Epilogue
Six months later…
Adjar let the cold wrap around him like an old friend, settling into the familiar embrace of the sub-zero winds that swept across the trading station’s outer perimeter.
His scales absorbed the chill, channeled it through his body, and made it part of him.
This was what he was designed for—what he had been born for, though the details of that birth remained frustratingly fragmented.
Six months of ice and silence and Jaz, and still the memories came in scattered pieces, like shards of a mirror he couldn’t quite reassemble. All he could do was gather them together and hope that one day they would make sense.
He shifted his position on the rocky outcrop, scanning the settlement below for the hundredth time.
The polar trading station sprawled across the ice like an ugly wound.
Prefabricated structures in garish colors clustered together inside a huge dome, too many humans crowded into too small a space.
The noise alone made his teeth ache. Engines and shouting voices and the constant hum of climate systems working overtime to keep fragile bodies warm.
Unnecessary, he thought. All of it.
But Jaz was down there somewhere, navigating the chaos with the quiet competence that still amazed him.
She was trading their minerals for supplies and asking careful questions, maintaining the fiction that she was merely another struggling prospector scratching a living from the ice.
In truth, between his knowledge of the ice and her skill at drilling, they’d already made enough to reimburse Alina for the claim and the equipment.
But she still insisted on trading which meant his mate was alone, surrounded by strangers who could not be trusted.
His wings twitched beneath the thermal covering he wore, restless against the concealment. He wanted to launch himself into the air, circling the station like the predator he was and letting every creature below know that the female conducting business in their midst was claimed and protected.
Instead, he waited.
She is capable, he reminded himself. She survived alone for years before you. She does not need you hovering.
The words were true. That did not make them easier to accept.
He’d argued against this division of labor when she first proposed letting her handle the face-to-face negotiations while he remained at a safe distance—safe for the fiction of her identity and safe for his own concealment. Safe for everyone except his increasingly frayed nerves.
They weren’t sure if GenCon had believed the story about the avalanche but, based on the reports they’d heard, they weren’t searching for him in any obvious way. They didn’t need to raise any questions.
You can pass for human at a distance, she had said, practical as always. But the station quarters are too close. Someone would notice the scales. The pupils. The fact that you’re nearly a foot taller than the biggest miner there.
As always, she was right. He hated that she was right.
The sun had moved a full handspan across the pale sky since she’d disappeared into the station’s main trading hall. Too long. Even accounting for the bureaucratic delays she’d warned him about, it was taking too long.
He closed his eyes and reached out with senses no human possessed.
The ice beneath him sang with subtle vibrations—the deep bass notes of geological shifts, the crackling soprano of surface freeze patterns, the familiar rhythm of their claim site forty kilometers to the north.
He filtered through the noise, searching for anything that felt wrong.
Nothing. The station hummed with ordinary activity. No alarms, no unusual movement patterns, no indication of trouble.
She is fine, he told himself. She is always fine.
Movement caught his attention as a snow crawler emerged from the station’s vehicle bay, its treads cutting fresh tracks through the packed ice.
For a moment his heart leapt, but then he realized it was the wrong model moving in the wrong direction.
But as it passed the outer marker, he spotted the second vehicle behind it.
A fade blue vehicle with the distinctive scratch pattern along the driver’s side where she’d scraped against a rock formation three months ago. With the slight rattle in the left tread assembly that she kept promising to fix but never quite got around to.
Jaz.
He was moving before his mind caught up with his body, scaling down the outcrop and making for the rendezvous point they’d agreed upon. The crawler was already turning towards him, its driver clearly as eager to close the distance as he was.
The moment she killed the engine, he wrenched open the passenger door and climbed inside.
The cabin was cramped but he didn’t care. He pulled her out of her seat and into his arms, ignoring her startled laugh, burying his face in the curve of her neck where her scent was strongest.
Mate. Safe. Home.
The words weren’t English. They were something older, something that emerged from the scattered fragments of his memory like water finding cracks in stone. He didn’t need to translate them. She understood.
