Chapter 45
Forty-Five
Midas noticed the changes in his body before anyone else did.
A dropped bowl that didn’t quite get caught in time. A wince when bending to lift one of the boys. A flicker of irritation in his eyes when someone asked for something when he was trying to relax.
Midas had been shifting into his human form every sunrise for weeks now—longer than ever before.
His horns and tail remained, a tether to his truer self, but the rest of him was soft and tired and wrong.
His blood felt slow. His breath shallow.
His strength was leaving him, quietly, like steam escaping through cracks.
But Midas was a stubborn creature, and so he did not give himself the time to heal his exhausted body.
Elowen still cried in the night. His boys still wanted to roughhouse with him.
He still needed to hunt for meat and patrol the skies to ensure his den was safe.
These were things only he could do, and so he forced himself to be strong for his family.
But that strength required the fire inside him that only guttered lower each day with every shift.
One morning, he was near the cave’s entrance after returning from a hunt. The limp deer fell from his teeth and he couldn’t stop himself from collapsing to the cave floor. He told himself he would rest for only a moment.
Just a moment…
The boys were the ones that found him, bounding toward him with their endless energy, ready to beg to take to the skies with him.
Their intuition told them there was something wrong with Midas before they approached.
They had never seen him slumped over in this state.
Whenever Midas slept, he was always somehow still alert—but this was different.
He did not move when the boys climbed over his body, and did not answer them when they nudged him.
Kalen made his way to the top of his head, between his horns, and snuggled into the space where it had always been warm before. This time though, Kalen felt the absence of heat, and his instincts instantly put him on alert.
Auric, he said. Papa is cold.
At first, Auric thought Kalen was teasing and that Midas was simply asleep, but then he looked closer. His chest rose and fell in shallow, shaky breaths, and when Auric moved closer, he too felt that unnatural coldness radiating from Midas’ body where he had only felt warmth before.
Auric nuzzled Midas’ face with his own. Papa?
When Midas didn’t respond, Auric ran straight to his mother, heart stuttering and his mind racing with fear of the unknown. As he came up to his mother, washing a bowl in a basin of water, he shifted and frantically tugged on Elowen’s skirt.
“Mama, Papa is cold.”
Elowen hummed, not understanding. “What do you mean?”
Auric tugged her again, more aggressively this time, enough to make her stumble. “Come look!”
She followed her son to the mouth of the cave, where panic immediately overtook her at the sight of Midas. She dropped to her knees beside him, hands cupping his face.
“Love,” she whispered. “Midas. Look at me.”
He tried. He did. But he was fading.
“What happened? Are you hurt?”
He shook his head, barely.
I wanted… His voice cracked. To stay close. To hold you.
She looked to her boys for translation, and then tears began to well in her eyes. “You have held me,” she said, tears spilling over. “But you’re burning out. You need rest.”
The boys clung to each other behind her, terrified, silent.
Elowen pressed her forehead to his. “Please.”
He tried to stand, but instead slumped, exhausted, his great head resting on the ground beside her. The boys rushed forward, pressing themselves to his massive chest, feeling the unnaturally slow thump of his heart.
Elowen stood, stroking the side of his face.
He closed his eyes, drifting into rest forced upon him by exhaustion.
Midas slept for nearly two days—scales pulsing faintly with heat, wings curled tight around his body, heart beating slow and heavy beneath his ribs.
Elowen never left his side.
She cleaned the cold sweat from his brow. She stroked his neck after. She wrapped his tail in blankets to protect it from the chill, and whispered to him in the dark when his breathing stuttered.
And the boys became guardians in their own right.
They took turns bringing him water and meat like they’d watched Elowen do. They lied against his side when he trembled in his sleep. They collected smooth stones and carved little sigils into them that Midas had taught them—symbols of protection, healing, flame, and family.
“He always watches us,” Kalen whispered. “Now we watch him.”
Elowen wept quietly at those words, brushing their hair back with shaking hands.
And yet, something cold was stirring in her gut.
If any of the humans had seen him in this state, or even suspected that he could be weak, they would come for their nest. And the boys, still too young, would not be able to fight off the humans themselves if they came.
This worry weighed heavily on Elowen, who knew firsthand of the cruelty of the humans, and every time the cave shifted, she flinched.
After two more days, the wind changed.
Elowen noticed how still the air had become. How the birds had stopped calling. How even the bees avoided the growing flowers at the cave mouth. Midas stirred that night, groggy and weak.
He rasped what she had assumed was her name in the language of the dragons. She leaned in. “I’m here.”
Against his better judgement, and against Elowen’s frantic protests, Midas shifted into his human form once more. She held his head against her chest, and when he looked up at her, his even his eyes seemed duller.
“You don’t need to exhaust yourself,” Elowen begged. “The boys and I managed while you were resting. We are okay.”
“How long?”
She ran her fingers down his long hair. “Just a few days.”
“Too long—”
“No. You needed it, my love. You’re still weak. You have to stop shifting so much.”
