Chapter 27 #2
Varek's right wing came away from his body with a sound like a sail ripping in a gale.
Blood — black and smoking — fountained across the plateau stone.
Varek's shriek shattered something in the frequency range that Rhaezon could hear but November, two hundred yards away, could not.
He did not stop. He released the neck grip, caught the left wing before Varek could recover, and tore that one free as well.
Varek, wingless, bleeding from wounds that would have killed anything that was not Drakonblooded, tried to turn. Tried to bring his fire to bear one final time. His jaws opened. The shimmer gathered.
Rhaezon drove his head forward and closed his teeth around Varek's throat from the front. The fire died in Varek's mouth. His eyes — green-gold, the Varek family coloring, the same shade that had looked down at a child and saw opportunity rather than responsibility — went wide. Then dim. Then dark.
Lord Aldric Varek of House Varek died in his shifted form, sprawled across the high plateau of Aelthar with the dawn light on his ruined wings and his blood turning the pale stone black.
Rhaezon stood over the body. Shifted. Damaged.
The victory already turning to something else in his blood — something urgent and failing, because the shift was slipping.
He could feel it going. His body had done the impossible thing and the impossible thing had a cost and the cost was coming due immediately.
His left wing seized. The scar tissue that had torn during the shift contracted, and the pain that had been manageable when he was moving became something else entirely when he was still.
His scales receded in patches, his body confused about what shape it was supposed to hold.
The Drakon form flickered. His hindquarters shifted back first, then his forelimbs, then his torso, and each transition was a separate agony because the shift that should never have been possible was already unraveling and his body was paying for every second it had held.
He went to his knees. His human knees, on the stone plateau, naked and bleeding from wounds that were rearranging themselves across a body that was no longer large enough to contain them.
The gash along his flank became a gash along his ribs.
The shoulder wound became a deep laceration from his collarbone to his bicep.
His left side was a ruin — the wing half-retracted, stuck somewhere between forms, the membrane torn fresh over old scars.
His vision was going. The amber was fading. The world was getting smaller and darker and colder and he was losing the shape of things.
Then hands on his face.
Small hands. Warm. Rough-palmed. Her hands.
"Rhaezon."
Her voice. Not commanding. Not desperate. Not pitched with the panic he could smell on everyone else within a quarter mile. Just present. Just there, the way she was always there — steady, warm, calm. Her fingers found his jaw. She cradled it in her palm.
"Come back."
Her thumb traced the scar that ran from his jaw to his temple. The scales under her fingers were receding unevenly, some already gone, others still raised and warm. She did not pull her hand away. She held on.
"Come back to me."
The shift was fighting him. Half his body wanted to stay in the shifted Drakon form and half wanted to collapse into the humanoid one, and the tearing between the two was worse than either state alone.
His bones were grinding against each other in configurations that did not exist in any anatomy.
His vision fractured — one eye seeing in the expanded spectrum of the Drakon, the other in the limited range of his humanoid form.
November moved closer. She put both hands on his face. She leaned her forehead against his.
"I've got you."
Her breath on his skin. The scent of her — tea and stone dust and the warmth underneath her skin that he had memorized in the dark of her bedroom, on the plateau under the ancient tree, in front of the fire while the book lay forgotten between them.
The scent that meant here. The scent that meant home.
"I've got you. Come back."
The shift released him.
It went all at once in a total and immediate collapse.
The Drakon form folded inward like a structure losing its last support.
His wings retracted — the right one smoothly, the left one with a grinding, tearing finality that made black spots bloom across his vision.
His scales receded. His bones settled into their human configuration with a series of sounds that he heard from the inside and November heard from the outside and neither of them would forget.
He was on the ground. His own form. Human-shaped. Destroyed.
His skin was slick with blood — his and Varek's, mixed together, steaming faintly in the cool morning air.
The wounds were significant. The shoulder laceration was deep enough to show something white beneath the muscle.
His ribs on the left side were visibly wrong.
His left arm hung at an angle that suggested the shift had not set the bones correctly on the way back.
He was shaking — not the controlled tremor of exertion but something deeper.
His body had exceeded its own limits. It was cataloguing the damage.
November was holding his face in her hands. He looked up at her. Her eyes were brown. Creek water in late afternoon light. The left one had a faint ring of amber-gold around the iris that he was almost certain had not been there yesterday.
He tried to speak. What came out was her name, broken across the middle, barely voiced.
She did not shush him. She did not tell him to be quiet or save his strength or any of the things that people said when they did not know what else to say. She looked at him. She did not look away.
"You did it. You're here. Stay with me."
Boots sounded on stone. Davn dropped to the ground beside them — not his usual controlled descent, just down, the way bodies land when elegance is the first thing to go.
His left arm was bound against his chest with a strip of fabric torn from his own shirt.
Blood had soaked through the binding and down his side.
His face was grey beneath the white-and-black Kleotrian striping.
He was running on empty. Had been for some time.
He looked at Rhaezon, naked, bleeding, on the ground.
He looked at the massive carcass of Aldric Varek fifty yards away, wingless and still.
He looked at November, dust-covered and cut and holding Rhaezon's face like she was the only thing keeping him tethered to the world.
Which, Davn appeared to conclude, she might be.
He sat down. Not strategically. Not choosing a defensible position. He sat down because even Davn had limits, and he had found his.
"Alliance is three minutes out."
His voice was thin. Stripped of its usual precision. He stretched his legs out in front of him and leaned back on his good arm and looked at the sky like he had not seen it in some time and wanted to confirm it was still there.
A beat. He turned his head and looked at Rhaezon. At the blood and the wounds and the specific wreckage of a body that had just achieved a full shift for the first time in over forty years and paid for it in a currency that would take months to repay.
"I didn't know you had it in you." The particular Davn inflection that carried ten years of friendship.
November's thumb was still moving across Rhaezon's scarred jaw. Her hands were steady. Her eyes clear.
"I did."
She did not look up from Rhaezon's face.
"I always knew."