“I was gone for four hours,” she said, but her arms came up around him just as tightly, her fingers finding the gap between the thermal layers of his disguise to reach the scales beneath. “That’s perfectly reasonable for a supply run.”
“Four hours and seventeen minutes.”
“You were counting?”
“I am always counting.” He pulled back just enough to look at the familiar features, the amber eyes that held his reflection, and the faint flush the cold had brought to her cheeks. “It is interminable when you are not within reach.”
“You’re so dramatic.”
“It’s not dramatic if it’s accurate.”
She laughed again, that warm sound that had become his favorite thing about this strange new world.
Six months, and it still amazed him that she had chosen this.
Chosen him. A creature from a dead civilization, awakened into a future he didn’t understand, carrying memories that came in fragments and instincts that sometimes frightened her.
But she stayed. She always stayed.
“The trade went well,” she said, pulling back to settle into her seat but keeping one hand on his arm.
She needed space to drive, but she also understood his need for contact after their separation.
“Better than expected, actually. Kerensky tried to lowball me on the rare-earth prices, but I had data from the southern exchanges showing the current market rates.”
“You were prepared.”
“I’m always prepared.” She started the engine, pointing the crawler north towards home. “The look on his face when I pulled out the comparison charts was almost worth the drive.”
He allowed himself a small smile. “You enjoy the negotiations.”
“I enjoy winning the negotiations.” She guided them confidently around a pressure ridge. “I picked up everything on the list, plus some extras. New filtration membranes for the water system, upgraded sensor arrays for the deep-core scanner, and—” a sidelong glance “—two cases of that tea you like.”
“The one with the—”
“The bitter root notes that taste like ‘properly frozen minerals,’ yes.” She shook her head. “I still don’t understand your palate.”
“It reminds me of home.”
The words came out before he could consider them. Her hand tightened on his arm, but she didn’t press. She had learned that his memories needed space. Pressing for details sometimes made them retreat further into the fog.
They drove in comfortable silence for a long time, the white expanse of the polar ice spreading before them like a blank page waiting to be written. He let the quiet settle into his bones and the familiar landscape ease the tension that had coiled in his chest during the long hours of waiting.
“There were rumors in the station.”
He turned to look at her. “What kind of rumors?”
“GenCon.” Her voice was carefully neutral—the tone she used when she was thinking hard about something. “They’re investigating another seismic anomaly. Nothing like the one at our old claim, but unusual enough to draw attention.”
His spine straightened. “Location?”
“South. A long way south, near the equatorial mining belt.” She glanced at him. “Nowhere near us. But the timing is… interesting.”
Interesting. Not the word he would have chosen.
He closed his eyes, reaching out with senses that had become sharper over the past months. The ice beneath them hummed with its ancient songs, but he searched beneath it for the distinctive vibrations that would indicate another chamber. Another sleeper.
Nothing. The southern territories were too far, too warm, and too different from the frozen depths that had preserved him. If there was another dragon awakening, it wasn’t one of his kind.
“I haven’t detected any indication of another… emergence,” he said carefully. “But my range has limits. Whatever GenCon is investigating, it’s beyond my ability to sense directly.”
“Could it be something else? Something other than a dragon?”
The question made something shift in his fragmented memories. Chambers of different sizes, different configurations, and different purposes.
“It could be many things,” he admitted. “I do not remember everything. But I know that the preservation network was extensive and designed to protect more than just the keepers of memory.”
“Extensive.” She frowned. “How extensive are we talking?”
Another flash. A map with lines connecting points across a world that no longer existed, circles marking locations that would have been unrecognizable even if his memory had been clear.
“Planetwide,” he said. “Though how much of it has survived, I cannot say.”
“Jesus.” She was quiet for a moment, processing. “If they all start waking up…”
“They will not wake all at once.” The words came with surprising certainty, emerging from a part of his mind that seemed more reliable than most. “The process is designed to be gradual. Sequential. One awakening creates conditions that eventually trigger another, but slowly. It could take decades.”