Chapter 2 #2
My body moved without thought, without plan. I threw myself forward, not away from danger but toward the drake, spreading my arms wide to make myself as large as possible. My ribs screamed where the package pressed against them, my tailbone sent lightning up my spine, but I didn't care.
"No!" The word ripped from my throat, raw and desperate. "He's just a baby! He didn't do anything wrong!"
Rovik laughed, the sound sharp as breaking glass.
"Protecting a drake? With what, your skinny body?
" He took a step closer, crossbow adjusting its aim to follow my movement.
"You think I care about some lizard? Step aside, thief.
Lord Solmar wants his package, and I'll take it from your corpse if I have to. "
"He's not just some lizard." I didn't know where the words came from, only that they burned coming out. "He's—look at him. Really look. He's beautiful and innocent and he doesn't deserve to die because I ran into him."
"Deserve?" Rovik's laugh turned uglier, meaner. "Nothing down here deserves anything except what it can take or defend. And you can't defend shit, girl. You're half-dead already. Bleeding, shaking, probably pissed yourself for all I know. What are you going to do, bleed on us?"
The guards laughed at that, moving to better positions, triangulating their approach. They'd done this before, cornered desperate people in dark places.
But I didn't move. Couldn't move. Something fundamental in me, something that went deeper than thought or reason, refused to let harm come to this creature.
Maybe it was because I'd spent so many years protecting Mica, the only innocent thing in my life.
Maybe it was because I'd just given three precious coppers to a boy with bone-white arms. Or maybe it was simply that I'd found something beautiful in all this ugliness, and I'd rather die defending it than live knowing I'd let it be destroyed.
"Just—let the drake go. He's nothing to you. I'll give you what you want, but let him leave first."
"You'll give me what I want either way," Rovik said, and his finger tightened on the trigger.
Behind me, I felt movement. The drake—this baby dragon I was trying to shield with my pathetic human body—peeked around my hip. His golden-green eyes took in the scene, the men with their weapons, the violence promised in their stances.
The hiss that emerged from his small throat was trying so hard to be fierce.
A baby sound attempting to be terrible, like a kitten trying to roar.
His wings spread slightly, membranes catching the light, and I could feel the heat coming off him in waves.
Not quite fire, not yet, but the promise of it. The potential.
It was adorable. It was heartbreaking. It was absolutely not going to stop what was about to happen.
"Aw," one of the guards mocked. "The little lizard thinks it's scary."
Rovik's finger completed its squeeze.
But the bolt never found its mark.
The temperature plummeted first, so fast and hard that my next breath came out in a visible cloud. Then it spiked, heat washing over me in waves that made the steam swirl in impossible patterns. The chamber itself seemed to inhale, drawing in on itself before—
The stone groaned. Not the groan of age or settling, but something alive, something responding.
The crystalline veins in the walls flared bright as midday sun, then dimmed to ember-glow, pulsing in a rhythm that matched no heartbeat I'd ever felt.
Through my knees where they pressed against the floor, I felt vibrations that started deep and rose through octaves I couldn't hear, only feel in my bones.
The bolt was slapped from the air by . . . something? A rock? Falling earth? It moved too fast to see.
Something was coming. Not through the passages like Rovik had. Through the stone itself.
The wall behind Rovik didn't break. It crumbled, dissipated, eroded. It fell like rain. And what emerged through that absence was so far beyond my ability to process that my mind simply stopped, caught between one thought and the next.
It was a force of nature. A force of magic. It was a dragon. The dragon.
His scales were black granite, the deep black that ate light, but veined through with quartz that pulsed with its own inner fire.
Each scale was the size of my hand, some larger, interlocking in patterns that hurt to follow with human eyes.
They weren't just armor—they were architecture, each one precisely placed to channel force and deflect harm.
The light from the walls caught in those quartz veins and refracted, creating halos of color that shouldn't exist.
His head alone was larger than my entire body, wedge-shaped and elegant despite its massive size.
Eyes like pools of molten copper, not just the color but the heat, the weight, the sense of something that could reshape itself into any form but chose this one.
