Chapter 47
Forty-Seven
Ishake my head, convinced I’m seeing things and that I’m back in the Blightwoods with Falcen with the drake who saved us, Mara’s wings like torn sails, all bone and decay with a skull made for terror and tragedy, and the endless hunger in her stare.
Falcen is Mara’s twin now.
Ember shudders. He’s gone, Verily. Falcen’s gone.
Malakai’s voice cracks somewhere to my left, high with triumph. “Behold! The first fully realized nether drake, born of Soulren and Void! We have done what the monarchy could not!”
Davrin releases me and staggers toward Falcen, purple energy guttering along his arms. He looks up at the monster in front of him, and for the first time, he doesn’t seem so eager to take what’s been promised.
Falcen—no, the drake—opens its jaws and a sound rolls out, shaking banners from their mounts and sending Malakai scrambling for cover.
The sound rattles my bones, shreds my ears, shakes the sand into liquid waves. Torches explode, and banners rip free and tumble like leaves in a gale.
Students who hadn’t fled yet scream as the overhang cracks, stone shearing off in jagged chunks. The arena tilts under his weight, the world shrinking beneath his wingspan.
I stumble forward, coughing on grit and smoke, refusing to lose him now.
He’s here. He has to be in there.
My chest heaves, my blood turning cold as that void-black gaze sweeps over the destruction and finally, inevitably, finds me. There’s no blue left in his eyes, no gold ring. Just dark emptiness.
But he lowers his head until it’s level with mine.
Ember’s voice lances through my skull, cold as the Arctic, condescending as a disappointed god. He is not yours anymore, child.
I grit my teeth against Ember’s spectral presence. I can talk to Mara, I spit at her, because somewhere in the continuum of life and death, I made a bridge. Which means I can talk to Falcen. I can reach him.
If I have to tear myself apart to do it, then I will.
I stagger to my feet, sand shifting treacherously beneath me, and close the distance to the drake.
His body blocks half the horizon. Iridescent scales glisten with fresh blood, shuddering as he inhales.
Each breath is a furnace, each exhale a hurricane ripping across the trashed arena.
The air is so charged with resonance and necrotic energy that my teeth buzz as the world takes on a blue cast, as if looking through the lens of a bruise.
I raise my hand and press the heel of my palm to the ridge of his muzzle, ignoring the way the heat burns my skin.
His massive head stills, his eye sweeping to mine.
It’s a bottomless, annihilating gaze. Nothing remains in it of the man who once hand-fed me a healing plant, or who rescued me from drowning, or who smashed through the Void just to save me from it.
But I stare into him anyway, refusing to accept that the only thing left of him is a beast.
Falcen, I whisper, not aloud but in the place where resonance lives, the secret channel between souls. Falcen, it’s me. Verily.
The drake’s head cocks, just slightly. A thousand-ton predator, reading the world with instincts bound to another realm.
I wait for a spark, a flicker, a single stutter of recognition. Some sign that my voice, my will, my idiotic, naked love for him might reach through the abattoir of his mind and bring him home.
There is none. His gaze isn’t cruel or kind. It’s a pure, cosmic void, an absence of possibility so total it feels like a physical blow.
My knees buckle. Tears scald my vision, but I brace myself upright and press my forehead to his snout, letting my tears run into the dry, battered cracks of his new skin.
“Please,” I whisper. “If any part of you knows me…”
His breath gusts out, hot as a blast furnace, blowing my hair and the stink of smoke and charred flesh into a halo around my head.
For a second, I think he’ll crush me. For a second, I hope he will.
But instead his head lifts, so high I have to tilt my eyes to follow, and he turns away from me, gouging the sand with every step.
“No,” I choke. “No, come back to me—”
A flash of light splits the smoke. Not gold, not blue, not any color I want to see again, but that sick, greedy violet. Davrin emerges from the dust, striding forward, arms lit with the corrupt Soulren glow, his face fixed in a mask of awe and lordliness.
“He doesn’t hear you, Holbrook,” he says to me with a smile on his lips. “He only hears his master now.”
Tendrils of purple light spill from his arms and coil into the beast’s hide. Falcen shudders. Then lowers himself, his enormous head bowing, his draconic body bending under Davrin’s command.
“No!” I scream in pure, animal rage, rushing forward, but Davrin launches himself onto Falcen’s back.
He climbs the ridges of his spine as if he were born for it, and settles astride the monster’s shoulders, purple light spilling from his hands into the beast’s hide.
The nether drake doesn’t resist him. It accepts him, as if the bond was always there, waiting to be claimed.
“Give him back!” I shriek, clawing at the empty air, nails tearing into my own palms, blood dripping in the sand. “Ember, stop this! Bring his soul back!”
It’s too late.
My scream is so raw, so guttural that I taste blood.
I feel it trickle down my throat. But nothing in the world changes.
Falcen’s wings span wide, slamming the air into a cyclone that knocks me off my feet.
Sand rips into my face, burnishes my wounds, embeds grit into every cut and scrape on my body.
But I keep my eyes open, wide and wild, because I will not lose him again.
“No,” I sob through rivulets of tears. “I’ve done it before. With Noxie. Ember, I can do this.”
You cannot. You are a burned-out star, sweet child. You have nothing left.
Falcen crouches, reptilian muscles bunching. My hand shoots out again, clawing at the sand as if I could hold him here with nothing but grit and will. But all I catch is Falcen’s dried blood.
Their launch rips my world apart. More stone shatters, torches gutter out, startled screams from the neighboring academy’s buildings vanish under the beat of those wings.
Davrin’s laughter peals from above. He looks down at me the way a god might look at his meager subjects.
“To think you wanted to save him,” he calls down with a merciless grin. “When all you did was hand him over.”
The very truth of it hits me harder than the wind. All the guilt I thought I’d bled away comes rushing back. I did this. I made this. Ember warned me about the price of my resonance, the cost of breaking the rules, and I did it anyway.
For what? For love? For hope? For the chance that Falcen and I could be something other than what the world planned for us?
That’s gone now. All that’s left is the monster I’ve made.
Davrin doesn’t look back as he guides Falcen into the air, bent low over the drake’s spine, violet energy fusing them into a single, terrible silhouette against the night sky.
“Falcen!”
His name rips from my heart and out of my throat, guttural enough to split my chest wide open before I collapse. Every trauma I endured at the hands of this place, every lesson I failed to learn, unspools inside me all at once.
I scream his name into the storm, one last time. “Falcen!”
The sound is snatched from my throat as the sky swallows him, Davrin astride his back, the first of the soul-bound Riders and the beginning of exactly the kind of purgatory I wanted to stop.
The thunder of those wings fades. The air stills.
Silence rushes in, heavier than any roar.
I look down, my hand falling to my heart where mine and Falcen’s bond used to burn.
It’s gone cold.