35. The Dragon
The Dragon
The man carried the worry. The dragon carried the woman.
The dragon was the oldest thing in this sky and the strongest thing under it, and he knew both facts the way he knew the wind.
This is not arrogance. Arrogance requires exaggeration.
He loved flying with Max on his back. He loved it more than his hoard. The wind screamed and he outran it. The speed pulled the world backward, and he made more speed.
The sky was his, horizon to horizon.
And riding the base of his neck was the woman he adored, solid and warm above his spine, small hands clenched to his scales, trusting him with her life.
When she stroked his neck, he rumbled. He was not ashamed of the rumbling. A king may purr in his domain.
She had talked to him for a while, out over the dark. He had liked that better than the stroking.
You liked me first. Before he did. Why?
Simple. She had walked into his fire and had not begged. Nothing that ever stood in his flame had failed to beg. Then she came out the other side with his flames dancing along her most intimate parts, concealing her from the eyes of a thousand soldiers.
He had known then that she was his.
The man had needed months to understand what the dragon knew in that first second. The man was a dumbass. No wonder Max had no patience for him.
And the man did not understand their future mate as the dragon did. She never showed the man her fear.
She showed the dragon.
He gave my sister his word. But what if we don’t return? Her voice had gone thin around the words.
He had growled at her, and the growl said he would carry her out of that dark with her heart still beating and set her down in front of the smaller one. The smaller one would throw her arms around his neck, and he would allow it.
He spread his wings wider when he heard the man’s thoughts. Sparks of dragon fire crawled along his scales where his heat met the cold air.
The man was worried sick about her. The dragon found this insulting.
Didn’t I rescue her from the Haven? he demanded into the shared skin. Didn’t I carry the smaller one to safety? Quiet now! This is quality time for Max and me, and you shall not spoil it.
Ahead, the DarkVeil stood against the dawn. The dragon’s eyes could pick out a rabbit’s twitch in the grass from a mountain’s height, and they found no end to it. Magnificent, in the way of great enemies. Terrifying, to things that could be terrified.
The dragon feared nothing and no one.
Two hundred wingbeats out. One hundred. The Veil’s pressure reached for him and dragged along his hide like an electric current, and above him Max’s thighs tightened and her weight went forward and low.
Good. His rider was ready.
He roared and pierced the Veil.
The shadow parted for him grudgingly, tearing across his snout and shoulders and wings in cold threads, and gave way. He knew what that mercy cost, and who paid it. Without Max on his back, the crossing would have been a war. With her, the dark merely tasted him and let go.
Then they were inside, and inside was another world.
The last time the dragon had been in the DarkVeil, he had only peeked out through Drakken’s eyes, a passenger at a slit window.
Nothing about that had prepared him for coming through in his own skin, with his own senses drinking it raw.
No sun. No sky. Shadow moved on every side in breathing walls, opening corridors and closing them, a country made of dusk that would not hold still.
And the path ahead was blocked.
Coldiron lightning walked the dark in front of them. Veins of metal-light forked up from the depths and across the black like the Veil’s own pulse. Hungry. Searching. Sentient.
Below it yawned the chasm, a wound in the world that went down past seeing, and far in that dark the hellfire churned. Its orange light came up the chasm walls and turned the shifting shadows red.
Shit, the man cursed inside him.
The dragon did not approve.
And the dragon did not fret over foes.
He drew breath along the burning length of himself and roared. He would defeat the shadow, the lightning, and the hellfire.
For Max.