Chapter 48
Chapter Forty-Eight
The clouds swallow me whole.
For a disorienting, horrible moment there's nothing to see in any direction except the pale glowing expanse of them. Above and below and everywhere in between, it's all the same: cold and damp and white whipping around me, soaking me to the bone, drowning my screams.
I am speechless, breathless, breaking.
And I am going to die.
I'm going to break into a million pieces against the ground, unless—
Sesca.
I feel her, even now. But she's still too far away. Still too much sky and too many dragons between us. Her urgency is twisting into anger, the helpless fury of a being powerful enough to shape worlds finding herself out of options, out of time.
I break through the cloud cover.
I close my eyes, and a memory of her words finds me: I could reach you from the other side of the stars, if only you called.
There are no stars between us. Only vast empty blue that somehow makes the distance seem even more insurmountable, with nothing bright to wish upon and no constellations to find my way by.
I still call for her.
Not with my voice. Not even with my thoughts. But with something deeper, something that woke up inside of me when I walked out of my chains this morning and hasn't quieted ever since. Some ignited, fiery part of this bond that runs deep and divine and undeniable even in the face of death.
I'm not reaching but sinking in, trusting her—trusting us—completely. I imagine myself falling into her rather than falling to the ground, and I receive a rush of all-consuming warmth in answer.
It’s followed immediately by pain.
It rips through my back. My shoulders. Tearing, blindingly hot pain, and for a moment I think the dragon that dropped me must have snatched me again—that its claws are dismembering me in mid-air, and parts of my body will soon be raining down in a horrible, scattered mess across the mountains.
But no.
I'm still falling.
Still in one piece.
Nothing has caught me, yet the pressure and agony persists, radiating out from between my shoulder blades. It feels like there's skin breaking and blood pouring out, too, though it's hard to tell how extensive the damage is while the wind and the cold continue to batter me.
My body catches on something.
I spin violently before continuing to fall, slower now but still heavy and plummeting to an inevitable ending.
I blink my eyes open.
I'm upside-down, hurtling head-first toward the ground that continues to rise up far too quickly. But something new is curved above me, and with a rush of clarity I realize—
I didn't catch on something.
I caught myself.
With wings.
They're stretched up toward the sky on either side of me.
A combination of feathers, dark arching bone, and thin luminous membrane stretched between—similar to Sesca's in all but color.
Where hers are a tapestry of blues and greens, mine are ash-grey with hints of deep violet along their edges, faintly glowing where the morning light catches them.
They're massive. Crumpled and flailing, but catching enough wind to change my trajectory.
And they could save me.
I know they could save me, yet my first instinct is to fold them in tighter and just keep falling, because I don't know how to do this. This is all too big, too powerful, too much for me to embrace, and I'm more unbalanced than I've ever been.
For a fraction of a moment, I believe that.
One last time, I believe that.
Then I think again of embers on the wind, stretched thin and flickering but still there, and I am still here, even if I am bloody and broken and falling down, down, down.
I stretch one wing out as wide as I can.
Then the other.
My control isn't precise. My entire body feels dangerously close to shattering when I slam to a violent, jarring stop in mid-air, and I can't remain calm enough to figure out how to hover; I drop several feet, and I panic, and the panic only makes me drop faster, until I'm tumbling toward another freefall—
Then Sesca is suddenly there, bright and warm and powerful, and we're falling together, her body weaving around mine.
Her wings are perfectly steady. Precisely tucking, twisting, turning. I don't watch the way she moves them; I feel it through the bond, and I lean into it without thinking, the way I've been learning to lean into all of it.
Our plummeting soon becomes a more controlled descent. Little by little I adjust my own wings, slowing down and finally bringing myself to a trembling but steady, hard-won hover.
Sesca dives lower and spins in tight spirals below me, creating an updraft of warm energy that lifts me even higher, giving me more time to find my balance. Once I manage to stop shaking, she ascends and circles several times, examining me, before drawing up directly in front of my hovering body.
I reach out and put my hand against the side of her jaw. She leans into my touch for an instant before spiraling away once more, her body seemingly full of too much power to keep still for long—the power of this fully realized bond that’s suddenly overflowing from both of us.
The enormity of the moment finally settles when I find the courage to look down. To see the entire world stretched out below us, the battle still raging across the valley floor, the two kings and their armies and the empire beyond waiting to see what happens next.
Waiting for me, it feels like.
It's hard to know where to start. Hard to think of anything to say, except: “What now?”
The wind stills as Sesca turns back to me, her golden eyes bright and blazing in the sunrise.
Now we fly.