31. Eradin
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
ERADIN
The rest period lasted exactly as long as it took to realize we couldn’t rest.
My muscles had barely stopped screaming when the official moved through the camp, her face holding a grimness that meant nothing good for us. She marked something on her scroll, counting heads or confirming how many bodies they’d need to look for tomorrow.
Around us, riders were counting too. I could see it in their faces, the same torturous math I was doing myself.
Thirty-eight riders left from the forty-nine who’d started. Eleven dead since the start of the Scorching. In less than a day.
And another lake waited between us and whatever came next.
Lyndie grabbed my arm, her fingers digging in. She pointed to the tendrils rising up from the lake, swaying in our direction. They’d engulf the shore soon. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“They want us to panic,” I said. “Kill each other trying to survive.”
Reece’s face went gray. “They’re not even pretending this is about skill anymore.”
“It never was,” Lyndie said.
I pulled dried meat from my pack, forcing myself to chew. Swallow. Drink water that tasted like metal and fear. Around us, other riders did the same, their movements mechanical.
My team and I ate feverishly. No one spoke. What was there to say?
The second lake wouldn’t wait for us to figure it out.
Packs returned to backs, and riders mounted. Reece, Lyndie, and I shared one look before we raced to do the same.
Some would make it across. Some wouldn’t. But if we joined a rush, we might see it through to the end of the day.
The horn’s blast came without warning. It was time to fly or die.
We urged our dragons into the air. The cavern filled with the beat of wings and the rush of displaced air so violent it knocked me sideways in my seat. Selira’s wings slapped hard, fighting for space in a sky too crowded to hold us all.
An elite dragon slammed into us from the left. Selira screamed, banking hard right to avoid the other beast. I clamped my thighs tighter, clinging to her neck spike.
Dragons and riders clawed for space and the speed that might keep them alive if someone flew between them and the surging death.
As we left the shore behind and raced across open water, tendrils swirled off the lake and lazily danced up to meet us.
Selira’s awareness snapped into focus. Safe paths still existed, channels of dead water, but they were narrower now. Disappearing faster. And with so many dragons trying to occupy the same area, avoidance became survival.
A ruby dragon dove past us, too close, its wingtip grazing Selira’s side. Wild fear blazed across the rider’s face, his hands sawing at the reins. Blue light flared across the tack.
“Let go of the reins,” I yelled, but he didn’t seem to hear.
He flew up higher, maybe hoping to put some of us between him and the mist, but the tendrils found him. They wrapped around limbs. Froze both the rider and dragon solid. Then dragged them down.
His scream cut off when stone reached his throat.
Reece flew behind me. I couldn’t look back to see if he was alive, because doing that meant not seeing what was ahead, and what was ahead could kill me faster than grief.
Lady Severine flew to the right, Heartsbrim moving well. Her face shone with composure, as if crossing a killer lake while surrounded by panicking dragons and riders was just another social event to navigate.
Lyndie kept pace on my left, her dragon responding to weight shifts so subtle I barely caught them. She gave cues that took years to develop. She hadn’t learned this in Shaleside.
“Dead water straight ahead,” she shouted, pointing. “Narrow channel!”
Three dragons tried to squeeze into the area at once.
One made it through.
A second clipped the edge where dead water met living silver. The mist wrapped around its tail, crawling up its body faster than the rider could react.
The third hit a stone spike jutting up from the lake.
They fell, dragons and humans, landing in liquid that sucked them down.
Selira’s fury crashed over me. Waste. All waste. Could live if—
“You’re right,” I whispered against her neck. “I’m sorry.”
My hands blazed. Heat poured from me into Selira, or from her into me. The lines were climbing, red serpents crawling up my wrists. I could feel them reach my elbows, moving under my skin, a living thing.
Magic called to the mist, and it surged toward us.
I wanted to suppress it, but I’d never learned how.
Selira banked hard left, and I shifted my weight before thought caught up. A tendril lashed through the space where we’d been.
An elite team tried to follow our path, riders crowding each other. Their dragons’ rune-marked tack glowed bright while the creatures screamed.
The mist tracked the light, and all four went down.
Selira’s wail started deep in her chest, vibrating through her body into mine.
I stopped counting the dead when my tally passed twenty. The numbers didn’t matter. They never had. Each death was another name I’d never learn, another family who’d wait in an empty doorway, and another body the system would grind up and call it worthy.
In the Scorching, bloodlines didn’t matter.
Ahead, Fenian and Aristus wove through gaps that closed seconds after they passed. Fenian flowed with his dragon, the reins loose along the dragon’s neck.
A massive thing moved beneath the surface. Bigger than the mist. Older than the lake. It lived here. I sensed it was patient and endless and hungry.
And it hunted.
A ridge of silver-black breached between the bulk of the riders and the far shore.
Fenian and Aristus flew closest to where it surfaced.
A tendril snaked up, snapping toward Aristus’s back leg, reaching for him.
“No,” Fenian bellowed.