Midas sighed against the steady beat of her heart in her chest. “The mountain feels wrong,” he said, causing Elowen to stiffen. “It’s too still.”
Her hand cupped his cheek. “You’re just tired, it’s nothing.”
But she didn’t believe it, and knew that he was too weak to argue.
She held him for a moment before the twins joined, elated that their father was finally awake.
They were intelligent boys, and understood he was still weak, so they carefully curled against him as if to use the fire in their chests to reignite his.
Then came the smell of smoke that came from none of them, nor did it come from the hearth or a cooking fire.
This smoke was wrong—acrid, wild, hungry. Midas lifted his head sharply, nostrils flaring. His body ached. His limbs shook.
“Someone has found us.”
Elowen stood pale and frozen. She had predicted this very thing, and her fears had become realized so soon after she was relieved to see Midas awake.
The boys looked up, their faces wide with dread.
Midas tried to stand and shift back to his beast form. He collapsed.
“I can’t—” he snarled. “I can’t shift again.”
Elowen rushed to him, cradling his face. “Then don’t. We will run. We will hide.”
“No,” he said. “You hide. I protect.”
Metal against stone dragged against their ears: a taunt from the humans before shouts followed. Torches, steel, and armored boots closed in on their hidden home.
Midas stood at the mouth of the cave, panting, one arm braced against the wall, his chest rising and falling in shallow gasps.
He could not shift. He could feel the dragon inside him screaming—begging to rise—but there was nothing left to give. He had no heat nor strength.
Behind him, Elowen gripped the boys tightly, her voice low and shaking. She pushed them in the opposite direction. “Go. Deep into the cave. Now.”
“But—” Kalen began.
“Now!”
They flinched. Elowen had never raised her voice like that. Her eyes were wide with panic. Her hand trembled as she touched their shoulders, and for only the second time in their young lives, they saw what they hoped to never see again: fear in their parents’ eyes.
“Listen to me,” she said, kneeling before them. “When I find you in a moment, you stay with me. You do not leave my side. No matter what you hear.”
Kalen’s lip wobbled. “But Papa—”
“Your father will protect us. But our job is to stay alive, to run and hide. Do you understand?”
They nodded, tears already forming.
Elowen pushed them along and then turned to Midas, who was watching her. She stepped forward and cupped his face, kissed him hard and fast.
“I love you,” she whispered. “You don’t stop fighting. You hear me? We will be okay. I promise.”
He nodded once. And then she turned, and disappeared into the shadows of the cave with their children. The last thing Midas heard from them was the echo of small feet retreating into darkness.
They came in fast with the reckless, violent momentum of those who sought to destroy legends once and for all.
Boots struck the once serene stones of the cave.
Their shadows reflected on the walls from their torches, transforming their shapes into distorted beasts of chaos with every step closer they took.
At least thirty of them—men in iron and leather, faces painted with soot, blades drawn.
Some bore crossbows, others curved axes, each one marked by fear masquerading as righteousness.
They had hunted beasts before, of course.
They knew what it was like to corner prey.
And the sight of Midas, alone and in human form, gave them confidence.
He stood protectively with his back to the deeper tunnels of the cave where his family hid. His shoulders were square despite his trembling, and his hair was wet and matted with the sweat of anxiety.
“The dragon lives in a man’s skin,” one said, disgusted at the sight. “Let’s see how he dies in it.”
Midas didn’t give them the satisfaction of an answer. He simply stepped forward, pulling whatever will was buried in him to once again become the beast of legends that they feared.
He was slower. Weaker. The strain of exhaustion burned through his remaining fire like poison.
It stirred his chest, but he could not reach it.
He could not bring it forward. His dragon instincts shifted inside of him restlessly and furiously, exhausted beyond anything he had felt before.
Every movement hurt—but he moved like a cornered creature, desperate and afraid and acting on pure instinct.
He had chosen love over survival, over protection, and now he had naught but claws at the tips of his awkward human hands to defend his family with.
Steel rushed toward him. Cuts painted his fragile human skin.
His heartbeat pounded with fear and his knuckles were torn down to the bone.
Pain bloomed from every inch of his body, but he could not let them see him fall.
He ducked beneath a blade, drove his fist into a jaw, elbowed a second man in the throat.
He fought without elegance or restraint or even reason. Blood slicked along the cavern floor from both man and beast.
But there were too many.
They adjusted. Observed his weak points in this man-flesh. They tightened their circle around him and fought on relentlessly until he was forced to his knees. White hot pain followed a crack of a whip, but he found his footing once more. He could not afford to fall.
Five of them slipped past to try and make their way deeper into the den. Midas snarled, lunging for them, arms closing around empty air as they vanished into the shadows as the others whipped and slashed and beat Midas back down to his knees.
Still, Midas didn’t fall to their weapons. He could not. For hiding behind him deep in the cave lay everything he loved.
But he did not know their fate had already found them.