Chapter 10
TEN
SOREIA
Iwake gasping.
The shelter is dark. The storm continues outside, muted by the stone walls but still audible—a constant shriek of wind that sounds less like weather and more like mourning. The cold has deepened while I slept, turning my breath to fog.
Kaster hasn’t moved.
He’s still standing near the door, still scanning the storm. But his head is angled differently now. Watching me.
“Bad dreams.”
I don’t answer. The dream clings to my skin like smoke, impossible to wash away. Power hums beneath my skin, pulled toward him, and I have to clamp down on it with everything I have.
“Prophetic?”
“No.” Rough. Damaged. “Different.”
He accepts this without pushing. Turns his attention back to the storm, giving me space to compose myself.
I don’t want space.
The realization arrives with the force of a physical blow. I don’t want distance. I don’t want the careful separation that defines hunter-and-quarry.
No. I don’t let myself finish the thought. I pull my knees tighter against my body and focus on breathing, on the cold, on the sounds of the storm.
The hours blur. Each time I surface, he’s exactly where I left him—an anchor in the darkness, the one still thing in a night that won’t stop moving. At some point during the night, his weight shifts, angling more fully toward the interior. Toward me.
The child’s shoe catches my attention again in the dim light. Small. Cracked leather. Someone who had no magic, no bloodline worth hunting.
Dead anyway because proximity to targets causes collateral damage.
The thought sends ice through my veins. I’m a target. Anyone near me becomes collateral.
Including him.
The wind shifts around what I estimate to be the third hour past midnight. The shrieking drops to a moan, and in the relative quiet, I hear them. Footsteps. Claws scraping stone somewhere beyond the walls.
Kaster’s posture changes—a minute tightening that wouldn’t be visible if I wasn’t watching for it. The temperature in the shelter rises slightly. His fire, stoking.
“How many?” I whisper.
“Six. Maybe eight.” He cocks his head, listening to frequencies I can’t detect. “They’re circling. Not approaching yet.”
“Testing the perimeter.”
“Waiting for the storm to clear enough for coordinated assault.”
They can’t attack effectively while the wind still throws ash into every line of sight. But once visibility improves, they’ll come. They always come.
“We could run. Use the last of the storm as cover.”
“They’ll track us. They always track us.” He turns his head, and for the first time since I woke, his full attention lands on me. The weight of it is crushing. Absolute. “You’re running on empty. If we hit an ambush, you die. I’m not risking that.”
The words land differently than they did in the ravine. Then, they sounded like calculation. Now, they sound like a declaration wrapped in an excuse.
I hold his gaze for three heartbeats. Four. Five.
Then I look away.
The hunters test the door at false dawn.
One heavy impact against the damaged frame, followed by the scrape of claws seeking purchase on stone. The door holds—barely—and the sound retreats into the gray half-light of morning.
I’m already beside Kaster.
I don’t remember moving. Don’t remember making the conscious choice to close the distance between my sleeping platform and his position near the door. But here I am, so close that the heat bleeding off his skin reaches mine, my body having made a decision my mind refused to make.
He doesn’t comment. Doesn’t tell me to retreat or put distance between us.
He angles his body slightly instead. Making room. Creating a space for me in his defensive perimeter as naturally as if I’ve always belonged there.
The gesture shouldn’t mean anything. Tactical adjustment. Optimal positioning. The kind of minor shift any experienced fighter makes when working alongside another combatant.
It means everything.
“They’ll breach in the next pass.” Low. Calm. The voice of someone who has killed more monsters than I can count and expects to kill more before this ends. “The frame won’t hold against a coordinated strike.”
“I have enough left for two anchors. Maybe three.”
“Save them. I’ll break what I can. You lock the deaths in place.”
The division of labor we’ve fallen into without discussing it. He destroys. I finalize.
The door shudders under another impact.
“When they come through,” Kaster says, “don’t leave my side. Not for any reason.”
I should resent the command. I’ve survived alone for weeks, fought and killed and run and bled without anyone’s help. I don’t need a dragon telling me where to stand.
But the resentment doesn’t come.
“I won’t.”
The words leave my mouth before I can stop them. A promise I didn’t mean to make, binding me to a position at his side.
His gaze holds mine. Searching. Looking for the lie.
He won’t find it.
Because I mean it. Gods help me, I mean it.
The door splinters inward.
The first hunter comes through in a shower of wood and stone, talons aimed at the space where it expects prey to cower. Kaster catches it before it completes its trajectory, redirecting momentum into the wall with a crack of breaking bone.
The second hunter follows immediately. The third. The fourth.
