Chapter 4 #2
The word rang like iron hammered wrong, the echo sharper than the sound itself. He’d survived imprisonment. The king’s torture. But this—naming what Galaeryn had mangled, what no magic could mend—split deeper than muscle and bone.
“It’s your spine, isn’t it?” Jassyn asked, quiet as an incision.
Lykor swallowed, throat seared dry.
Jassyn inched closer, measured now. “Can you not shift because of it?”
“It’s worse than that,” Lykor grated. “I can shift. But I can’t fly like the rest of you.”
His focus dropped to the claw that mocked him with every heartbeat—a relic of Galaeryn’s cruelty, a wraith’s limb never to return to elven flesh.
“The king saw to it,” he muttered. “Unintended. But it lasted.”
Jassyn’s wings rustled in a rasp of leather, silence lingering long enough to sting before he whispered, “Can you show me?”
The question landed too soft, too close to gentleness, a healer reaching for a wound. And gentleness was the one thing Lykor couldn’t stomach. He barked a rough laugh, sharp enough to flay the sympathy before it rooted.
“Why?” he growled, lip curling. “So you can watch me crumple like a failed experiment and—”
Jassyn moved before Lykor finished, pupils slicing to vertical slits. Like a knife ripped free from its sheath, he sundered the space with a single stride. Before Lykor could blink, Jassyn seized his tunic and yanked him forward.
Chest to chest, the heat of Jassyn struck harder than the grip. Lykor froze, but everything inside him ignited. His heart hammered a mutinous rhythm, battering his ribs with a want he’d sooner smother than confess.
Jassyn had never pushed back. Not like this. Not with iron in his fist, violence trembling in his arm, wing talons clicking as they clenched and unclenched.
The scent of him—those stars-cursed orange blossoms, now edged with something half-feral like the desert sun—flooded Lykor’s senses. Every muscle tensed as their breath clashed in the narrow space, until only the treacherous urge to lean closer burned through him.
“If you think I’d do that to you,” Jassyn hissed, “then you don’t know me at all.”
Even with Jassyn’s fingers knotted in his tunic, it was the gentlest accusation Lykor had ever heard. But it still punched like a lance between his ribs.
“There’s nothing that can be done,” he ground out. “Cinderax said he can’t—”
“Cinderax isn’t one of the realm’s best healers,” Jassyn snapped, each word a lash, fury striking too fast to dodge.
“But you are, aren’t you?” Lykor spat, yet the venom soured to bitterness even as it left his mouth. “The bleeding heart with steady hands. Always reaching. Always fixing. Pretending you’re not just as fucking broken.”
He hadn’t meant to say it, but of course he went for the wound anyway.
That was all it took.
Rage detonated in Jassyn’s eyes. Then he shoved.
Driven across the cliff, Lykor staggered as Jassyn drove him backward. His spine jolted as he rammed into a spire, teeth clicking shut. Air ripped from his lungs as the claws of Jassyn’s wings slammed into the rock beside his head, talons gouging deep.
Pinning him.
Stone at his back, Jassyn’s wings and body caging him, heat roared through Lykor’s chest. Every muscle coiled to strike, but each breath betrayed him, aching for the hold he didn’t dare break.
Teeth bared, scales erupted down Jassyn’s throat and arms. His wings flared wider. Dominating. Towering. He looked more dragon than elf, fury snarling through him.
Lykor should’ve thrown him off. Reminded Jassyn who the real beast was.
He didn’t.
Shame burned. Hunger flared hotter. The weight. The grip. It split him open.
Worse still, he hoped Jassyn wouldn’t let go.
Jassyn’s eyes flashed, fist tightening in Lykor’s tunic, breath scorching his cheek. Close enough that every heartbeat collided, the air between them seething with heat and fury. For a moment, Lykor couldn’t tell if the tremor came from Jassyn’s fist or his own chest.
Blood thundered in his veins, but he stood still, waiting for Jassyn’s next move. As the silence stretched, the waiting turned unbearable. He wanted to see what Jassyn would do. If the beastblood would take over. So Lykor targeted the bruise. Pressed where it hurt.
“And what, exactly, does ‘one of the realm’s best healers’ think can be done?” His voice cut low, every word honed to a point. “You know magic can’t mend the injuries already engraved into my spine. But here you are, believing you can.”
There. He’d said it. Now the truth had teeth, every one of them sinking deep.
Lykor dropped his gaze, unwilling to let Jassyn read what still lived in it. The phantom twinge of the golden stakes had never faded where the metal had once been driven. Jassyn had seen the scars, walked the wreckage of his mind. He knew.
Behind him, talons scraped stone. When Lykor glanced up, Jassyn blinked, round-eyed and dazed, as if he’d surfaced from drowning and his lungs hadn’t remembered how to work. His wings twitched, then vanished. Scales receded. And his face…
Rage drained, leaving only remorse behind.
Lykor hated that look most of all.
