Chapter 41
HEMMING
I watched her fall…
Chained to the wall, unable to stop the horrifying scene playing out before me, I watched as her scorched body plummeted from the sky like a wounded bird. The beast inside me rammed his way to the surface, but he could not penetrate the paralyzing fear that coursed through me—or the iron that bound him—as she descended toward the ground at a harrowing pace. She crashed so hard that it took a moment for the dust to clear enough to see if she moved. If she was still alive.
I swore I didn’t breathe until she lifted her head.
Then the terror in her eyes took that breath away once more.
The golden dragon lingered in the background, pacing as though uncertain what its next course of action should be, and I channeled the fear overtaking me into anger, willing Ariel to hear me as I shouted commands at her to get up. Move. Do anything to save herself. But with that look on her face, I just knew…
Something was horribly wrong.
ARIEL
A terrible crunching sound marked my crash to the ground. I’d somehow survived the fall, but I wondered how long I could stay alive in my broken state.
My wings had been destroyed. The side of my body that had faced the dragon was naked and charred. My left arm throbbed, clearly broken from the fall; my right appeared not to have fared much better. And the pressure in my head seemed to increase with every passing breath. I wondered if I’d split my skull when I landed—but that wasn’t what concerned me most.
It was the complete and utter lack of pain I felt everywhere else.
I should have been in agony from the burns that covered my body from the chest down, and the fact that I felt nothing at all set off alarm bells in my mind.
The hot breath of the dragon gusted over me as it approached, its rhythmic steps haunting me like the drumming of a funeral dirge, and I dragged my head up from the sand to see how far away it was. What I found instead was Hemming, Eldrien, and Shayfer staring at me from their cage in the distance. Eldrien was pale, his mouth agape as he looked on helplessly. Shayfer’s wide eyes were filled with fear. And Hemming raged like a feral beast, trying to escape his restraints as he screamed my name. Even over the raucous crowd, I could hear his demanding voice.
“Get up, Ariel!” he roared as he tried to rip his manacles off. “You have to get up!”
And he was right. The ever-stronger reverberations of the dragon’s steps echoing through my chest told me so.
With great effort, I managed to position my right hand beneath me and press up onto it, hauling my torso out of the dirt. But when I tried to lift my hips and tuck my legs underneath me, nothing happened. A new kind of panic surged through me as I attempted to bend my legs or tuck my toes—anything that could help me get to my feet. But still, nothing moved.
Nothing even stirred.
The reason for the lack of pain in my lower body crashed down upon me like I had the ground only moments before. The fall had not only broken my arm, but my back as well.
My torso collapsed back to the sand, and I lifted my eyes to Hemming’s, tears welling as the noose of fate tightened around my throat. I had escaped one death only to be ensnared by another, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
As the weight of the truth settled upon me, I reached my right hand out toward him—a futile plea for help, because he had always been my protector, the one to keep me safe at all costs. Selfishly, in that moment, I wanted nothing more than for him to break through those bars and slay the dragon about to kill me.
But we were no longer children, and this wasn’t one of his bedtime stories.
This time, the dragon would kill the princess and destroy the future the prince—and fate—had promised they would have together. Tears streamed down my face as I looked at the boy I still recognized in the man I loved and breathed his name as time ran out.
HEMMING
H er hand reached for me, and though it was far away, it dug deep into my chest and seized my heart. Everything stopped in that moment as she silently said goodbye, tears welling in her eyes. And then I watched her mouth form a word—‘ Hemmy ’—as she tried in vain to call for my help.
Her desperate plea left me as broken as she.
But not the beast.
He plunged to the forefront, forcing me backward until I hit the wall of the cell so hard that the stone cracked and crumbled. Shayfer had said that iron kept fae magic from working, but one look at the dragon hovering above Ariel’s helpless form, and I knew that even it would never be enough. A heinous sound ripped from my body as it morphed into the massive black monster, and the dragon’s eyes snapped toward our cell.
Dust filled the air as he kicked up debris from the prison wall and lowered his head.
Then he smashed through the bars as though they were nothing and charged the dragon.