Chapter 37 #2
The battle rages on around us. Explosions paint the sky in shades of orange and red. Screams of agony fill the air—spiders shrieking, mages dying, dragons roaring in triumph and pain. The scent of smoke and blood and burning silk hangs thick over everything, a miasma of war.
Four mages guard Abraxis. Only four.
His drake screams at me, demanding I leave him. The sound tears at my heart—a father telling his daughter to save herself, to let him die, to not risk everything for someone who spent years pushing her away.
We don’t leave family behind.
I shift back.
The transformation is smooth, controlled.
I straighten my gown, adjust the fall of my hair, and walk forward with the calm, measured steps of a princess approaching her throne.
My wings spread half-open behind me, the black leather catching the firelight, making me look larger than I am. More threatening. More dangerous.
“You have something that belongs to my mother.”
I narrow my eyes, fighting to keep my dragoness from taking over. She wants blood. She wants to tear and rend and destroy. But I need precision right now. I need control.
The mages turn to look at me, their hooded faces tilting with sudden interest. “She’s a wyrm dragoness with wings.” The words pass between them in excited whispers. “We can siphon her magic and power ourselves for a century at least.”
I look up at Abraxis, meeting his eyes through the shimmer of magical chains. Fear lives there—not fear for himself, but fear for me. Terror at watching his daughter walk calmly into a trap.
“Remember what happens when my twin gets angry, Dad.” I hold his gaze, willing him to understand. “What do we do?”
We close our eyes.
I push the words through the familial bond, forcing them past barriers I’ve kept raised for years, hoping desperately that he hears me. For a heartbeat, nothing happens. Then—
His dragon’s eyes slammed shut.
I shift mine.
The change is subtle on the surface—just my eyes, just the irises, shifting from sapphire to something else. Something ancient. Something borrowed from my twin’s basilisk blood that runs through my veins as surely as my father’s acid.
I feel a fuzzy tickling behind my eyes as I sweep my gaze over the mages.
One by one, their eyes lock onto mine.
They can’t look away. They don’t want to look away. The power pulls at them, draws them in, holds them captive as surely as their chains hold my nest father.
One by one, the mages turn to stone before my eyes.
I pour all of my anger into the gift. All of my fears.
All the protective fury of a mother who just left her newborn daughter hiding under a willow tree, who flew into battle not knowing if she would return, who found her nest father bound and helpless before enemies who would have killed him without a second thought.
The transformation is horrible and beautiful. Flesh becomes granite. Blood becomes mineral. Living, breathing beings become statues frozen in expressions of dawning horror, their reaching hands and open mouths preserved forever in stone.
When the last one is no longer living, I close my eyes.
The aftermath of using the basilisk gifts always leaves me feeling wrong. Hollow. Like something essential has been scraped out of my soul and replaced with cold emptiness. I breathe deeply, trying to settle the trembling in my limbs, trying to push down the nausea that rises in my throat.
When I feel my eyes shift back to normal—sapphire blue, dragon-bright, wholly my own—I open them.
Looking to my left, I see Corvus and the other dragons of the outpost burning the last of the spiders and mages to a crisp.
Fire lights up the evening sky, casting everything in shades of orange and red.
The webs collapse as their anchors burn, the silk disintegrating into ash that drifts on the wind like black snow.
“It’s over, Dad.” I yell up at Abraxis, my voice carrying over the crackle of flames and the distant roars of victorious dragons.
He looks down at me the best he can, his drake’s eyes finally opening, his massive form still bound by those shimmering chains.
Spreading my wings, I fly up and land on his dragon’s shoulders.
The scales beneath my feet are warm, familiar—I remember climbing on him when I was small, before everything went wrong between us.
My silver talons extend, gleaming in the firelight, and I slice through the bindings with surgical precision.
Now that the mages are dead, the magic is no longer infused in the chains. They’re just metal now—strong, but not strong enough to resist a wyrm’s talons. Whatever I can’t cut through, I spit a small amount of acid on, watching it hiss and dissolve under the corrosive liquid.
When the last of the chains falls free, Abraxis shudders beneath me. A full-body tremor that speaks of relief and exhaustion and emotions too complex to name.
I spread my wings and glide to the ground, landing softly on the scorched earth.
Abraxis shifts back in a rush of reforming bone and receding scales. He’s human in seconds—tall and broad-shouldered, his dark hair disheveled, his face streaked with dirt and blood. He runs to me, his footsteps pounding against the ground, and grabs my shoulders with hands that tremble.
“Why did you come?” He shakes me slightly, his grip almost painful, his eyes wild with something that looks like terror. “You are next in line. You can’t be putting yourself in danger. Especially not for me.”
I see the truth in it all.
He was scared for me. Not angry. Not disappointed. Not trying to control me, or diminish me, or push me away. He was scared. Terrified. Watching his daughter dive headfirst into danger to save him, all he could think was, please not her. Anyone but her.
Before, I would have raged against him for telling me what to do. I would have seen his demanding brashness as an attack, his fear as an insult. But I see it now for what it is—love. Desperate, inarticulate, clumsy love from a man who never learned how to express himself without shouting.
“I came because you needed me.” I don’t waste any more words. I pull him in for a hug and just hold him.
He’s stiff at first—frozen with shock, with disbelief, with years of distance that made us strangers wearing family titles. I feel the moment the walls crumble. The moment his arms come up. The moment he stops being my nest father and becomes my dad.
“I saw the skull dragon and thought it was Thauglor.” His voice is rough, muffled against my hair. “Hell, the mages thought it was him. Then I noticed the red scale.”
He pulls back just enough to meet my eyes, and I see it there—the fear, still raw, still bleeding. “I know what genuine fear is now. I saw our baby diving headfirst into a mage-infested area to save me.”
I slide my wings over his shoulders and bring them up, creating a shelter of black leather around us. He does the same, his own wings rising to meet mine, encasing us in overlapping membranes that block out the world.
Inside our cocoon of wings, it’s quiet. Private. Safe.
“It’s okay, Dad.” I nuzzle his cheek, letting my dragoness rise just enough to purr. The sound rumbles from my chest, soft and soothing—a comfort I haven’t offered him since I was a little girl climbing into his lap after nightmares.
The first sob wracked his body.
He holds me tighter, his shoulders shaking, his breath coming in ragged gasps. I called him Dad. I came to save his life. I’m purring for him like I used to before everything went wrong.
It undoes him completely.
All these years, I misunderstood him. His anger and yelling were not because he hated me.
He was afraid for me and didn’t know how to express it.
Having two great wyrm fathers and a mother who was at wyrm status when I was born gave me everything he has to wait centuries for.
After his wing was damaged, he hated himself because he can’t do what he used to.
I hold him while he cries like I would my own child, because he needs it. My nest father. My dad. This broken, complicated, frustrating male who loved me badly for years because he never learned how to love well.
We have a long way to go to finish working through our issues. Years of misunderstandings don’t dissolve in a single embrace. But today was a step in the right direction.
Today, I saved my father.
And maybe—just maybe—we started saving each other.