CHAPTER 12
DRAGON
The stone is cold beneath me. So cold. I can feel it through my scales, through the membrane of my wings where they're spread across the floor like broken sails. Blood pools around my neck, dark and thick, and I watch it spread with a strange detachment.
The second arrow hits my arm and the world tilts sideways.
I'm falling. No… I'm already on the ground.
When did that happen? My massive body crashes fully onto the stone, and the impact sends tremors through my bones.
My tail lashes once, twice, smashing into a pillar.
Stone cracks. Or maybe that's my ribs. I can't tell.
Adelaide.
Her name is the last thought before darkness swallows me whole.
When consciousness returns, minutes later?
hours? I can feel the poison wrapping itself around my very existence.
I can feel it crawling through my veins like acid, burning away my magic from the inside out.
My healing, that ancient power that's kept me alive for centuries, sputters and dies like a candle in the wind.
The arrow. Still in my neck.
I reach up with one massive clawed hand, my talons scraping against stone as I move.
Everything hurts. Everything burns. My scales, usually impenetrable, feel paper-thin.
The arrow shaft is slick with my blood, and when I wrap my claws around it, I can feel the poison pulsing through the wood like a heartbeat.
I break the tip off and I pull. The scream that tears from my throat is pure dragon.
A sound that shakes the castle walls, that sends birds fleeing from the forest for miles around.
The arrow comes free in a gush of blood, and I throw it across the room with what little strength I have left.
It clatters against the far wall, and I watch it fall, my vision swimming.
Poison. They poisoned me.
And Adelaide—where is Adelaide?
I try to reach for the bond, that golden thread that connects us, but it's like grasping smoke. Too far. She's too far away. The poison has severed something vital, something I need to heal, and without her proximity, without her presence, my body can't fight back.
I'm dying.
The realization should terrify me, but all I feel is a distant sort of resignation. Maybe this is what I deserve. Maybe this is justice for all the decades I kept her, all the ways I failed her.
Darkness takes me again.
Time becomes meaningless. I black out and wake, black out and wake, caught in an endless cycle of agony.
Sometimes I'm aware enough to feel my body trying to heal, my magic flickering like a dying ember.
Other times, there's nothing but pain and the cold stone beneath me and the terrible, aching absence where Adelaide should be.
Weeks pass. I think it's weeks. Could be days. Could be months.
I'm so sick I want to die. My body, this massive draconic form that's supposed to be indestructible, feels like it's rotting from the inside out.
My scales lose their luster. My wings, those great leathery expanses that can blot out the sun, lie limp and useless.
My tail, thick and deadly, barely twitches.
Fevers rack through me, covering me in sweat.
I'm close to death. Closer than I've ever been.
But slowly, agonizingly, my body begins to win. The poison weakens. My magic returns in fits and starts, just enough to keep me breathing, to keep my heart beating in my massive chest.
And when I finally, finally manage to stay conscious for more than a few minutes at a time, when I can finally think clearly enough to reach for the bond—
She's gone. Adelaide is gone.
The realization hits me like a physical blow. I surge to my feet, my legs shaking, my wings dragging on the ground. I stumble through the castle, my claws gouging deep furrows in the stone floor. I search every room, every corridor, every shadowed corner where she might be hiding.
Nothing.
They took her. While I was dying on the floor, helpless and weak, they came and took her.
I didn't protect her.
The shame is unbearable, a beast with claws that tears at my insides worse than any poison. I roar my anguish to the empty castle, and the sound echoes back at me, mocking. Some protector I am. Some mate. I couldn't even keep her safe in my own home.
I have to get her back.
The journey to the palace nearly kills me. I'm still weak, still recovering, but I don't care. I shift into flight, my wings screaming in protest, and I follow the bond. That golden thread is faint, so faint, but it's there. She's alive, and I'm going to bring her home.
She’s so far away. It takes me days of flying to get to the castle they took her to. But as I get closer, as the palace comes into view with its gleaming spires and manicured gardens, I feel something through the bond that stops me cold.
Hope. She feels hopeful.
I circle higher, confusion warring with the desperate need to see her, to know she's safe. Hope. Why would she feel hope? Unless… unless she wants to be there.
The thought is a knife between my ribs, sharper than any arrow. I land in the forest beyond the palace walls and shift into my human form. It takes more energy than it should, and I have to lean against a tree to keep from collapsing. But I manage. I always manage when it comes to her.
I slip into the palace like a shadow. No one looks twice at another servant, another guard. I'm good at being invisible when I need to be.
And then I see her.
She's walking in the garden, alone, and she's so beautiful it hurts to look at her. The afternoon sun catches in her hair, turns it to spun gold. She's wearing a dress I've never seen before, something fine and expensive, something a princess would wear.
She looks like she belongs here.
I watch her from behind a hedge, my human heart pounding in my human chest, and I wait for her to look sad. To look trapped. To look like she needs rescuing.
But she doesn't.
She just walks, serene and lovely, through the roses and the carefully trimmed paths. Like this is where she's supposed to be. Like she chose this.
The bond hums between us, and I can feel her emotions. Complex, layered, but not despair. Not the desperate need for escape that I'm feeling.
She chose this. She chose the prince, the palace, this gilded life over the bond. Over me.
I should be angry. I should storm over to her and demand she come home, remind her that we're fated, that she belongs with me. That I am her home. Her safe place.
But I can't. Because looking at her now, seeing her in this place, I realize something that breaks me: maybe she's better off here. Maybe she deserves better than a monster in a castle.
