I don’t understand how he’s managed to survive down here. I can only assume that these cursed wisps have something to do with it, stringing him along with their magic long enough for him to make it to his next meal. In this case— us .

Jyn’s fear runs so cold over our connection that it almost scalds my hand, like I’ve dipped it into a bucket of ice water. While I can’t read her thoughts, I’m still able to sense her frustration scraping along the sides of our bond. She’s still in a terrible state, lucky to be standing. I can tell she wants to shift, to transform into the mightier version of herself, but the rolling sickness in her stomach blocks the free flow of her magic. She’s in no condition to fight after our disastrous narrow escape from the emperor’s crows.

Her safety lies solely in my hands.

We take a deliberate step back. He takes a step forward.

Something crunches underfoot. Bones.

Human bones.

“Sai,” Jyn says tightly.

The man takes another threatening step forward. Saliva spills from his lipless mouth, thick globs dripping down the point of his sharp chin. “Just a bite,” he says with a maniacal laugh. “Just a bite!”

He lunges toward us with such alarming speed that we have no time to retreat. He latches onto my arm with force, digging his sharp nails into my flesh as he bites straight through my hand. A scream rips itself from my throat as he gnaws my forefinger off at the base knuckle. The disgusting crunch of my finger between his teeth leaves me sick with nausea, too dizzy to catch myself before I stumble onto my back.

He’s on top of me in an instant, slicing through the skin of my arms, my chest, my throat. He smells so putrid that it makes me gag. I kick and punch, doing whatever I can to throw the monster off. My own blood drips from his mouth, coating my face with spit and the smell of iron.

“So… juicy .”

Disgust and panic swirl within me, but there’s not a second to waste. I wrap my legs around the crazed man’s hips and lock him to my body, screaming over his rotting shoulder.

“Jyn, run! Go!”

“I’m not leaving you here!” she yells, leaning heavily against the cave wall for balance.

“There’s no time to argue! Find a way out while you still can.”

The monster throttles me, wrapping his long, rotten fingers around my throat. He’s missing a few of his nails, one or two of the remaining ones dangling by their nail beds. He squeezes so hard that I swear I feel my windpipe collapse beneath the force. Leaning forward, he licks a stripe up my cheek. Goose bumps break out across my flesh.

“I will save you for later—oh, yes! A nice big meal. The pretty one will be a nice snack—such a nice snack!”

“Take your hands off him!” Jyn shrieks, charging from behind.

She’s grabbed a long bone from off the ground—a femur, I think—one of its ends having happened to be broken off into a sharp point. She lances him through the back, piercing him straight through the chest. The sound he makes is disgustingly wet, but he’s nowhere near dead. I’m the one who must finish the job.

I throw him off me, clambering on top as quickly as I can to keep him pinned beneath my weight.

A blazing heat surges forth from my core, my fear unexpectedly erupting into uncontrollable anger. My mind blanks. Nothing matters except the crack of my knuckles against his jaw, the fading light from this monster’s eyes, the twitch of his fingers as I beat him past the point of submission.

I’m not myself. This unshakable frenzy can’t be explained. There’s no way to describe the thrum in my veins, the fire that spurs me on. It singes down to the tips of my toes, builds in an enormous pressure behind my eyes, tastes like bitter charcoal on my tongue. Something inside me is changing, but I’m so consumed by this sudden bloodlust that I don’t register anything except the sound of my fists beating his head in like a drum.

Even as his red thread of fate turns black and begins to dissolve away, I don’t regain control. I can’t.

And it feels good . To be the one on top. To let out all this rage and hatred.

Shouldn’t he be with the other conscripts?

Probably weaseled his way out of it.

I have seen too much of it. Death upon death upon death.

Fight or die, you coward!

I have seen too much suffering, inflicted upon myself as well as others.

This is what you deserve, maggot.

How nice it is to finally be the one to strike. If I hurt him first, then he can’t hurt me. I want to lash out at the world, to tear this man limb from limb. I’m so frightened of this feeling. All I wanted was to walk away. To protect Jyn. If he had only listened—why didn’t he just listen ?

“Sai!” Jyn’s voice cuts through my thoughts with crystalline clarity. “Sai, enough!” She drags me off the dead man, staring at the mess I’ve made in abject horror.

I slowly come back to my senses. My hands shake, my knuckles are swollen and bruised. My fingers are stained crimson, bits of his flesh beneath my nails. I, too, am revolted at what I see.

“What… what just happened?”

