Chapter Seventeen
Dela
I plunged downward, the wind ripping at me worse than it ever had on Ember’s back.
For a moment, I did nothing, just stared at the ground as it rushed toward me from thousands of feet below.
We’d nearly crossed out of the rocky, blasted landscape and into a lusher, greener part of the dragon realm, and the divide between the two was harsh enough for me to study.
Then my brain caught up with the rest of me, and I started screaming.
“Ember!” I shrieked, looking up for him.
The movement started me spinning, but as I tumbled around over and over again, I could see one thing very clearly.
There was no dragon in the sky above me. Ember was gone. He’d disappeared.
I’m going to die.
My screams faded as I wrestled with that sudden moment of mortality. There was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t fly, couldn’t magically be on the ground. I was going to hit and hit hard.
At least it will be quick, I thought, distractedly admiring a fluffy cloud as I plunged through it. No pain. Just death’s embrace. Not how I wanted it, but better than lots of suffering first. That’s something, at least.
It was a shame I wouldn’t be able to say goodbye to anyone, though. My mom and dad, Chelsea. I would have liked to tell them how much I loved them one last time. Just so they knew it.
“Dela!”
I frowned, half-lost in my fatalistic mind, not sure if I’d imagined the sound or not.
“Dela!”
Then, suddenly, he was there. Ember. Blue sapphires, staring at me from less than five feet away, his hair all messed up from falling through the sky.
“Ember?” I shrieked. “What the hell are you doing? You can’t die, too!”
He frowned. “I’m not going to die, Dela. I’m going to save you. Let’s go.”
I stared at him. How was he going to save me? He couldn’t fly in this form.
“Grab onto my back!” he shouted. “Like you did back on the plateau for the first time, okay?”
My mind slowly began to work. Which was good because the ground was coming at us really fast, and we didn’t have much time. I nodded, and he turned around.
I angled toward him and extended my arms and legs, wrapping them tight like a goddamn spider monkey the second I made contact. The strong movements were more than he could compensate for as I slammed into his back, and we started spinning.
“It’s okay!” he shouted as I cried out in fear. “Just stay calm, and don’t let go. Let me control us.”
“Yep, not letting go,” I whimpered, closing my eyes. I could start to make out details on the ground below. It was close.
We slowly stopped spinning, but I didn’t dare open my eyes. I’d rather not know when the last few seconds of my life were.
Ember shuddered, and then, abruptly, I felt his body surge in size, my legs and arms forced to spread wider to remain straddling what was now his neck. I still wasn’t looking, but I knew what would happen, the same as before.
But would we be in time?
The mighty dragon grunted in pain, and a strange whistling filled my ears.
I opened my eyes just in time to see his wings snap fully open, catching the wind.
We didn’t stop falling, we were still angled downward, but now we were going with the wind.
The whistling was from the air moving across his wings as they slowly bit into the air.
We slowed, and then, a few hundred feet in the air, we stopped falling and began to glide.
“Are we going to die?” Although I whispered the question, he was still somehow able to hear it.
“No,” he said, still strained. “No, we’re not.”
I slumped against the scarlet scales of his neck. “Thank god.”
“God-King, that was close,” he added.
“God-King?” I’d heard that phrase before, back in the cavern, but so much was happening that it had been very low on my curiosity level.
“Our immortal ruler,” Ember said, though he didn’t elaborate further on the subject.
He was tired. I could hear it in his voice and feel it in the beat of his wings. That had taken a lot out of him. As my fear of dying faded, I sat up and looked around. For the first time since I’d been sucked through the freezer, I had some answers and wasn’t actively being attacked or pursued.
“What is that?” I said, pointing at the giant peak, ringed by dark gray clouds shot through with blue. “I saw it before. It’s huge. Bigger than any mountain I’ve heard of.”
“Mount Drakonus. It marks the center of the four dragon realms,” Ember said. He paused. “I really should not be telling you this.”
“Why are you, then?”
Pause. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I shouldn’t. But I want to.”
I nodded, though I didn’t actually understand. “What’s there?”
“That’s where I had hoped to take you,” he said. “So that you could go home. Be safe.”
“Not anymore?” I asked, staring at the mountain and the lands surrounding it. We gained height with every passing second, revealing more of the lands around me. Beyond them, I could see what appeared to be the sea.
Where were we? And how had humans never found dragons before, let alone a mountain so big?
“No,” he said. “Those two won’t be the only fliers out. Albright will have others in the sky, and odds are someone saw the fight with Flare.”
“So, what now?”
“Now we turn back,” he said, clearly angry.
“Oh.”
“I have to keep you safe,” he said. “And right now, the safest place is at Fire Castle.”
“Castle, you say,” I said, thinking over everything I’d heard from him and from listening to his argument in the caves. “Like where kings are? That kind of castle?”
“Sort of,” he said, clearly unhappy, his dragon head fixed straight ahead as we flew over the landscape.
“Are you … the king?”
“No.”
“But the men in the cave. They were talking about the throne or something? I know they were talking about you.”
“It’s nothing,” he said, trying to shut down the topic.
“Ember, how much longer will you keep me in the dark? I think I’m—somehow—doing a fairly decent job of not flipping the fuck out, even though I’m riding a fucking dragon. So, perhaps you could relent for just a little bit when we get back?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Well, perhaps you could answer some questions. Really basic ones,” I said.
“Like?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Where am I, for starters?
The dragon realm isn’t a good enough answer.
This isn’t any place on Earth that I know of.
Also, maybe who you are.” My composure came apart at that point.
My nerves were frayed, worsening as I continued to talk until my voice rose into a shriek.
“And most importantly, why the fuck am I here?”