Maybe I was never the hero of this story at all.
Maybe I was always the villain.
I leave. I shift back into my true form and fly home, and every beat of my wings feels like a death knell.
For three days after returning home, I try to accept it. I pace the castle halls in my dragon form, my tail knocking over furniture, my claws leaving marks on every surface. I tell myself she made her choice. I tell myself to let her go.
But on the fourth day, the rage comes.
It starts as a tremor in my chest, a heat that has nothing to do with my fire. And then it builds, and builds, and builds until I can't contain it anymore.
I roar, and the sound shakes the very foundations of the castle.
She didn't choose me. She didn't choose our bond. She's going to deny what we are, what we're meant to be, and there's nothing I can do about it. Nothing.
The shame crashes over me in waves. I didn't protect her. I failed her. I let them take her, and I was too weak, too pathetic to stop them.
And the despair, God, the despair. It's a black hole in my chest, sucking everything good and light into its depths.
Something breaks inside me. Something fundamental and necessary.
I destroy the castle. I start with fire.
Great gouts of flame pour from my jaws, and I set everything ablaze.
Tapestries, furniture, the wooden beams that support the ceiling.
Her beautiful nightgowns. The silk sheets.
I watch it all burn, and the heat feels good against my scales. Cleansing. Purifying.
But it's not enough.
I smash through walls with my tail, reduce stone to rubble with my claws. My wings sweep through rooms, knocking over everything in their path. I tear down the towers, rip apart the battlements, demolish everything I've built over centuries.
The castle crumbles around me, and I don't stop. Can't stop. Because if I stop, I'll have to think about what I've become. What I've always been.
A monster.
This is what I am. This is what I've always been.
The monster in her story.
I stand in the ruins of my castle, surrounded by broken stone and ash, and I see it clearly for the first time.
She deserved so much more than this. So much more than me.
She deserved someone who could actually protect her, who could give her the life she wanted, who wouldn't trap her in a castle and call it love.
Who would actually let her choose. Someone she would choose back.
She deserved everything, and I gave her nothing but a cage. Violated her body every day.
The knights come a week later. Or maybe it's two weeks. Time has lost all meaning.
I hear them before I see them. The clank of armor, the nervous whinnying of horses. They're here to capture me. Someone's offered a bounty, apparently. The dangerous dragon who destroyed his own castle, who's gone feral in the forest.
They're not wrong.
The first group of knights dies quickly. I don't even shift fully into my dragon form. I just let the fire come, let it pour from my jaws until there's nothing left but scorched earth and melted metal.
The second group lasts longer. They have mages with them, magic users who think they can bind me. I kill them slowly, savoring their screams. My claws tear through armor like paper. My tail crushes bones. My teeth find throats.
I'm covered in blood. Theirs, mine.
More knights come. They always come. And I kill them all.
Between the attacks, I lie in the ruins of my castle and think about Adelaide.
I'm obsessed with her, with my memories of her.
The way she looked sleeping so sweetly and peacefully.
When her lips would shift ever so slightly before she would come.
How she looked at me with her amber eyes full of fire and anger when she woke.
I replay every one-sided conversation, every interaction, searching for the moment I became the villain instead of the hero. Maybe I was always the villain. Maybe I just didn't want to see it.
I cry. Great, shuddering sobs that shake my massive frame. Tears that could fill rivers. The grief is endless, and I drown in it willingly.
She's gone. She chose someone else. And I'm here, alone, exactly as I deserve to be.
My wings are tattered now, torn from battles and neglect. My scales are dull, caked with dried blood and ash. My tail drags behind me, too heavy to lift. I'm a shadow of what I was, a broken thing pretending to be a dragon.
The bond is still there, but I don't reach for it anymore. What's the point? She made her choice. She's happy without me.
And I'm here, in the ruins of everything I built, everything I destroyed, waiting for the next group of knights to come and try their luck. Waiting for the day when one of them finally succeeds.
Waiting for the mercy of death, because living like this, without her, without hope, without anything but rage and despair and the crushing weight of my own monstrosity, is worse than any poison, any wound, any death could ever be.
I am the monster in her story. And monsters don't get happy endings.
The bond suddenly flares to life, bright and burning and furious. I lift my head, confused, my massive body tensing. What—
I'm coming for you.
Her voice, down the bond, filled with rage and murder and something that might be betrayal.
I'm coming, and you better be ready. You better have a damn good explanation for why you abandoned me. For why you let them take me and did nothing.
Abandoned her? Let them take her? I nearly died. I did everything I could—
Because when I find you, I'm going to kill you too.
The bond pulses with her fury, her pain, her absolute conviction.
And for the first time in months, I feel something other than despair.
Terror.
She's coming. My Adelaide is coming, and she thinks I abandoned her? She thinks I left her there on purpose? I surge to my feet, my wings spreading despite their tattered state. I have to explain. I have to make her understand. I have to—
But what can I say? What explanation could possibly be enough?
I didn't protect her. That's the truth. I failed her when she needed me most.
And now she's coming to kill me.
Maybe that's what I deserve. Maybe that's the ending this story always needed.
The monster, slain by the princess he tried to keep.
Justice, at last.
I wait in the ruins of my castle, my massive body trembling, my heart pounding in my chest like a war drum.
She's coming.
And I don't know if I'll fight back or let her end this.
I don't know if I want to live or die.
I only know that I'll see her again, one last time.
And maybe that's enough.
Maybe that's all a monster like me deserves.