Chapter 14
Fourteen
The cold night air slams into my lungs as the nether drake’s splintered wings catch the wind, propelling us higher into the star-strewn sky.
My hair whips around my face, and I squeeze my eyes shut, fingers gouging into the dragon’s slippery scales. The airborne sensations are staggering, the rush of the wind, the stomach-churning altitude, the unnatural movements of the drake’s body beneath me. I’ve never even ridden a horse.
Oh, and Falcen’s girth against my backside.
He hasn’t loosened his hold on my center, pinning me between his legs, and I’m appalled at how much I want to burrow into him, seeking safety.
Not safe, my ember reminds me.
My unwelcome internal friend is right. Nothing about this, or him, or the drake, is a comfort right now.
“You’re not going to die tonight, Veilbreaker.” Falcen’s wry voice is slow and steady in my ear. “Open your eyes. You need to see this.”
“Do I, though?”
Falcen’s chest moves on a deep sigh. “You’ll regret it if you don’t. It’s a rare gift to see the world from our gods’ perspective.”
I force my eyes open and immediately wish I hadn’t. The ground is a dizzying distance below, the jagged peaks of the Brimhall mountains reduced to mere lumps.
But it’s not the altitude that steals the air from my lungs. It’s the shimmering tears in the fabric of reality itself, gaping wounds that ooze sickly violet light along their edges.
Veil tears.
As if sensing my unease, the nether drake banks closer to one of the festering portals. The closer we get, the more I feel my magick reacting, ribbons of my power lashing out to mingle with the Void. Reaching.
NOT SAFE, my ember screams, its haggard cry chewing into my mind.
“Falcen, I don’t like this,” I say over the wind.
Stop getting so close to the tear, I beg of the drake. It’s doing something to me.
The drake’s quiet laughter joins my screaming ember. I know.
“Focus!”
Falcen’s command cuts through the haze of wind and panic. He releases my stomach long enough to grab one of my hands and pull it in, settling back against the soft flesh of my center. He squeezes while he shouts, “Don’t release your magick here!”
I try to ground myself in the feeling of his calloused palm against mine, to his solid chest at my back. But it’s like trying to hold on to smoke.
As we skim past the tear, reality cleaves in half.
For a heart-stopping moment, I’m no longer on the drake’s back, but standing in a blasted hellscape, the ground beneath my feet throbbing like an infected wound.
Shapes move in the poisonous fog, twisted, slobbering things that skitter at the edges of my vision.
Then Falcen hugs me so tight I can’t breathe, and I’m wrenched back to the present. I gasp, my heart a crowbar against my ribs.
“What was that?” I rasp. “I saw ... I felt ...”
“The Void,” Falcen replies in my ear. “You’re resonating with the tears. We need to be careful.”
No shit, I think, a little hysterically.
The world spins in a dizzying kaleidoscope of colors. The bilious incandescence of the drake’s rotting flesh, the bruised red of the roiling clouds, the angry peaks of charred mountains.
I instinctively press back against Falcen. “Everything looks wrong.”
“The barrier between our world and the Void is thin near the tears. You’re seeing glimpses into that realm now.”
As if to punctuate his words, a tendril of oily black smoke curls out from a ripple in the air ahead of us. It reaches for me with grasping fingers. I shrink away, bile rising in my throat.
The drake shrieks, a sound like nails on glass, and veers sharply. The smoke recoils, but not before brushing against my cheek. Ice floods my veins at the contact, a glacial cold that has nothing to do with the wind whipping past us.
“Falcen,” I choke out, my voice small and frightened even to my own ears.
“This is just a small taste of what the Soulren face every day. Of what you’ll face. You must endure it.”
I want to laugh at that, a guffawing bubble rising in my chest. As if I have a choice. As if any of this was my goal in life.
But I swallow it down, forcing myself to meet Falcen’s gaze over my shoulder. In his eyes, I see a glimmer of understanding, of shared burden. It steadies me, somewhat.
We’re forced to break eye contact when the drake shudders beneath us, and I realize with a start that she’s phasing, too, her form flickering between corporeal flesh and ethereal shadow. Nausea roils in my gut as we slide between realms.
Falcen answers the tearful question written all over my face. “The drake, it’s drawn to the Veil tear. It’s like a beacon to its kind.”
Of course. I should have realized. Nether drakes feed on the resonance that leaks from the tears, the exposed, untamed power of the Void. And now, with my own magick surging out of control, I’m like a damn feast laid out before her.