When those eyes fixed on the men with the weapons, I felt the air itself recoil.
He moved.
It happened faster than something that large should be able to move, with a grace that belonged to water, not stone.
His tail swept out in what looked like a casual gesture, the way I might brush away a fly.
But when it connected with the guard holding the cudgel, the man didn't fly backward or crumple or scream.
He pressed into the wall.
The stone accepted him like he'd always been part of it, flowing around his shape, embracing him.
For one heartbeat, I could see his outline in the rock, arms spread, mouth open in a scream that never made sound.
Then the wall smoothed over, leaving only a subtle bulge in the surface.
A place where the stone was slightly more convex than it should be.
The guard with the blade tried to run. His boots skidded on the wet stone, legs pumping with the frantic energy of prey that knew it was already dead. He made it three steps—impressive, considering—before a taloned foot the size of a wine barrel came down.
The sound was wet. Specific. The kind of sound that would live in my nightmares forever—bones giving way, organs compressing, all the complicated machinery of a human body suddenly occupying much less space than it was designed for.
The dragon—Garruk, this had to be Lord Garruk—lifted his foot with the same casual indifference, and what remained wasn't recognizable as having ever been human.
My stomach turned itself inside out, but nothing came up. Nothing to come up. Just dry heaves that made my ribs scream where the package pressed against them.
Rovik, though. Rovik had survived in Zarathos territories by being smarter than his victims, quicker than his competitors. While his men died, he was already moving, crossbow swinging up—not toward me or the dragon, but toward the ceiling.
The bolt flew true, striking a natural fault in the stone where thermal stress had created weakness over centuries.
The crack was immediate, spreading like black lightning across the ceiling's surface.
Chunks of stone began to fall—not enough to harm a dragon, but enough to create chaos, distraction.
Rovik dove for a side passage I hadn't even seen, hidden behind a fold in the chamber wall. His purple coat billowed behind him as he ran, and for a moment I thought the dragon would follow, would chase him down and finish what he'd started.
But Garruk moved over us instead—over me and the small drake I was still pointlessly trying to shield.
His massive body curved above us, wings spreading to create a canopy as rocks rained down.
Each impact on his scales rang like granite bells, musical notes in a composition written by violence.
Dust filled the air, coating everything in grey film that tasted of centuries.
The roar that erupted from him when he realized Rovik had escaped made my bones feel like they were liquefying.
It wasn't just sound—it was force, making the entire Sanctum tremble, sending new cracks racing across already damaged stone.
Somewhere in the passages, I heard Rovik's footsteps getting fainter, faster, gone.
The dragon's fury was a living thing, heating the air until it hurt to breathe.
Through the gaps in his protective stance, I could see his tail lashing, sending fragments of stone flying like shrapnel.
His claws gouged trenches in the floor that glowed cherry-red at the edges, stone turned molten by the force of his rage.
But he didn't pursue. Didn't abandon us to chase down the man who'd dared threaten what was his. He stayed, wings spread, body curved, protecting.
The silence that followed was deafening.
Just the soft patter of settling dust, the hiss of steam from disturbed vents, and my own ragged breathing.
The small drake beside me made a questioning chirp, seemingly unconcerned by the violence, the death, the transformation of his chamber into an abattoir.
Above us, the dragon's breathing was like wind through mountain passes—deep, rhythmic, controlled despite the fury I could still feel radiating from him. One of his eyes, large as a dinner plate, rotated to look down at us. At me, specifically.
The intelligence in that gaze was ancient, vast, tinged with exhaustion that had nothing to do with physical effort. He'd killed two men in less than ten seconds, turned them into cautionary tales, and now he was looking at me like I was a problem he didn't know how to solve.
Between one breath and the next, the dragon ceased.
There was no dramatic transformation, no slow melting of scale into skin.
One moment, massive wings sheltered me from falling stone.
The next, a man stood where physics said no man could have fit, like he'd always been there and my eyes had simply been too human to see correctly.
If any being that magnificent could be called merely a man.