Chapter 43 Vaylen
Vaylen
Heratrix folds her wings and drops beneath Vestra's fire column, the blast scorching the air where we were a heartbeat ago. Heat washes over my face as if brushing against the sun.
Left, she says in my mind, not a word but a direction, a certainty as sure as my own instincts. I lean. She pivots. My palms come up and wind explodes outward in a concentrated Wind Spear, hammering Vestra's shoulder. The false goddess stumbles sideways through the air, wings churning to recover.
Tahranis throws both arms wide and the sky answers. Fire and wind simultaneously, two elements braided together into a spiral that screams toward us like a drill.
I split their attack down its center seam with a blade of compacted earth. The fire and wind peel apart and disperse in different directions. My arm screams from the effort. My teeth lock together against the pain.
Diving toward us, Vestra snaps at his mother's throat. Her jaws close on nothing as Heratrix twists with impossible speed. Her enormous tail comes around in a wide arc, catching Vestra across the jaw with a crack I feel in my chest. My Tethers tighten, keeping me in place.
Vestra roars. The sound tears through the sky, and every dragon below flinches. Tahranis rights himself and his eyes find me across the gap between our dragons, and I see nothing resembling fear in them, only cold hatred that feels much older than his own age.
Fire explodes from his hands. He hurls it without warning, no wind-up, no tell. Two columns branch from his palms like a thrown net.
Metal erupts from the air, a ridge of defensive rock I didn't summon.
The feat shocks me, even though, through the bond, I understand Heratrix's power is different.
She can call metal to her out of thin air like SkyBlazes call fire.
She can do more than just manipulate what's already there.
The fire shatters against the wall in cascading sparks that rain down like embers.
Then we counter. Together.
I pour wind into her fire breath and what emerges is something that has no name, a white inferno that moves faster than fire has any right to, that bends and twists and seeks like a living thing.
It strips the air clean of moisture and scorches a black line across Vestra's underbelly, who shrieks and climbs hard, trying to put distance between us.
We don't let her.
Heratrix surges upward, powerful haunches driving us into a near-vertical ascent. My Tethers extend, allowing me to fold backward in one line with her. Cold air screams past. My lungs burn.
We crest above Vestra, and I bring both hands together.
Every element I possess rises in answer. Wind, ice, lightning, metal, stone, fire, all of it compressed into a single point of force that costs something vital to hold. My vision tunnels. My ears ring.
I release it.
The impact drives Vestra straight down, hard and fast, a comet trailing smoke and scattered scales. She pulls up before hitting the ground but only barely, wings hammering the air in desperate recovery.
When they steady, Tahranis's expression changes. He doesn't show fear, but something that might be respect, if he's capable of such a thing. But respect won't stop him. He's already jumping to action.
Both hands thrust forward and a column of superheated air slams into us, wind and fire, the two fused into something caustic that leaves my lungs dry in a single breath.
Just in time, I drag compressed air around us in a defensive shell.
The attack disperses across the barrier, but the force still rocks me backward, Tethers locking to keep me planted between the dragoness's horns.
She pivots hard left. I feel her composure through the bond, an immovable calm as old as time.
Suddenly, Vestra speaks, her voice sliding into Heratrix's mind like Tahranis's blade between my ribs. I feel it through our bond, a brush too intimate and wrong.
—Mother. The word carries nothing resembling affection. Your time ended long before you cursed me to useless slumber. You simply have not accepted it yet.
Heratrix says nothing, but grief moves through her like a storm, and I feel it in my own chest, whirling viciously.
—I am what you should have been. Vestra's voice sharpens, each syllable precise as a claw drawn across stone. A power like nothing before me. Nothing after. You were a beginning, Mother. I am the end of all beginnings.
Still Heratrix holds her silence.
—Step aside. The word lands like a final verdict. Let me rule what is always been fated to be mine. Something shifts in Vestra's presence. The cold voice withdraws from Heratrix's mind and pivots toward me.
I feel the attack before I realize what it is—not the elements as I know them, but something I can't name. It arrives as a sensation beneath my skin, a slow unraveling, like stitches being pulled from a wound one by one.
My Tethers flicker as my fingers go numb.
Slowly, the frigid feeling climbs to my wrists, then threads up through the tendons of my forearms. Unable to do anything, I watch in horror as my fingers start to dissolve into nothingness, and where Vestra's strange power touches, nothing remains.
There is no pain, no sensation. And then no flesh. Just absence.
Oh, fuck! I clench my jaw and drag wind into my lungs, forcing breath past the spreading cold of this nameless curse. Heratrix surges beneath me, closing the distance to attack, but the unraveling climbs faster than she flies.
My knees buckle.
—What is happening? Panic burns through me.
I drop to my knees on her scales. Stumps hang useless at my side, pale as ash.
The cold reaches my shoulders.
My vision splits—two sets of eyes, two bodies, one awareness.
Heratrix pulls me inward like I'm a drowning man clutching driftwood.
Her consciousness wraps around mine. She feels everything I feel.
The numbness climbing my throat, descending my chest. The trembling in my jaw.
Millennia of composure holds her against the tide of my terror, steadying us both, but only barely.
—Hold, she says, and the word is enormous, a mountain pressed into a single syllable.
Out of nowhere, Rhealyn comes at Vestra like the world splitting open. Zephyros drives the attack from above, haunches coiled, wings folded tight until the last possible moment.
With a battle cry, Rhealyn throws her arms wide.
The Wind Blast that erupts from her hands is unlike anything I've ever witnessed, air compressed beyond what wind should be capable of, threaded through with Zephyros's silver power and something vast and flickering pulled from Heratrix through the bond between us.
Vestra takes the full force of the attack across her back.
