Chapter 14
LYKOR
The memory of lightning still echoed in Lykor’s shoulders, though his scales had taken the worst of the charge. When they’d returned to Asharyn, Jassyn’s mending had driven out the scorch, but his hands had lingered for long enough that Lykor almost believed something else might spark there.
Almost.
Then Jassyn had pulled away. And the absence haunted him more than the storm—even a day later.
Lykor shoved the thought aside, matching Jassyn’s stride through the druid jungle. The heavy air clung like the memory of their first encounter beneath this canopy. He hadn’t questioned Jassyn’s choice to heal him here instead of in Asharyn—something about needing the earth’s energy.
The glade where their people had camped a week ago lay eerily still—ash-circled fire pits sinking into moss, the bones of a temporary home already devoured by the jungle’s slow hunger.
Lykor decided he could stomach vines and damp air again if it meant soaring the sky.
Even if circling back to this grove nudged them closer to the king’s armies in the mortal realms. He accepted the risk, but the delay in the search for Skylash still chafed—a bitterness honed by the fact that it was for his sake.
Footfalls landed close behind. Intruding. Unwanted.
Miraculously, he’d held his tongue when Vesryn and Fenn followed through the portals that he’d opened back across the Wastes. But now—with their shadows dogging his heels and the mending looming like an execution block—his neck prickled, as if it already sensed the axe in their eyes.
“I agreed to healing,” Lykor muttered, keeping pace at Jassyn’s side as the canopy pressed darker overhead. He shot a scowl over his shoulder at the pair following. “Not an entourage.”
“I need Vesryn’s shadows,” Jassyn said, parting a tangle of vines with a wave of his hand.
His voice was too level, too measured with the kind of calm that only meant something beneath wasn’t. Lykor’s eyes cut to him, already not liking the sound of it, and trusting the prince’s involvement even less.
“Let me do the rending,” Vesryn called from behind. “I’d be faster.”
“In the way a butcher is faster than a surgeon,” Aesar mumbled in Lykor’s head.
Lykor rolled his eyes, ignoring them both. His glance snagged on Fenn, shouldering his druid flight leathers—though Lykor had never asked him to bring his gear from Asharyn. Fenn’s fangs flashed in a smile that promised nothing good.
“That doesn’t explain the captain’s presence,” Lykor grumbled.
“Pain management?” Jassyn offered, his voice pitched higher with the question.
Lykor stopped cold, glare sharp enough to peel bark. “I don’t think so.”
“It’s only fair,” Vesryn shot back, jabbing a thumb at Fenn as they all halted. “You made me endure his fangs, remember?”
“I don’t need venom,” Lykor bit out.
“You say that now,” Fenn said, idly twisting one of the obsidian scales dangling from his ear. “I’ll be gentle. Well, that is, depending where you let me bite.”
Lykor bared his own fangs, the snarl already rumbling.
Jassyn pinched the bridge of his nose, looking ready to bleed patience instead of Essence before he silently lifted his hands. Turquoise light fountained, spinning into form. Of twisted shoulders. A ruined spine. Scar-laced nerves writhing with phantom pain.
Lykor stiffened as the illusion floated between them. Every injury etched mercilessly clean. Every mutilation mapped in perfect clarity.
“I need you unfeeling for this,” Jassyn said softly. “Temporarily paralyzed.” He motioned toward the vertebrae and tendons. “I’ll channel Vesryn’s rending through the bond, deconstruct everything, then rebuild.” He didn’t quite meet Lykor’s eyes. “The venom is better than…the alternative.”
Every muscle braced. Coercion. Masking pain the same way Jassyn had with the prince, when he’d knit tattered legs after the druids’ flayers.
So this was what Jassyn’s vagueness had been circling—the sidelong glances when he thought Lykor wasn’t looking, the half explanations, the detour into the jungle. The truth kept quiet because Jassyn scorching well knew Lykor would’ve refused to participate.
Clenching his teeth, Lykor bit down the impulse to portal back to the desert. Too late for cowardice dressed as second thoughts.
Instead, he growled, “You could’ve just led with ‘spinal detonation.’” The words came out harsher than he meant—gallows humor honed sharp against himself, even as the sight of bone unraveling wrenched the breath from his lungs.
Expecting some snide reassurance, Lykor glanced at Aesar, who’d materialized outside of their skull. But Aesar’s attention had locked on the illusion. He drifted around it, studying muscles peeling in layers, realigning vertebrae, nerves unspooling before reknitting. The sequence cycled again.
Ruin rehearsed. Repair promised. Neither convincing.
Lykor gestured at the hovering dissection. “And you’ve done this before?”
“Not…exactly,” Jassyn admitted, tugging at the strap on one of his bracers. “I’ve been conferring with Magister Thalaesyn—since you didn’t want anyone else joining us. I would’ve preferred a circle of magus, but you left me no choice. I know I can do it.”