Jyn collapses to her knees and reaches out with unsteady hands. She cups my face, a look of bewilderment on her own.

“Is something the matter?” I ask.

She pauses, shakes her head. “It’s nothing.”

I can’t catch my breath. The clawing in my lungs returns. Now that the adrenaline is fading, every inch of my body aches. Dread crawls its way down my spine.

“I… killed him,” I mutter. “I didn’t mean—” I choke on a sob that catches in my throat.

The gravity of my actions bears down on me with a vengeance. I fixate on the sticky warmth of his blood on my hands, splattered across my face. It is the bits of bone stuck to my skin that break me. Tears well in my eyes, my heart twisting within my rib cage. I must look every bit as monstrous as I feel.

“Jyn, what have I… He had a Fated One. His thread… I saw it. Someone out there was waiting for him, and I—”

“Calm down, Sai.”

“But it’s my fault! We could have helped him. Why didn’t I stop?”

Jyn looks deep into my eyes, our faces so close that I can feel her breath whisper against my cheeks. The tip of her nose bumps mine.

“It was a mercy,” she tells me firmly. “A mercy , do you understand? You saw the state he was in.”

“No,” I rasp. “It was murder; I felt his life slip away at my touch.”

“Do you really think his Fated One would want to see him like that?”

“And instead not know what happened to him at all?”

Anguish is etched into her expression. “Believe me,” she murmurs, casting her eyes down. “Sometimes, when it’s clear they are doomed for tragedy, it’s for the best.”

I want to ask her what she means by this. Her every word is colored with unspeakable grief, with an experience I can’t see. What in her past haunts her so? Her melancholy subsides after a moment. Slowly, Jyn wipes my tears away with the pads of her thumbs. Her touch is so gentle that I can’t help but feel soothed.

“It was him or us,” she says firmly. “Don’t let it weigh on your heart, Sai.”

We remain there a while longer, my face cupped in her hands, our foreheads pressed together as we breathe in a matched rhythm. I stop trembling eventually, regaining some semblance of myself. I feel better. Just by a hair.

“Are you hurt?” I ask, breaking the silence. My voice feels far too loud for my own ears.

“My ankle…,” she admits. “I must have sprained it when we fell. But never mind me, let me look at your—”

Jyn reaches gingerly for my injured hand. When we both look down to inspect the damage, we stop. My jaw drops open. My missing finger has grown back . The skin is pink and tender, my knuckle throbbing where the man’s teeth chewed clean through. I turn my hand over and back, reeling. Now that I think about it, the vision in my ruined eye has faded back in as well. If the emaciated underground cave dweller wasn’t enough to send me over the edge, this is bound to do it.

“I don’t understand,” I murmur. “How can this be? It’s as if by—”

“Magic,” she finishes for me, thoughtful and perplexed.

“Is it a lingering effect of the blood you fed me before?”

Her brows furrow into a deep frown. “No, this… this is something else.”

“Like what?” I tilt my head to the side, studying her. She holds something conflicted in her dark gaze. Contemplative. Secretive. “Do you know something?”

“We must find a way out of this place before hunger reaches us,” she deflects.

I glance down at the dead man beside us. It would certainly be a cruel fate to end up like him. He said he’d been trapped down here for four moons; I shudder at the bones beneath us, wondering how many other poor souls were led here only to be devoured. Were it not for Jyn, I might well have been next.

If she notices the way our thread of fate has begun to take on more and more color, she says nothing of it. I don’t draw attention to it despite my lightheaded reverie, fearing that she may once again cut the process short. The thread is nowhere near fully restored, but it’s transforming with every passing second. It twists and it weaves, binding itself together where once it looked seconds away from breaking apart, the center of it becoming a richer, deeper crimson hue. The ends connected to our fingers may still be gray and unraveling, but with enough time…

“Do you have the strength to transform and fly us out of here?” I ask.

“We don’t know how deep underground we are. If we’re not close to the surface and I try to break through, there’s a good chance the cave will collapse and bury us alive.”

I sigh heavily. “Not ideal.”

We help each other to our feet. Jyn slings her arm over my shoulder while I circle mine around her waist. She leans against me heavily, shifting uncomfortably on her injured foot. Silently, we both search for a way out of this hell.

A wisp appears before us, floating ominously a few feet away. A whole line of them appear, one by one, leading down what looks to be a long, narrow tunnel. There’s another narrow tunnel next to it, our path forward forking into two. The wisps want us to go right.

“This way,” I say, helping Jyn turn so that we stumble left.

They won’t make a fool of me twice.