Chapter 2 #2
I'd thought the chamber was quiet before. This was something else entirely. This was the silence of beings processing the impossible, of minds grappling with magic so vast it should have been myth.
I saw Davoren exchange a glance with Sereis—something heavy passing between them, some understanding I couldn't interpret.
Garruk's massive hands clenched at his sides.
Zephyron's lightning flickered erratically, casting strange shadows across his face.
Caelus had gone utterly still, which somehow seemed more alarming than if he'd started raging.
The mates moved almost as one. Kara's hand found Davoren's arm. Thalia pressed closer to Zephyron. Lark stepped back until her shoulder brushed Garruk's chest. Wren and Mira mirrored them, reaching for their partners like drowning sailors reaching for shore.
They knew. Whatever they understood that I didn't, they knew something terrible was coming.
Morgrith's eyes found mine again. This time, they held something I couldn't name. Something that looked almost like apology.
"The ritual requires a sacrifice," he said. "And it requires a wound-walker to ensure the sacrifice doesn't destroy the one making it."
My mouth went dry.
The chamber seemed to contract around me, the vast space suddenly intimate, suffocating. I wanted to ask what kind of sacrifice. I wanted to demand an explanation. I wanted to turn and run and never stop running.
Instead, I stood there. Waiting. The way I'd always waited—for the next patient, the next fever, the next pain that needed swallowing.
Whatever came next, I would face it.
I'd been facing impossible things my whole life.
What was one more?
"What does it cost? What is the sacrifice?"
Davoren's voice cut through the silence like a blade through silk. He'd stepped forward without me noticing, his bronze form seeming to radiate heat even in human shape. His ember-eyes burned brighter than I'd seen them—not with anger, I realized, but with fear poorly disguised as fury.
"Nothing comes free, Shadow Walker." The old title dripped from his tongue like a challenge. "Especially not pulling souls from beyond the veil. What are you not telling us?"
Morgrith didn't flinch. Didn't move. The shadows gathered closer around him, as if protecting their master from what came next.
"A Dragon Lord must sacrifice their dragon-essence to power the ritual."
The words hung in the air. Simple words. Devastating words.
"Specifically," Morgrith continued, his voice impossibly calm, "the shadow torn from the Shadow Dragon. It's the only thing that can pierce the boundary between life and death. The only thing with enough power to call a soul back across ten thousand years."
The chamber erupted.
Sereis moved first—ice crackling in his wake, spreading across the stone floor in jagged patterns that climbed toward the altar. His pale face had gone even paler, his glacier-eyes blazing with something I'd never seen in someone so controlled.
"You're talking about destroying yourself." His voice was sharp as breaking icicles. "The dragon-essence isn't separate from you, Morgrith. It is you. What you're describing is death dressed in ritual language."
"There must be another way." Garruk's rumble shook the floor. He hadn't moved—the mountain lord never moved quickly—but his presence seemed to fill the chamber, solid and immovable as the stone he ruled. "We have resources. Time. Other options we haven't explored."
"We don't have time." Morgrith's response was quiet, but it silenced Garruk's protest like a door closing.
"Valdris is already stirring. I've felt him in the shadows for months now—growing stronger, testing the boundaries of his prison.
The equinox approaches, and when it arrives, the barriers will thin enough for him to break through. We have weeks, not years."
Zephyron's form flickered. Lightning arced between his fingers, jumping to his shoulders, crackling down his spine in agitated bursts. "We need you for the battle to come. You can't face the Unnamed as a—as a hollow shell. Without your dragon-nature, you're barely more than human."
The words stung. I felt them land like a slap, though they weren't aimed at me.
Barely more than human.
Is that what I was to them? What all of us were—the unclaimed, the unmagical, the merely mortal?
Even Caelus showed alarm, and watching him lose his composure was like watching stone crack. "The ritual could kill you outright. And even if it doesn't—"
"I know what I'm sacrificing."
Morgrith's voice cut through the chaos. Not louder than the others, but somehow more present. More final. The kind of voice that ended arguments not through volume but through absolute certainty.