Lykor caught the exasperated edge in his tone. It stung more than it should have, but he shoved it aside with a grunt. “Reassuring.”
Aesar flapped a hand at him. “Just agree so we can get this over with.”
Fine. He’d get to the part where he regretted everything.
Lykor turned, surveying the place where he’d stopped. The hollowed trees that had once served as infirmaries loomed in the dappled sun.
He kicked at a gnarled root. “So, what? I lie here in the dirt?”
Jassyn shook his head, dispelling the illusion with a flick of his fingers. “We’ll do this inside.” He approached the central tree and stepped through its living threshold, motioning for them to follow.
Lykor lingered after Fenn and Vesryn vanished, the weight of what lay ahead creeping close.
“WHAT DO YOU THINK?” he asked Aesar, who had appeared beside him.
“I think his methods are sound. And if Thalaesyn agrees…” Aesar tilted his head, studying him. “This won’t be the worst thing you’ve endured.”
Lykor scowled. “THAT’S NOT EXACTLY COMFORTING.”
“Don’t act like you’re looking for comfort,” Aesar volleyed back, voice smooth as a blade sliding into its sheath. “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t trust him.”
“I’M ONLY ASKING BECAUSE IF THIS GOES WRONG…” Lykor trailed off, claw clenching at his side, every knuckle cracking. “IT’S NOT JUST MY BACK THAT brEAKS.”
“It’s worth the risk,” Aesar murmured. His eyes met Lykor’s, shining steady. “And like you, I’d rather gamble on flight than rot on the ground. We were never built to survive by crawling.”
Apparently that settled the matter. Aesar didn’t wait for an answer before dissolving like mist, his presence curling back into the quiet recesses of their mind.
Lykor exhaled, the sound thin as a last reprieve, then rolled his neck and stepped into the tree.
Vesryn waited by the curve of the trunk, unusually still, as Fenn settled Lykor’s flight armor on the ground. Jassyn knelt at the chamber’s center, palm pressed to the tree’s polished floor. Essence whirled around him, and globes of illumination spiraled upward, casting the trunk in a dim glow.
Lykor didn’t feel the next surge of power, but he saw it ripple through the earth. Roots writhed in first, dragging in the scent of loam. Vines spilled from high in the trunk, veiling the chamber in green. Moss spread thick across the floor, damp and breathing, until the space itself seemed alive.
The tendrils rose and fused, shaping into a low structure of woven root. The tilt was too familiar. A platform meant to bear a body.
Lykor’s breath went cold, his chest snared in old memory.
Jassyn looked up. And in his eyes Lykor saw it, the worry and concern at what he’d created. The echo of an altar, not stone but living earth and root.
“I tried to make it different,” Jassyn said softly as he rose. “Is this…okay?”
Lykor’s heart jammed in his throat. No one had ever asked him that, and the gentleness scraped deeper than his oldest scars.
He said nothing. Instead, his gaze slid past Jassyn—to Vesryn, lounging with one leg propped against the trunk, and to Fenn, eyes burning with far too much enthusiasm.
Something bristled back into place. A sharper edge. One he could control.
“I don’t want them here,” Lykor growled. “Spectating like that.”
Jassyn’s voice didn’t rise, but steel threaded through it. “Vesryn. Out.”
The prince rolled his eyes but pushed off the tree. “Fine. But if you start fumbling with my shadows, I’m coming back in to help.”
Muttering under his breath, he slipped through the swaying curtain of vines that had descended to obscure the entrance.
Fenn made no move to follow. “You might want to get comfortable,” he said, sweeping a claw toward the platform.
Lykor’s lip curled, but Jassyn moved between them before the snarl could rise, his hand landing on Lykor’s arm.
Instinct reared. Muscles coiled. The contact wasn’t unwelcome. Not from Jassyn. Only…strange. To be steadied, not subdued. A creeping familiarity stirred, like a beast recalling it needn’t bare its teeth at every touch.
“I asked him to give you just enough venom to hold you on the brink,” Jassyn said gently. “To keep your body still but your mind aware. But if you feel anything while I’m working…” His fingers tightened, heat pressing into Lykor’s arm. “You have to tell me so he can give another dose.”
“And if I can’t speak?” Lykor mumbled, the bite draining from his voice.
He already knew the answer, but balked anyway, unsettled by how little armor it left him to hide behind.
His eyes flicked to the hand Jassyn still braced on his arm.
He waged a silent war not to linger there, as if staring might turn the anchor into a shackle.
When he finally tore his gaze upward, he found Jassyn watching him.
“Then I’ll reach for you telepathically,” Jassyn said. “If you’ll permit it.”