Chapter 25 Lysa
twenty-five
Lysa
My heart was still doing something bird-like against my ribs, echoing the pulsing silence of the cavern.
I stared up at the vaulted ceiling, trying to remember my name.
The scholarly texts I’d hoarded had chapters on biology, and the scandalous, dog-eared romance novels I kept hidden beneath my mattress had plenty of adjectives about quivering members and heaving bosoms, but none of them—not a single one—had mentioned that the aftermath of unparalleled ecstasy would involve a cramp in my left hip and the acute sensation of stone grit sticking to my ass.
For twenty-three years, my experience with pleasure had been a solitary affair, a quick, guilty friction in the dark while imagining faceless heroes who didn’t exist. This.
.. this was a violent, sweaty, magnificent sensation.
Fenrik was a dead weight on top of me, his face buried in the crook of my neck.
His breath hitched against my skin, as the silver scales along his spine dissolved into sweat-slicked human skin.
He smelled of musk, a scent so intoxicating I wanted to bottle it and drink it, though currently, I mostly just wanted to pull my trousers up.
“Fenrik,” I said, my hand stroking the damp hair at the nape of his neck. “Are you—“
The ground beneath us lurched. The Manor above us let out a high, tearing scream of timber and stone.
Fenrik groaned, lifting his head. His eyes were grey again, storm-dark and dazed. “The valve,” he rasped, looking past me. “The governor... it’s gone.”
I followed his gaze. The ley-line fissure, which had been boiling with silver chaos, was no longer effectively siphoned by the shadow dragon or the ritual. It was vomiting toxic magic waste into the room.
A wheezing laugh cut through the rumble. Lady Kelda was propped against the far wall, blood trickling from her nose, her perfect hair in disarray. “You fools,” she spat, though she looked like she might vomit. “You didn’t fix the leak. You blew up the dam.”
I scrambled out from under Fenrik, fumbling with my buttons with numb fingers. My hand brushed my pocket, feeling the cold glass of two vials.
One: My father’s Dragonheart extract. A single boost to push past limits.
Two: The dubious vial Kelda had given me in the hallway. This will ease his pain.
“Get back!” I said, pulling both vials out as I staggered to my feet.
My knees felt like water, a delightful side effect of the last ten minutes, now terribly inconvenient.
Kelda’s eyes snapped to the red-tinted glass in my left hand, the Dragonheart.
She recognized the shimmer of potency. “Give that to me,” she shrieked, lurching forward.
“You’ll kill us all if you try to channel that much raw entropy! ”
She was fast for a woman wearing three layers of Hearthcraft robes. She lunged, her manicured claws raking for the red vial.
I dodged, slipping on the loose shale, and nearly dropped both. “Back off, or I’ll—“
“You’ll what?” She grappled with me. “You’re a nursemaid, Lysa! Hand it over!”
She grabbed my wrist, twisting hard. Pain flared, and I gasped, my grip loosening on the other vial—the clear one. The “pain relief.”
Ease his pain. It was meant to suppress a Shadow Dragon. It was meant to kill Fenrik. I didn’t try to pull away. Instead, I uncorked the clear vial with my thumb and, with a vindictive shove, splashed the contents right into her open, screaming mouth.
Kelda sputtered, choking on the liquid. She shoved me back, wiping her face. “You stupid little—“
She froze, while her eyes went comically wide.
“I...” She blinked slowly. Her pupils dilated until her eyes were black pools. “I feel... so... floaty.”
Her knees unhinged. She slid down the wall, a loose-jawed smile spreading across her face. “Look at the pretty lights,” Kelda slurred, pointing a limp finger at the apocalypse happening in the center of the room. “They’re... dancing.”
“It works,” Fenrik said, staggering to my side, buttoning his shirt halfway. He looked at Kelda, then at me, a startled laugh huffing out of him. “You drugged the villain.”
“Look at that,” I said, gripping the Dragonheart vial.
“She was telling the truth, it was just a drug after all. I assume she isn’t feeling any pain right now.
Someone in Abberwyn told me it was poison, so for a moment I thought I’d killed her.
At least it worked quickly. I didn’t have time to feel guilty. ”
“One might think a healer like you would be deft with brews.” Fenrik’s amusement flickered out fast.