He leaned forward, releasing the buckles with the speed that came from doing something so many times, your body knew the pattern even when your brain was screaming.
He shoved the harness off Aristus’s head.
The rune-marked leather dropped away, tumbling through the air, spinning as it dropped toward the silver death below. It hit the mist and dissolved. Years of conditioning, gone in a flash.
Aristus’s body convulsed. His pupils blew wide, then contracted, then widened again like he was remembering something he’d forgotten existed. The tendril near his leg dropped away.
His wings caught air in a new way. The hitch faded, and his flight smoothed into something that looked like joy wearing dragon scales.
Heat burst through my chest.
A few elite riders saw what happened, and they pulled away from him.
Lady Severine flew past him and kept going.
By the time we reached the distant shore, only a few fractured elite teams remained. Twenty-three dragons dead. Twenty-three collared and broken and fed to a watery death because the court demanded it.
And we had to do it again.
We landed on another black sand shore that shifted underneath Selira’s talons. The moment her weight settled, she keened. Her wail vibrated through her body.
Kin. Dragons. They were MINE.
The system had forced them into rune-marked tack that made them targets.
They’d trained them to suppress every instinct that might’ve kept them alive.
Not only that, but they’d also broken them until they forgot how to survive.
Then fed them to silver liquid and mist that hunted the very magic used to break them.
All done for an audience. For sport.
No one was thinking about the dead dragons except the one who grieved them.
The trial wasn’t neutral. It didn’t test bonds or skills or worthiness. It was designed to kill, and I suspected it always had been. The system ate everyone it touched, and called it sacred.
What kind of Oracle granted a wish at a cost like this?
I leaned over Selira’s neck and held her as best I could.
They were mine, she said again. They were kin.
Finally, she dropped to the ground and laid her snout on the sand. I slid off her back. My knees unlocked as I hit the ground, and I fell forward, my hands screaming when they hit. Standing up took three tries. On the second one, my thighs cramped so hard I gasped.
I hobbled over to Selira and stroked her wild-dragon stripe. Scratched at her jaw hinge until her inner keening waned. It wasn’t much, but it was all I had to offer.
Lyndie and Reece stood off to the side, staring at the lake, their faces tight with grief. The nobles suppressed us, but none of us were eager to celebrate their death.
A horn sounded, and in the lull, an official’s voice boomed across the cavern, magically amplified. “Surviving riders will camp here until the next trial.”
A messenger imp flew past, weaving through the elites, stopping at Lady Severine. She took the message, and the imp left the cavern.
I scanned the area, noting the high walls made up of shiny black stone and the sandy floor. A few faelights peppered the ceiling, generating enough light to see.
Until I wished I couldn’t.
Servants had appeared from somewhere, carrying tents that assembled themselves with spelled poles and enchanted stakes.
Bedding rolled out, thick enough to keep the cold away and make the sleeper feel like they rested on a cloud.
They lit a huge fire and cooked an entire haunch of meat over flames that burned blue and smokeless.
Packets simmering in the coals released the sweet scent of vegetables, roots, and herbs.
The place where Lyndie, Reece, and I stood was like comparing the queen’s castle to the worst of Shaleside.
We had our packs holding spare clothes. Dried food and biscuits, plus the extra items Fenian had stuffed into my bag. No tents. No lush bedding. And certainly no fire with a meal roasting.
Lyndie’s gaze remained on the elite camp. Her shoulders slumped, and she jerked her head around, focusing on where we could set up our supplies.
I slipped my bag off my back and sat, laying it in my lap, loosening the top. Peering inside, I hoped I’d find something wonderful I hadn’t packed. A tent, maybe. Plush bedding.
My snort rang out.
“We don’t need that shit,” I said. “We’re commons and commons are strong.”
“You’re right.” Lyndie dropped down to sit beside me, Reece taking the place across from us a moment later.
I shared, and we ate quickly, washing the food down with water. They didn’t ask why I had extra, and I didn’t offer comment.
My belly groaned over the delicious smells wafting across the small canyon, but this meal was as good as anything we had at home.
When we’d finished, we placed our bags nearby and stretched out side by side, staring at the roof of the cavern.
Reece lifted his arm and traced the skin where the scarf had rested. He caught me watching and dropped his arm back to his side.
“We should sleep.” Lyndie’s voice had lost its bright edge. “Tomorrow’s going to be worse.”
“You don’t know that,” Reece said. “Maybe this was the worst, designed to kill off the weak.”
Lyndie sat and pulled her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. “They’re not going to make it easier. They want us dead.”
“Even the high lords and ladies,” Reece said. “Who’d have thought?”
Grief made Selira’s breathing jagged. She’d curled up where she’d landed. Rising, I walked over and lay down beside her. Her wing flopped over me, her body forming a wall between me and the rest of the camp.
Protecting. Mine.
Her grief pressed into my chest until I couldn’t tell where hers ended and mine began.
How many of us would die tomorrow?