"I am the only one who can walk between worlds." He looked at each of them in turn—his brothers, his fellow lords, the beings he'd known for millennia. Beings who cared about him, I realized. Who were fighting not because they disagreed with his logic, but because they couldn't bear to lose him.
"I was made for this," he said. Quietly. Simply. As if stating a fact no more remarkable than the color of the sky. "If we fail here—if Valdris breaks free and we have no way to reach him—there will be no world left to protect."
He paused. Let the silence stretch.
"No mates," he said. "No bonds. Nothing."
I watched the mates react before I understood why.
They'd gathered together without my noticing—drawn to each other the way water seeks its own level.
Kara's hand was pressed to her mouth, her fire-marks dimmed to something closer to dying embers.
Mira's frost-patterns had spread up her neck, climbing toward her jaw, her face pale as winter.
Thalia's lightning had gone still, trapped beneath her skin, no longer crackling but coiled tight like a spring about to snap.
They understood, perhaps better than the Dragon Lords themselves, what it meant to give up the bond that made you whole.
They'd felt it. That connection. That belonging. The certainty of being claimed by something vast and eternal, of never being alone again.
And they were watching a Dragon Lord choose to surrender it.
Morgrith's starlight eyes found me.
The chamber fell away. The other lords, their arguments, their fear—all of it dissolved into background noise. There was only him, watching me with an expression I couldn't decipher. Apology? Resignation? Hope?
"That's where you come in, wound-walker."
My name. He didn't use my name.
"Your role is to keep me alive as the dragon-nature is torn away." His voice was steady, but I heard the tremor beneath it. The crack in his armor. "You'll need to absorb enough of the trauma that my body survives the separation. That my mind doesn't shatter under the weight of what's being taken."
My mouth went dry.
I'd absorbed fevers that could have killed strong men. Infections that turned flesh to rot. The slow poison of tumors eating their hosts from within. I'd taken broken bones and bleeding wounds and the screaming terror of children too young to understand why their bodies had betrayed them.
But this.
This was different.
This was the death of a god. The unmaking of something ancient and vast. The tearing away of an identity that had existed since before my ancestors' ancestors were born.
"I've never—" My voice cracked. I swallowed and tried again. "I've never absorbed anything like that."
"No one has." Morgrith's expression didn't change, but something in his eyes softened.
Just slightly. Just enough for me to see the person beneath the power.
"But you're the only one who might survive it.
The only one whose gift might be strong enough to hold the pieces together while everything else falls apart. "
He said it like a compliment.
It felt like a death sentence.
But I nodded anyway.
What else could I do?
They prepared in near-silence, and that silence held more weight than any words could have carried.
The Dragon Lords moved to their positions with the practiced ease of beings who had done this before—not this exact ritual, perhaps, but others like it.
Ancient workings that required precision and power in equal measure.
Their arguments had ended not because they'd accepted Morgrith's decision, but because they understood it couldn't be changed.
Davoren stood to the east, and heat rolled off him in visible waves.
When he raised his hands, fire bloomed between them—not the wild flames of destruction, but something older.
Steadier. The fire that had burned at the heart of the world since the beginning.
It would fuel the transformation, he'd said.
Provide the raw energy needed to tear reality open.
Sereis took the west, and the temperature around him plummeted. Frost spread across the stone beneath his feet, climbing the altar's base in delicate crystals. His ice would preserve what remained. Keep Morgrith's body from failing even as his essence was stripped away.
Garruk stood to the north, and I felt the stone shift beneath me—a subtle vibration, as if the mountain itself was acknowledging its master. His power would anchor the magic. Keep it from spinning out of control, from consuming more than it was meant to take.
Zephyron claimed the south, lightning crackling between his fingers like eager pets. His energy would bridge the gap between worlds, create the pathway across which Evara's soul could travel.
And Caelus stood opposite Morgrith, wind gathering around him in visible currents despite the enclosed space. He would carry the call. Send it ringing across the veil to wherever lost souls waited.