Chapter 68
It’s such a surreal sensation that I don’t even let out another sound. An odd sense of calm overtakes me as the wind howls in my ears, and the chill of the mountain peaks envelops me.
Pia, Dazni, Myla, and Ember are all thrown as well. They are nothing more than dark shapes against the inky sky. Barely visible beneath Lucan’s massive spark-haloed form.
My heart begins to race faster and more erratically than I’ve ever felt. My skin ripples. Every ragged, panicked breath feels like it’s tearing my lungs apart.
The world is spinning as we free-fall. What was down is up. Up is down. My skull is going to split apart long before it smashes on the rocks below.
Lucan’s roar fills the night, rattling my bones with chilling horror.
Another burst of light—this time orange-tinted—explodes around him.
As the magic fades, he is left back in a shape similar to the one I know well.
Except dragon’s wings still protrude from his back—one is broken and hanging at an odd angle.
Half his body is coated in blood. The shot hit more of him than I realized.
I have to save them—save him.
I twist in the bitterly cold air. Trying to get to him—to all of them. Not that I know what I’d do if I could.
Copper scales rise along his neck and creep onto his cheeks. His hands are barely human, nails black and sharp. He’s completely limp; it’s as if his body tried to revert back into its normal, human state, but couldn’t completely finish.
The errant thought of the night I fell during the Tribunal comes back to me, the pulsing wind I felt. How he caught me despite all odds. He dared to use this magic then, too, to save me.
He risked everything for me then—and now.
I must do the same for him. We can’t die like this. There’s too much left for all of us to do. The truth about Valor, Mum’s research, the scourge, how to save this world, and the magic within me… None of it can end here.
“This won’t be the end,” I vow as the wind rushes past my ears, my body still plummeting toward the ground.
Think, Isola. Think. There’s so much power within me. I have to be able to use it for myself. Use it, Isola. Use it!
I draw on whatever Ether surrounds me. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter if it could give me the strength to stop them. A cry rips through me as a flood drowns me in a surge of sudden power.
The feeling of Lucan’s and my Ether flowing that day in the Tribunal returns, coursing between us, even at this distance.
Smoke fills my nose, trailing off my battered form. Fire sparks around me, snuffing before it can turn the air into an inferno. Trails of gray smoke curl through the air where the pops of Etherlight once were.
As if heated from within, I can feel the scars made when I was twelve. He’s been a part of me all this time, carved onto my heart. Changing me into what I’ve always suspected I was—into what I’ve always dreaded most.
Stop being so afraid, Isola. The vicar and his Creed were the ones who told you to fear. What if I give in? What if I stop fighting it?
Wrenching, churning, snapping, popping.
I gasp, flailing through the air. My joints ache.
My skin is too tight, and I claw at it, drawing blood, as though it’s a horrible coat I must shed.
Two invisible swords are pushing through my chest, skewering my lungs, slowly protruding from my back.
They punch through the skin with a pain so sharp and bright, it’s nearly pleasure.
I scream so loud, my voice swells into a roar.
Two membranous wings unfurl, outstretching behind me.
I see them in the outline of my shadow on the snow below.
They catch the wind, slowing my fall. Instinct has me trying to flap them—to save my life—but I’ve never done such a thing; they’re unruly and strange.
My arms and legs grow. Scales coat them, and as they do, the pain begins to vanish. Everything slowly starts to fade away. Things that were just so important are suddenly not so. Vinguard is little more than a distant memory, growing hazier by the second. The pain of Father’s loss, of Saipha—
Saipha.
No. I grit too-sharp teeth in a too-long muzzle. I will not forget her. I will not succumb to the beast. I will not let it have me. My magic is my own.
A burst of Ethershade shoots out from me as ribbons of crimson. There is no gold, and there are no orange flames. It is as red as the blood I spilled across the altar of the Grand Chapel of Mercy. I imagine it enveloping the others, catching them like clawed hands.
A breath. And then a shock wave of crimson light and acrid mist. The whole world seems to take a collective gasp and go dark.
I force my eyes open, then blink. I’m on the ground, though I don’t remember hitting it. The others are here, too. They roll on the deep snow of the wide cliff we’ve landed upon, unconscious but moving slightly. Twitching. Breathing. Wounded and blood-covered, but alive.
My chest squeezes tight as I catch sight of Lucan. He’s there, just beyond my reach. His one wing still hangs at a sickening angle. But I see the rise and fall of his chest. He’s hanging on, but he needs help.
The snow where I’ve landed has melted in a circle around me.
I place my hands on the blackened rock between us, ready to crawl over, but notice something…
unnatural. The stone is not blackened like smoke or fire or even the shock wave of Ether.
It’s a dark gray, just like it was in the Font when my blood dripped upon the stone.
Except now it’s faintly spotted with red.
Blood? No… More dots appear.
Shifting onto my knees, I tip my head back and stare up at the sky. Tiny motes of what look like bright-red ash fall like snow. The once cloud-dappled night sky is now overcast with an ominous, deep-red haze from which it falls.
Quivering, I reach up and behind and gasp when I catch sight of my hand. My fingers are crimson-scaled—obsidian nails extend from my fingertips, sharpened into points. The wing curves to meet my transformed hands. I see it in my periphery, then by craning my neck for a better look.
The bony structure of the wing is covered with tiny crimson scales in the same shade. The membrane is slate, dappled with swirls of red, as if painted to match the scourge that clouds the sky above us. The wings emit a haze I last saw in the sundering pits.
In horror, I shut my eyes, waiting to wake up, hoping it’s nothing more than a vision, like when the power of the Font flowed into me—but it’s not, and I know it. I open my eyes and blink at my taloned and scaled hands. Red…
I shake my head. There are copper, green, purple, blue, yellow, and silver dragons. There is the mighty white-and-gray Elder Dragon. But never, in my life, have I ever heard of a red dragon.
What… What am I?
Lucan’s words from days ago come back to me, Like it or not, Isola, you’re something special.
I stare at the blighted ground beneath me.
With every inhale I take, the scourge my body emits fills my lungs, sizzling but not painful.
It doesn’t ravage my body as it does the land.
It feels…powerful. Tilting my head back, I let out a scream that is part terror and part triumph, one that becomes a roar unlike any have ever heard before.