They pour through the ruined doorway in a tide of armor and muscle and divine-forged malice, and Kaster meets them with the killing precision I’ve come to expect. Each movement purposeful. Each strike positioned to break rather than wound.
I hold my position at his flank. Near enough to feel the displaced air from his blows. Near enough that my magic can reach whatever falls beneath his claws.
A hunter gets past him. It happens in the chaos of close-quarters combat—a momentary gap in his guard, a creature small enough to slip through while he’s engaged with two larger threats. It comes for me with lethal intent, talons aimed at my throat.
I don’t run.
My hands come up. My magic surges forward, burning through my reserves with familiar pain. The hunter’s momentum carries it into my reach, and I anchor it before it can land—not killing, but holding, making its god-spawned flesh susceptible to permanent ending.
Kaster’s claws tear through its spine before it touches me.
He doesn’t pause. Doesn’t check if I’m harmed. He spins back into the fight with a growl that vibrates through my bones, and I see it now—the fear beneath the fury.
He’s terrified.
Not of the hunters. Not of the god that sent them. He’s terrified of me dying while he watches. Terrified of failing to prevent the one outcome he refuses to accept.
I’ve never seen fear on a dragon before.
The fight continues. Bodies pile up in the ruined doorway, blocking the approach of reinforcements. I anchor two more kills, burning magic I can’t afford, and Kaster tears through the remaining hunters with a ferocity that borders on unhinged.
When the last creature falls, the shelter is silent except for our breathing.
My body won’t stop trembling. Magic depletion and cold and adrenaline combining into spasms I can’t control. My nose bleeds—I taste the copper at the back of my throat—and my vision keeps graying at the edges.
Kaster turns to me.
His hands come up—bloody, clawed, still half-shifted from the fight. They hover near my face without touching.
“You used too much.”
“We’re alive.” The words slur. I’m more spent than I realized. “That’s what matters.”
His hands stay raised. Near enough to touch. Near enough that I feel the heat against my skin.
The distance between us contracts to nothing. Expands to everything.
“We need to go.” I force the words out through numb lips. “The survivors will report our position.”
“You can’t walk.”
“Then help me.”
It’s not what I mean to say. Not a request I planned to make. But the words escape before I can cage them, and now they hang in the air between us.
His hands lower.
Then his arm slides around my waist, pulling me against his side with careful pressure, supporting my weight without crushing me.
The Anchor flares at the contact. Not the painful burn of combat use, but a deep, instinctive pull—toward his heat, his strength, the fire that lives beneath his skin. My body wants to press closer. My mind screams at me to pull away.
I do neither.
I let him help me through the ruined doorway, over the bodies of the hunters he killed, into the gray light of morning.
And when his arm tightens fractionally around my waist—possessive, protective, something between those words—I don’t object.
We walk east.
The ash storm has passed, leaving the landscape painted in gray-white. Bodies of hunters litter the terrain in our wake—creatures that found us during the morning hours and paid for their pursuit. Kaster kills them. I anchor the deaths when I can afford the cost.
My magic is nearly gone. Every use brings me closer to collapse.
But I keep using it.
Because when I anchor a kill, he looks at me differently. Not as a burden. As an ally in a war neither of us asked to fight.
The sun breaks through the ash haze at midday. Weak light that does nothing to ease the chill, but visibility improves enough to see the terrain ahead. The plains stretch endlessly—no trees, no structures, no break in the monotony of dead grass and gray sky.
Kaster stops at a natural rise, scanning the horizon. His head tilts, reading the wind, the scent, the invisible language of threat that his instincts translate without effort.
“Rest.” Clipped. “You’re past your limits.”
“We need to keep moving.”
“We need you functional more than we need distance.”
I sink to the ground because my legs won’t support me anymore. The grass is cold and damp beneath me, but I’m too exhausted to care. Every muscle aches. Every breath burns.
Kaster lowers himself beside me.
Near. Nearer than necessity dictates.
I don’t move away.
He doesn’t either.
We sit in silence while the weak sun tracks across the sky, and I try not to think about how natural this is. How right. How dangerous.
The wind carries ash across the plains in lazy spirals. Somewhere in the distance, a structure collapses—the delayed casualty of some battle fought days or weeks ago. The sound reaches us as a faint rumble, barely audible over the whisper of dead grass.
Kaster’s attention shifts toward the noise, then back to the horizon. Always scanning. Always processing. Even in stillness, he’s hunting.
But he doesn’t move away from me.
Being near Kaster is a threat.
But being away from him—
That might be worse.