34. Max
Max
We flew for hours toward the Greyhold outpost.
The capital burned bright behind us, then the towns, knots of Stormglass glow strung along the old roads and dimmed to embers at that hour. Valleys folded in shadow. Mountain ranges with snow catching moonlight along their spines.
Dead cities passed under us too, grids of streets with no lights in them at all. Inside some of the ruins, new towns had taken root, small and bright and stubborn.
Twice the dragon dropped lower to read the ground.
Both times we found patrols. Covenant riders working the roads, spaced like men who expected to be jumped. The war hadn’t come as one great wave. It’d come like this. Bites out of the edges. A village here, a supply road there.
The second time we went low, we caught a fight.
A company had a mutant pack pinned against a town wall. Shield line holding. Someone’s captain shouting orders.
The dragon’s wings hitched. Heat rolled up through the scale under my palm, and my Coldiron woke on my arm, hungry.
Down! Down! Dragon! Burn them all!
“No.”
That company had trained for this, and we had our own mission.
The dragon growled and climbed.
Hours later, ash began to fall.
Byproduct of the Rupture. Eighty-one years, and neither the land nor the sky above it had ever fully recovered.
It came down slow, catching on my sleeves, salting his black-and-gold scales gray. In Denver it fell in winter, drifting over the fortress walls like dirty snow. Winter was still two months out.
I turned my face up into it and let it settle on my lashes, and I didn’t examine too closely why that felt like an omen.
My back went stiff around the fourth hour. My thighs passed sore and dropped into a grinding ache, the price of riding a beast the size of a warship with nothing but my own legs for a saddle. I shifted my weight, rolled my shoulders, counted my breathing in fours.
Nothing up here but the boom of the wings and the wind tearing past my ears. The dragon was solid under me, a mountain that flew, and his heat came up through the scale and into my aching muscles like a hearth.
I couldn’t lay a hand on any of my heirs. Drakken included.
But I could touch the dragon.
I flattened my palm and stroked the scales at the base of his neck. The rumble came up at once, rolling through his whole body and into mine.
“You liked me first,” I said. “Before he did.”
The dragon purred.
“Why?”
Wind. Wings.
I kept my hand where it was.
“I voted against him in front of his officers.” The wind took most of it. “He wanted to put the whole base through your fire. The school too.”
Nothing changed in the wingbeat.
“He’s a paranoid asshole.”
The dragon made a huffing noise that sounded like a laugh.
Whatever was happening between Drakken and me, I hadn’t let myself sit with it. There hadn’t been room. The world kept catching fire faster than I could blink.
But up here there was nothing to fight and nowhere to run, just me and Drakken’s dragon and endless sky, and the question rode along with us the whole way, warm and unanswered under my hand.
“He gave my sister his word.” My throat closed, and I waited it out. “But what if we don’t return?”
A growl came up through the scale, low and fierce.
“That’s not an answer.”
I laughed at myself, and the wind took that too. Talking to a dragon at fifteen thousand feet about the man inside him.
“You’re both impossible, you know.”
Dawn came along the horizon, gray first, then a low seam of rose. I’d been awake all night, and the tiredness sat behind my eyes like grit. Sleep was never on the table. We’d climbed until the cold bit through my layers and stayed there. No fires. No rest. No trace for anyone to find.
Then the light came up far enough to show me the east, and the DarkVeil stood there.
From that height it looked like the edge of the world’s page. A curtain of living shadow ran north and south beyond sight, then sank into the earth and climbed out of it all the way to the sky. The dawn stopped against it. Light poured in, and none of it came back.
The dragon’s flight changed. Half a wingbeat faltered and caught itself. The ridge of horns down his spine lifted like hackles, and a growl rumbled through him, carrying to me through the scale.
My mouth had gone dry.
What if there was no connection between Lucifer and me at all? What if I’d read one word on a cursed parchment and built this whole desperate road on it? Left my sister. Left my princes. Flown to the darkest seam of the broken world and risked all of it for nothing.
But my birth name on that marriage contract was Morningstar. And nothing that breathed dared wear Lucifer’s surname without the blood to answer for it.
My former passenger’s taunt came up in that jaded purr I would never hear new again.
Do you know who your real daddy is?
I reached for my Dark Grace out of habit. Nothing answered.
“What if I am wrong? What if we’ve come to the wrong place?”
The dragon growled, long and final. There was no going back.
“Fuck it.” I set my eyes on the wall of shadow. “Let’s go all in.”