My unraveling stops.
Each breath costs more than the last. My lungs pull in air but nothing catches. It's like breathing through wet wool, like my chest has forgotten the mechanics of the thing.
I'm dying.
I fall to my side against Heratrix's scales and focus on her solidity. She's steady, a mountain that has never once considered crumbling. Peace pours through our bond and wraps around my panic before it can destroy me. Slowly she smothers it into something manageable.
In contract, Rhealyn is a tempest. Her fear for my life crashes into me through the tetrad bond. It stops when it meets the dragoness's protective embrace surrounding me, but still a part of it floods me with a single, wordless request.
—Stay.
It's not a command, but a plea, her love arriving like a fist closing around my heart, trying to hold it in rhythm by sheer force of will. I feel her reaching, fingers of pure desperation threading through the bond, attempting to anchor me to the living side of this.
My vision blurs. My heart stutters. Once. Twice. Then nothing.
Rhealyn's scream tears through the bond like lightning finding iron, and the blackness takes me whole.
I'm falling, sinking through obsidian waters that have no bottom, no surface. This is death then, not the end, but a passage to eternity. Which of the seven hells will claim me first? The descent feels endless, a spiraling path through nothingness.
Strange. I expected agony, but there's only this hollow weightlessness.
My body is gone. I am thought without form, memory without anchor.
Regret blooms like poison in what remains of me.
But it's not for duty unfulfilled or battles lost. What I regret is the time I squandered, every moment I could have spent loving Rhealyn instead of fighting against her, for the future we'll never have.
You will endure them all. Something seems to whisper in the void.
Each hell will take its turn with me. I accept this fate. It seems fitting that a Skyrider would be tormented by all six elements before finding his eternal home in the seventh hell.
First comes the fire.
It begins as a pinprick of heat at my center, expanding outward like a newborn sun. The calm evaporates. My nonexistent lungs scream as flames consume what isn't there. This is no ordinary burning. This is elemental fire, the essence of destruction itself, reaching beyond flesh to scorch the soul.
The flames spread until I'm nothing but agony in the void. Each lick of fire traces pathways through my being. I'm being fully unmade.
Except…
The pain suddenly concentrates where my arms should be.
Something pulls at the emptiness, stretching what isn't there into what once was.
Bone materializes from nothing, calcium crystallizing in geometric patterns.
Muscle fibers weave themselves into existence, strand by delicate strand.
Blood vessels branch and connect with agonizing precision. This isn't destruction.
It's creation.
—Heratrix!
Understanding crashes through me like thunder. The dragoness saw how Vestra unraveled me at the minute level, and now she reverses the process, copying the technique to rebuild what her daughter destroyed.
My chest explodes with sensation as lungs repair within the cavity. The first breath burns worse than any fire, oxygen searing newly formed tissue. My heart skips time and time again, then pounds with renewed purpose, pushing blood through vessels still knitting themselves into place.
Skin crawls across exposed muscle and sinew, pain firing with each millimeter of growth. It's exquisite, unbearable, and absolutely necessary. This is what birth must feel like.
—Live, commands a voice that exists both inside and outside me. Heratrix speaks directly into my consciousness.
I reach out through our connection, feeling Rhealyn's desperate hope and Zephyros's steady strength, while Heratrix's ancient resolve brings me back to life. They hold me, anchoring me to life as my body rebuilds itself.
Fingers sprout from my new hands, nerve endings screaming as they connect to my brain.
My bones realign, stacking into place with sickening cracks.
Every part of me is on fire, but it's the fire of rebirth.
This pain isn't punishment. It's redemption.
It's not the agony of the seven hells as I thought, but the suffering required to return to the world. To return to her.
I focus on Rhealyn's presence, letting her be my north star as I navigate back toward life. Her love pulls me from the void, stronger than any elemental force.
I stand on shaky legs, new muscles quivering under the strain.
The world snaps into focus, everything vibrant and overwhelming.
Sunlight caresses my skin with a warmth I never properly appreciated before dying.
The wind wraps around me, gentle as a lover's touch, carrying scents I can identify with preternatural clarity: scorched earth, dragon scales, blood, and more.
Rhealyn's love crashes through our bond and fills every corner of my being, bright as the sun and twice as powerful. Her relief and joy become mine in this shared consciousness.
My soul is radiant.
I've never felt so utterly, completely alive. Every part of me sings with heightened awareness. Colors are sharper, sounds clearer, sensations more intense. Death has stripped away some barrier between me and the world.
Across the battlefield, Tahranis's face contorts with disbelief.
While Vestra's massive form trembles with rage, her roar splitting the sky.
She underestimated Heratrix, as she always has.
Her arrogance blinds her to others' strengths, even her mother's.
Her fatal flaw has always been believing herself superior and beyond challenge.
She was wrong, and now she knows it.
Understanding floods from Heratrix to all. The knowledge of Vestra's technique for unraveling life itself is laid bare before us. It settles into our shared consciousness like poison. I stagger under its weight as my newly formed body trembles.
Dragon's breath! We could unmake anything. Anyone.
The thought chills me to my marrow. The power coursing through us now is wrong. No being should wield such dominion over life. With a thought, we could dissolve armies. With a gesture, reduce cities to dust. The very fabric of existence could become malleable in our hands.
—Vaylen? Rhealyn's shock weaves through my thoughts.
She can't believe this power is at our disposal. I feel her analyzing it, fearing it, but also giving it its proper place in a list of horrific, but sometimes necessary measures.
Could power like this corrupt us? The line between godhood and monstrosity feels thin, and I'm terrified of which side we might fall on when this battle ends. The question haunts me as I gather myself to continue fighting.
We must end this, but at what cost?