Falcen’s hand releases mine to press against the drake’s neck, his soul-glyphs flaring to life. I feel the bolt of his magick, a controlled, focused burst, go into the drake.
If I thought the drake’s shriek was upsetting before, it was downright terrifying now.
Her rage floods my mind, hot and boundless, but no words. Just an image of Falcen’s body broken on rocks, his soul-glyphs dark and still, her hatchlings circling.
But whatever he did seems to stabilize our mount despite her mind-deafening resistance.
“You can control her?” I ask, twisting to look at him again.
His jaw is clenched tight, his eyes shimmering with residual power. “Yes, which is precisely why they don’t like me.”
I can’t help but let out a slightly hysterical laugh. “You don’t say.”
“It doesn’t need to be happy with me. It just needs to obey.”
Falcen stares long and hard into my eyes, letting me know that he means me, too.
I want my stare to sear holes in him or to say something scathing, but the drake’s image of Falcen’s dead body tumbles around my mind, a promise of violence barely held in check. I shiver, and not just from the biting cold of the altitude.
Falcen’s brow furrows. “You’re trembling.”
“Well, that tends to happen when you’re dragged into an interdimensional joyride on the back of a creature that wants to eat you,” I snap, my nerves frayed to their breaking point.
His lips twitch, though whether from amusement or annoyance, only he knows. “The drake won’t harm you. Not while I’m here.”
“How reassuring,” I mutter.
If only he knew the incredibly gory details she keeps reciting about what she wants to do to him the instant she’s able to.
As if to spite his oath, the drake chooses that moment to barrel roll, her massive form twisting in the air. I yelp, scrabbling for purchase on her slick scales. Falcen’s arm winds around my waist again, his chest a solid wall at my back as we spin through the night sky.
When we level out, I’m breathing hard, my heart attempting to vomit itself out of my mouth.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I groan.
“Please don’t,” Falcen says dryly. “I’d rather not experience that particular indignity.”
I wish I could vomit on command just to piss him off. “How much longer?”
He stays silent, unrepentant and deliberately not answering. In the ghoulish light of the Veil tears, his eyes are more gold than blue, unearthly and unsettling. A reminder of what he is.
I’m not sure which scares me more, the eldritch horrors biting at the edges of our realm, or the man encircling me and keeping me there.
I look away from him first, focusing on the landscape below. We’ve left the mountains behind, soaring now over a vast expanse of disfigured, blackened trees.
The Blightwood. Even from this distance, I can feel the wrongness emanating from it, a creeping malevolence that sets my teeth on edge.
As we fly over the ash-soaked remnants of the forest, a loathsome sensation unfurls from the depths of my being. It’s like a thousand ants marching beneath my skin, their skittering legs tickling my nerves to the point of torture.
At first, I try to ignore it, to focus on the rhythm of the drake’s wings and the solidity of Falcen at my back. But the feeling only intensifies, building and building until it’s a scream inside my head.
Something is coming, my ember whispers. Then again, louder. Something is coming. Something is coming something is coming something is—
My ember’s frantic chant melds with my own rising panic. I grip the drake’s scales, desperately trying to ground myself.
Falcen senses my distress. “What’s wrong?”
I open my mouth to respond, but what comes out is a strangled moan. Pain lances through my skull, white-hot and blinding. My vision fractures, the world splintering into shards of a polluted rainbow.
The drake beneath us shudders, her flight path going erratic. Falcen hikes me against him as he tries to regain control, but it’s too late.
My magick surges, a tidal wave of uninhibited, wild energy that bursts from my skin in a nova of searing light. It engulfs the drake, Falcen, everything. For a terrifying moment, I’m untethered, lost in a maelstrom of my own making.
I hear Falcen shout and feel his magick trying to contain mine.
The drake screams, a sound of pure agony, as my power rips through her already decaying form.
We’re falling, the ground rushing up to meet us at dizzying speed. Wind whips past my face, snatching away my screams. I’m tumbling through the air, no longer sure which way is up.
In a last, desperate attempt to save us, Falcen wrenches me around to face him. His eyes blaze with power, the soul-glyphs on his neck searing themselves into my vision.
He crushes me to his chest with one arm, the other outstretched as he tries to slow our descent with a blast of soul-magick. The backlash slams into us, sending us spiraling.
I bury my face in his neck, fingers clawing at his back as I hold on for dear life. His heartbeat thunders against my own.