“I–I’m sorry,” Jassyn stammered, staggering away. Hands bracing on his knees, his breath came in bursts. “That’s why I don’t stay fully shifted. I can’t always control what I’ll do. If I’ll overreact. Or hurt someone.”
“You didn’t hurt me,” Lykor said, regret gnawing at his ribs because Jassyn took the blame for a fire he’d lit himself.
Without thinking, Lykor stepped forward. His hand lifted, almost bridging the space between them. He’d never flinch from whatever Jassyn became when the beastblood rose. It wasn’t monstrous to him, but something honest. Unmasked.
Yet Lykor buried the truth before it left his tongue, the way he always did.
Better Jassyn think him unmovable than glimpse the fracture inside.
Instead, he curled his hand into a fist, reaching for the druids’ neat little assurances—a framework Jassyn could cling to.
And perhaps he needed something rational to blunt the edge of what had almost broken loose.
“Kaedryn’s people learn to master it,” Lykor said. “Unlike us, they come into power young and temper instinct through discipline. They insist that when the magic settles, the emotions will too.”
Jassyn just stood there watching him. Lykor waited for the rebuttal, for the challenge.
It never came.
“I’ve seen the scars on your spine,” Jassyn said.
Lykor’s pulse scraped his throat. The words weren’t an attack, merely surgical. Of course Jassyn would circle back to the one thing Lykor had given him. The truth.
Jassyn stepped closer. “But I haven’t gotten to look further. Will you let me decide if it’s beyond repair?”
He waited with that infuriating patience, as if Lykor’s fire had already burned to ash. It made him want to punch a boulder. Or throw himself off the cliff.
Instead Lykor reached for the hem of his tunic.
Fine. He’d do it. If this was what it took to make Jassyn understand that it wasn’t some wound begging for healing. It was fact. Damage wrought to permanence.
Let him look. Let that be the end of it.
Lykor stripped his tunic off in a single motion, exposing his scars to the stars. The night breeze hit his back, biting against skin stretched taut over ruin.
He didn’t lift his eyes as Jassyn drifted behind him, but he felt the stir in the air, the stillness settling thick as smoke. He sensed the gaze honed by study. Assessment. Diagnosis. As if he were a puzzle missing a piece, not a broken body.
“Your wings?” Jassyn asked quietly.
Lykor’s jaw locked. He didn’t want to stand like some sacrificial beast at the altar of false hope. But with Jassyn behind him, every scar revealed, he’d let the evidence speak for itself.
Reaching inward, Lykor gripped the ember in his chest. The shift came in bursts. Wings erupted like swords wrenched from rusted scabbards. They unfurled with all the violence of something forged for the sky yet condemned to crawl.
Technically whole.
Functionally wrecked.
The left wing sagged like a severed sail, membrane trembling near the ground. The right fared only slightly better, but still quivered from the effort, the claw at the apex twitching in protest.
Breath hissing through his teeth, Lykor bowed beneath the weight. He couldn’t fold them. Could scarcely move them, let alone wrest flight from a twisted spine.
His fingers curled into fists, bracing for the mockery. Every muscle tensed as Jassyn stepped closer behind him, as if expecting fingers to trail his spine, flicking each golden spike in turn.
As Galaeryn once had. Lykor still felt that echo sometimes, rattling through his bones.
“I’ve tried everything,” he growled, voice threatening to break. “So did Aesar. Building strength won’t make a difference.” His gaze dragged toward the lake below. “I’m done chasing hope.”
Jassyn stepped closer still. So close his breath brushed Lykor’s shoulder. “May I?”
The single request made Lykor twitch, but he gave the barest nod. “It won’t matter,” he muttered—more to himself—as Essence flared from Jassyn’s hands.
The first touch made him flinch. Not because it hurt, but because it didn’t.
Jassyn’s palms closed on the ruined joint, at the crooked lattice of bone, the broken anchor where wings should have risen. His fingers were steady as he lifted, cradling the burden with impossible care.
Lykor fixed his stare on a crack in the stone beneath his boots while Essence threaded under his skin like a second pulse. Jassyn didn’t recoil as he mapped every fault line in silence.
“You say you can’t be healed,” Jassyn finally murmured. “But healing isn’t the first step.”
“Spare me the riddles,” Lykor snapped, turning his head.
Wrapped in his assessment now, Jassyn didn’t seem to hear him as he crossed to Lykor’s other side and drew the second wing open just as gently as before. The membranes twitched grotesquely, and Lykor swallowed the bitterness rising in his throat.
Jassyn lowered the span in a patient arc, guiding the wing back into place until the weight settled without a jolt. Then he stepped in front of Lykor, face unreadable.
“I have an idea,” he said, eyes locked with Lykor’s, shining in the glow of the moons. “But I already know you won’t like it.”
Lykor’s breath came shallow as he stood there—wings ruined, everything exposed—watching a male who should’ve turned away but didn’t.
Jassyn held his gaze, mercilessly steady.
“If you’ll trust me, you’ll fly.”