Chapter 97
My gut finally stops convulsing.
Spitting blood and bile onto the snow, I realize the world hasn’t trembled in a while …
Have the moons stopped falling?
I lift my head, squint through the smoggy gloom, pumping my lungs with short, rattling breaths that only serve to clog me further. A barking cough threatens to slice me open, jerking the two stab wounds that have grown impossible to ignore.
No point checking them. I’m certain the light feeling in my head isn’t due to what little I’ve consumed since we were captured, but the constant leak of blood oozing from my drenched bindings. Like the wounds held breath as best they could until my job was done.
I’m thankful for that.
Avoiding the gory twist of Arkyn’s mutilated mouth and his flat, unseeing eyes, I tear a strip from his cloak and bind it around the bottom half of my face to stop my lungs from clogging with dusty pollution.
All the while, most of my conscience is within, cradling Rygun’s remaining ember.
Blowing on it. Begging it to flare. But no matter how hard I try, it continues to sputter.
My need to be with him explodes, pumping me full of the strength I require to stand and blast a belted word, searching the surrounding gloom. “Rygun!”
His ember loses a little more of its luster—
Panic rages as I whip around, hunting for a sign of which direction I should search. Anything.
“Rygun!”
Another chest-ripping cough threatens to disable me, but all the hurt in the world has nothing on the realization that my dragon is dying. He’s dying, and I’m not there to tell him it’s okay to push into the sky.
To leave me.
Because he won’t; not without me there, urging him on.
He’ll die alone in the frigid dark for the predators to pick at.
For his blood to leach into the ground, fossilize, and eventually be scavenged by greedy folk, his valuable scales and tusks fought over until all that remains are his bones … forever lost in the snow.
I choose a direction and stumble forward, chest jerking. “Rygun!”
Something begins to take shape ahead, emerging through the gloom, making my breath catch. But any hope is crushed when I see it’s too small to be Rygun, using its left wing like a foreclaw, hobbling.
I freeze.
The Elding Bird’s beak pierces into view, still red with Rygun’s blood. I expect it to snap forward and end me, but it’s not looking my way. Instead, those bloodred eyes are narrowed on the broken body at my back, while soft keening sounds slit the silence.
I stagger to the side as it trudges past, offering a perfect view of its crushed and tattered wing painting a bloody trail through the snow.
With a scratchy lament that echoes my own agony, the beast collapses beside Arkyn, the tip of its beak resting against his chest.
It shudders.
Popping, snapping sounds distort the silence as it begins to compact down, claws retracting into feet, wings wilting into delicate hands bundled together. Its body tightens in places, feathers melt into slopes of pale, naked skin, its beak retreating to form a delicate face.
I fail to make sense of the shapely fae lying coiled beside my slain brother in place of the Elding Bird, with her head on his chest, cushioned by a spill of red hair … wondering if I’ve lost more blood than I thought. If I’m seeing things.
That has to be it.
She releases a gurgling breath, then goes deathly still with my sword lodged in her back—
Groaning, I turn. Stumble down the bloody trail she left.
“Ruif, Rygun.” Darkness gathers at the edge of my vision, pressing in. Threatens to clap together. “RUIF …”
A rumbling exhale comes to me. Almost splits my chest.
I run, unsteady through the bloody snow and smog on legs that barely feel. Come to the edge of a crater the Elding Bird must’ve clambered free of, based on the bloody gouges in the steep, icy terrain.
It’s an agonized stumble into the bowl, some of the skin ripping from my arms as I’m forced to slide down the majority until the terrain flattens again.
I surge to my feet, power forward through the powdery gloom.
Release an anguished sob when a hill of jagged darkness begins to take shape, lumped on a mess of luminous moonshards.
Staggering around Rygun’s crumpled wing, I move toward his right claw—outstretched, his scales frosted over.
Like he’s made of ice.
I groan, coming to the side of his face that’s been pecked at, his eye gone. All that’s left is a pulped hollow leaking blood into the snow.
Falling to my knees, I press my hands against his jaw and look up at his remaining eye, straight into his dying soul. He releases a drawn-out exhale of relief that guts me.
I open myself to the Creators and pull a crackling breath, then belt a stream of desperate requests. But only silence comes. Like they’re too crushed with mourning for their battered world to listen.
Again, I hiss at Ignos. “Vaugh—aith ish-áth, Ignos. VISH AITH.”
In the quiet that follows, the cold knifes deeper. A thousand icy swords of it pointing toward my dragon, pushing past his scales.
Turning within, I dare to look at his remaining ember, barely glimmering with life. My own side is lit with only the single flame he gifted me; that tethered us together and kept me alive at a time my heart had given up.
Without second thought, I lift the flame that binds us, its molten roots pulling taut. “Ew tua zin-ath—ooshá.”
You can still survive.
I move to pass it back to him and sever us for good. To give him enough energy to move somewhere hot. Perhaps one of the fresher moonfall sites—
He feeds me a memory. Vision of me smothered in blood, clinging to the Elding Bird as we tumbled through the warring smog. As he urged me to let go and save myself, only for me to refuse, screaming, “Aburr—ath tuíl, Rygun.”
We’re in this together.
Then, he slams a scaled wall between us, blocking me out.
Feeling his jaw clamp down on me would hurt less.
“Ruif!”
The plea sputters with more blood.
I wobble.
With a thunderous groan, Rygun scoops me into his claw. It’s only once I’m off my feet that I realize I had nothing left to keep me upright.
That my body is failing, too.
I relax into him, letting my muscles loosen for the first time since Raeve slumbered close on our journey through the Undercity. Before everything changed.
“Lukith át—utun ath tah—tuíl, Rygun. Ruif.”
Let’s go to the sky together. Please.
Rather than lift his wings, he pulls me to his chest. So close, I’m pressed against his cold scales, the slow thud-ump of his heart hammering beside me.
He makes a droning sound that tells me everything. That he very much wants to bury us in the above—together—but lacks the energy to try.
My heart cracks as he uses what little he has left to shift in small but mighty motions, bundling into a loose knot reminiscent of a moon.
He sweeps his wing around me, leaving a shredded window to the sky barely visible through the dense smog.
But there. Something for me to focus on while humming the song Mah so loved to hear.
The one I played for her while she was bringing Veya into this world, hoping it brings Rygun some sense of peace.
But I also hum it for a different reason.
So I can tune out the sounds of his staggered breaths, not wanting to live these closing moments wondering if this will be the final thump of his heart. If this will be his final inhale.
Not wanting to hear the sounds of him solidifying around me, down here in the snow, so very far from the sky.
Wanting to, at the very least, believe we’ll drift off at the same time, swaddling myself in ignorance until the moment we’re cleft apart.
I think of Raeve. Think of our daughter.
Pray to the Creators they’ve found each other at last—that they’re together. A thought that bolsters me as my lids grow almost too heavy to keep open.
Something shifts above. A piked shadow so big I’d almost mistake it for Rygun’s spirit soaring skyward … were it not for the silver scales glinting from the light of the scattered moonshards.
A mighty roar cleaves the silence before a gentle darkness takes me.