Chapter 12 #2
Ryoden swallows and lifts his chin to glance in my eyes for just a moment, and then makes his choice.
“Stand down!” he roars, voice cracking like a whip along the wall. “All units hold fast. No one fires without my explicit order—do you hear me?”
A murmur of confusion ripples through the men, but training and his authority win out. Fingers twitch away from triggers, barrels dip a fraction, though not all the way down. Below, the tank turrets pause, engines still rumbling.
Ryoden leans closer, the space between us filled with the sound of Torryn’s wingbeats and the rush of our own breathing. His voice drops to a rough whisper as his lips brush against my ear, “I might have just killed us all with my trust in you.”
The words land heavily in my chest and stay there as he pulls back. I feel every ounce of what he’s placed in his faith in me. Every life tucked behind these walls seems to press against my ribs, reminding me that there is no version of my existence where my choices don’t matter.
My hand drops away from him and we turn to face Torryn.
He hurtles closer, wings beating so powerfully that the wind hits the wall in violent surges.
Snow whirls around us in chaotic spirals.
I step forward until my boots are at the very edge of the wall, one hand braced on the cold stone as I push up to stand on the open parapet slot meant for a rifle.
My heart beats so hard it hurts. I can’t tell if the shaking in my limbs is fear, hope, or the wind threatening to push me off the wall.
If I’m somehow wrong and it’s not him…
I drag a breath deep into my lungs, filled with cold air and the scent of smoke beginning to seep across the wind from his growing fire, and let my voice rise to meet the sky.
“Torryn!”
His name rips out of me louder than I thought I could shout, fueled by every shred of longing, grief, and stubborn belief that this is him. The sound slices through the roar of the wind, through the growing thunder of wings, and the dragon’s jaws snap shut.
The fire at his throat snuffs out in an instant, like someone pinched the flame closed from the inside.
The roar he’d been building dies mid-bloom and transforms into a strangled, almost startled sound—a whine that shouldn’t be able to come from a creature that large, a raw note that hits an aching place inside my chest.
He banks hard, his massive body executing a tight, staggering loop in the air, wings folding and bursting open once more as he twists through the snow and clouds. For a heart-stopping moment he disappears inside the roiling gray clouds, then bursts out again, repositioned.
His eyes lock onto the wall.
Onto me.
There’s no mistaking it. For all the distance still between us, something in his gaze sharpens and focuses, as if the rest of the world has dropped away and all that exists to him is this small human shape standing atop a stretch of stone.
A shriek tears from his throat and then he folds his wings in, diving straight toward me. Soldiers stagger back a step, fingers twitching along their guns. Fear surfaces tightly in my mind and my stomach rolls with the implications.
“Hold fast!” Ryoden barks. “No one breaks, no one fires!”
Even so, terror has a way of loosening discipline. Out of the corner of my eye, I see one young soldier’s resolve crack. His hands move in a blur of panic, rifle jerking up toward his shoulder, barrel aiming toward the rapidly descending mass of scales and teeth.
Ryoden sees it too and he’s already moving when I gasp. He strides the few steps between them in a heartbeat. His hand snaps out, wrenching the gun from the soldier’s grip with such force that the younger man stumbles and falls back onto his bottom.
“I said hold,” Ryoden snarls, voice low and dangerous. “You fire without my order and you’ll be cast out of these walls to deal with whatever comes our way without any of my weapons to protect you. Understood?”
The soldier pales, nodding rapidly, eyes wide. “Y-yes, Colonel.”
I tear my eyes from the wall after watching many of the soldiers stiffening and regaining some semblance of control over their fear.
Torryn’s almost upon us when at the last possible moment, he flares his wings wide.
The sudden drag of air snaps him out of the dive, sending a brutal gust exploding along the wall.
I brace myself, feet planted, as snow and grit sting my face.
My hands reach out to the stone on either side of me to hold onto.
He hovers above us for a breathless second, enormous body suspended above the wall, casting all of us into shadow.
His silhouette blots out the storm behind him, turning the world into a narrower space in which only he exists.
Then he drops and his weight hits the wall in a controlled, heavy landing that reverberates through the stone all the way into my bones.
Talons, each longer than my hand, curl over the edge of the stone parapet, stone grinding and crumbling beneath their grip.
His wings fold in, tucking close to his body, though even folded they seem wider than anything we could have imagined.
The soldiers nearest him are silent statues, faces chalk-white, gripping their weapons with such intensity that their knuckles look bloodless. Two bodies collapse to the ground, seeming to have fainted, as another bends over and wretches the contents of his stomach onto the frost-slicked stone.
I ignore them as Torryn lowers his head.
The massive skull descends in a slow, deliberate arc, nostrils flaring as he draws in a deep breath.
Warm air rushes over me in a gust that smells like smoke and the scent of his forest. His eyes, bright and swirling with golden flecks that seem to pulse, fix on my face.
My heart feels like it’s beating outside my body now, lodged somewhere in my throat as I lift my hand.
The motion is small, trembling, but I force it upward anyway, palm open, fingers splayed.
For a fraction of a second the world seems to hold its breath.
Torryn closes the final distance between us and presses his snout gently into my hand.
His scales are warm and surprisingly smooth beneath my palm, the ridges around his nostrils firm but not unyielding.
I feel the vibration of his breath through my hand and the almost inaudible rumble that starts somewhere deep inside him and spills into my body.
My vision blurs as tears break free, hot and stinging as they spill over and track down my cheeks, cutting little paths through the cold on my skin.
“You’re here,” I whisper, voice cracking and shaking as I curl my fingers against him in a reflexive, desperate grasp. “You’re really here.”
For the first time since I walked away from the kings mid-battle to forge my own path, the carefully constructed emotional distance I’ve tried to build between who I need to be and what I left behind shatters.
The earth showed me two options, and yet I chose neither in an effort to find a third on my own.
The reality is that I could never kill them…I’d rather walk away without any explanation, letting them think I’m a traitor and ending any chance of holding onto their affections, than to end their lives.
And still the earth punishes me for that weakness.