56. Fen
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
FEN
Heartsbrim’s body tumbled past us, the ruby dragon’s wings spiked out, his collar still blazing white as he fell.
Lady Severine didn’t look back. She’d flung herself off him the moment he froze and was already climbing hand over hand up the rock face, her focus locked on the summit. Her dragon’s death was just another obstacle she’d cleared.
Eradin’s horror spiked so sharp through the pack bond my teeth ached.
I’d grown up in Vella’s world. She’d eaten at our royal table. We were friends at one time. But I’d been trained by men who thought exactly as she did, that the bond was a resource, not a relationship. That a dragon’s death was a calculation.
Other elite riders reeled away from the carnage and kept climbing. Bellowing. Kicking. Whips cracked across scaled hides. Rune-magic flared as riders forced their dragons higher, faster, proving their devotion through pain.
Everything climbing toward the summit had been turned into fuel, and the columns were the mechanism that converted it.
The structures sang louder.
Dragons froze mid-climb, their collars flaring white, threads of light connecting them to the pillars like puppet strings. One by one, they fell.
I’d been trained to assess casualties in battle. Calculate losses. My tutors had drilled it into me until I could watch people die and hold myself steady.
These weren’t soldiers who’d chosen to fight. They were creatures whose only crime was trusting the humans who’d collared them.
And the elite were climbing over their bodies.
“Stop.” The word ripped from my throat, but they didn’t hear or didn’t care.
Lord Cedric’s dragon seized, his wings locking. They plummeted twenty feet before the dragon caught himself, though barely. Cedric clung to the saddle, his face gray.
Another dragon’s wing tore, the membrane splitting along the leading edge.
Through the pack bond, I felt Eradin counting. How many bones in these walls? How many riders had clambered over their dying dragons to reach the top?
How many had believed it was worth it?
Including my father.
The structure’s hum twisted into a wail.
“We need to stop pushing them,” Eradin called out. “Let the dragons choose the pace.”
Reece frowned. “But the voice said—”
“The voice is lying.” Her jaw locked. “It’s giving them permission to kill their dragons. We’re not doing that.”
Lyndie nodded. “Agreed.”
We let them guide where they stepped, where they climbed. Aristus’s sides heaved with the effort.
Until a spell hit like a fist to the base of my skull.
One second Aristus was picking his way up the rock face. The next, his left shoulder buckled, his wing collapsing inward with a wet crunch that ricocheted through the bond. He sagged to his left. A bone snapped and ligaments tore while he tried to compensate for a limb that no longer worked.
My belly surged. I swallowed bile and tightened my grip on his neck spike, but my hands had gone slick with sweat and I was sliding, my thighs burning as I clamped down harder.
Falling meant landing on bone-studded rock far below. I’d seen what that did to bodies.
His pain roared through our connection, so intense my vision blackened.
He shifted hard right, seeking better footing, his good wing beating frantically. My fingers found purchase again, digging into the ridge above his shoulder blade hard enough my nails bent backward. My shoulder screamed. Blood trickled down my chest.
Another spell crackled past my ear, close enough it nearly burned a path across my scalp.
I couldn’t locate the source. The canyon walls threw the magical signature in every direction, fragmenting it, making it impossible to pin down. Someone had trained specifically for tight spaces. For exactly this.
The next one hit Aristus’s good wing. He shrieked and wrenched sideways. I jolted forward, nearly tumbling over his shoulder. Only my grip on the neck spike kept me on his back, my wounded shoulder spasming at the angle.
Someone was trying to kill me. And when they did, I’d fall down the bone-studded wall.
Reece and Lyndie brought their dragons closer while Eradin urged Selira between us and whoever had cast the spells, her hands already glowing red. Selira growled and blasted fire toward the other elites. The wild dragon had no patience for strangers who hurt what was hers.
I pulled magic from the well I’d been trained to tap since childhood, blue fire crackling across my palms. Combat magic, the kind reserved for killing.
Eradin’s red light met mine in the space between us.
Our magic should’ve repelled. Commons couldn’t do magic. Elite magic came from a different bloodline.
The texts were wrong. The entire kingdom was wrong.
Red and blue hit in the space between us.
The colors fought each other, pushing back, refusing. Then something gave way and the colors spiraled, braiding tight. The shield that formed wasn’t mine or hers. It was ours. Just like when we clung to each other, drowning beneath the dome.
Our magic caught the next spell and shattered it into sparks that winked out before they reached the ground.
I stared at my hands. At hers.
The bond between us sang so loudly I felt it in my back teeth.
Through it, Eradin’s shock met mine.
We’d been building toward this since I’d saved her life in the garden and helped her in the kitchen. Every moment we’d chosen each other over those who said we couldn’t be together, we’d been laying the basis for what we were doing now.
“Who’s attacking?” Lyndie cried out.
Reece scanned the remaining elite riders. “One of them.”
Most elite had been trained to hide their magical signature, and only three remained of the original eight.
Blair, who’d gone carefully blank-faced since the canyon floor.
Vella, who’d stopped looking up and started watching us instead.
And Cedric, who appeared much too focused on his climb.
“Let me help.” Eradin brought Selira closer. She laid her hand on his broken wing and red flushed across her palms. Her healing warmth sunk in and Aristus’s pain eased.
“I sealed the break,” she said when she’d pulled her hand back. “He’s still fragile, but he’s more comfortable.”
We began climbing again, the shield Eradin and I created shimmering around us.
The pillars’ hum built until it drilled into my skull. The collar heated Aristus’s scales, the runes glowing brighter as the columns pulled harder.
Grimstone convulsed, his body going rigid. His wings locked, and he started falling backward.
“Lyndie!” Aristus and I dove toward them.
She clung to her dragon’s neck, her face white with horror, but her hands moved on his scales. Soothing. Gentle.
“Come on. You can do it, love,” she cried.
His wings unlocked a short distance before they would’ve hit a jagged boulder embedded in the wall. The strain showed in how he moved to join us, sluggish, fighting for every step.
Reece’s dragon wasn’t doing much better. His wings stuttered on each upstroke, the damaged membrane tearing further.
The drain on Aristus intensified, a steady pull tearing away what little magic he had left. Our shield couldn’t block it.
Selira strode beside us, her distress bleeding through the bond she shared with him. Even though they couldn’t touch her, she could feel what the structures were doing.
More canyon stretched above us.
The three remaining elite riders were scattered across the rock face now. Blair in the front, still on his dragon, with Cedric and his dragon in the middle. On foot, Vella lagged behind.
Eradin frowned. The glow of her hands reflected off the nearest pillar as we passed, and her head turned to follow it as we climbed higher, studying the channels carved between the rune columns.
The light in the channels moved upward, each wave traveling from the base of the pillar toward its tip, then to the next pillar above it, climbing toward the summit in a chain. The higher we went, the brighter the pillars burned.
The upper ones appeared fuller. That was the only word I could use to describe it. Whatever flowed through them was accumulating as it rose.
Eradin held her hand toward the nearest pillar without touching it. The red lines on her skin flared, and she yanked her hand back.
“I can feel where it’s going,” she said, her voice stripped down to almost nothing. “My magic follows wounds. And whatever waits at the top of the canyon is hungry. It has been for a very long time.” She gazed up, frowning. “What if the pillars are draining the dragons to feed whatever’s above?”
If she was right and the Oracle lay at the top, it had been powered by centuries of dragon death.
“It can’t be,” I said, but I knew I was wrong the moment I said it.
Because it made sense.
“Every Scorching death could’ve been feeding that thing,” I said.
She nodded and focused her attention forward.
“We have to remove the collars.” Her voice carried across the space between us, cutting through wind and the columns’ wail. “The collars are feeding the pillars. Remove them, and we break the connection and stop feeding whatever’s above.”
“You can’t do it,” Reece said. “I’ve heard it could kill the dragons.”
“Maybe.” Eradin’s hands were already glowing red, the serpentine lines crawling up past her elbows. “Or maybe my magic can do it safely. It’s that or we die. The shield isn’t stopping the pillars from sucking down your dragons’ power. They won’t survive to make it to the top.”
“Can you do it?” Lyndie asked, her voice one full shake.
“I want to try.”
I felt what she wasn’t saying. She’d never done this before.
No one had. There were no healer texts covering what happened when you tried to pry years of fused metal from living scales.
The collars had grown into the dragons’ necks.
I’d felt the calluses beneath Aristus’s, the way his scales had built themselves around the intrusion because his body had known it was never going to leave.
Aristus’s pain spiked again. The collar blazed so hot the scent of scorched scales floated through the air.