“Pretty,” Kelda slurred from the wall, pawing at the air like a kitten chasing dust motes. “So many... shiny teeth. Look at them smile.”
I stared at her, then down at my own trembling hands.
I’d flung that vial with every intention of ending her.
The rage that had surged through me had wanted to see her choke on her own medicine.
But seeing her chest rising and falling, addled and harmless but alive.
.. the relief nearly knocked me over. I was a healer.
I fixed broken things; I didn’t snuff them out. Even twisted things like her.
The cavern shook again, stone dust raining down on us. The ley-line roared, a column of white fire shooting toward the ceiling.
“Right,” I said, as I looked at the chaotic magic threatening to dissolve the mountainside. I uncorked the Dragonheart extract. “Time to do the impossible.”
The Dragonheart extract pulsed in my hand, a rhythmic thrum-thrum-thrum against my palm.
“So messy,” Kelda mumbled from the floor, trying to adjust her robes and failing as her hand slid off her own shoulder.
She gazed at the column of screaming silver fire with the disappointed air of a hostess whose guest had just vomited on the carpet.
“I tried to tidy it up. I made boxes. Perfect little boxes.”
I stepped closer to her, despite Fenrik’s hand catching my elbow in warning. The magic tearing through the room was wild. And Kelda… she looked at it with genuine offense.
“You deal in stasis,” I said.. My voice gained strength, cutting through the roar of the magic. “You think peace is the absence of life. That’s why you couldn’t fix the ley-line. You were trying to kill it.”
Kelda giggled. She tried to point an accusatory finger at Fenrik but missed, poking the air a foot to his left.
“Fenny,” she slurred, her head lolling back against the stone.
“You were supposed to be my masterpiece. My handsome, silent statue. Your parents… goodness, they were so loud. Always laughing. Always bonding with things. They were so… biological. I wanted to harness the ley-lines, who would want to kill them? Stupid failed witshhh.”
She shuddered, her nose wrinkling. “Sweating and aging and feeling things. Disgusting. They destroyed the silence. Dying was the quietest thing they ever dith.”
Fenrik went rigid beside me, a low growl building in his throat, but I squeezed his arm. It was like listening to a nightmare narrate itself.
“I picked you out, you know?” Kelda said, her eyes staring into a past only she could see. “Thirteen years ago. Like a puppy in a window. A cursed puppy. You were chosen for this curse long before you were born, darlingh. I just… helped a little.”
She smiled, and it was the saddest, emptiest thing I’d ever seen.
“You should have been mine. Truly mine. I would have kept you perfect. Preserved. Like a bug in amber. No more hurting. No more… wanting.” She spat the word wanting like it was a slur.
“Everything eventually stops moving. I just wanted to help it along.”
“She’s insane,” Fenrik said. “She didn’t want a husband. She wanted a taxidermy project.”
“She wanted control,” I corrected him, looking from the woman to the raging fire of the ley-line. “She wanted a world that didn’t demand anything from her. A world she could arrange.”
Kelda let out a long, wheezing sigh, her eyelids drooping. “It’s so much work,” she said to the ceiling. “Living. It’s just… so much… laundry. I arrange the world, not stupid dragon toys.”
“And that,” I said, uncorking the red vial with a sharp pop, “is where we differ.”
I turned to Fenrik. The air between us was charged, not just with the lethal radiation of the ley-line, but with the remnants of what we’d shared.
The sweat on his skin, the bruise blooming on my neck, the fierce, terrified glint in his eyes.
It was messy. It was loud. It was deeply, wonderfully biological.
“I’m going to drink this,” I told him, holding up the Dragonheart extract. “And then I’m going to do something extremely reckless.”
“Just another day for the healer, then,” he said, though his hand trembled as he reached out to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. “Lysa. If you burn out—“
“I won’t,” I said, and for the first time in my life, I believed it. Because I wasn’t just a container for power anymore. I was a conduit. I wasn’t going to dam the river.
“Peace isn’t death, Kelda,” I said to the woman who was now snoring amidst the apocalypse. “Peace is flow.”
A frantic scrabbling sound echoed from the shadowed stairwell, followed by a yelp and the distinct clatter of claws on slate.
Kirion, the midnight-blue wyrmling, burst into the cavern.
He skidded across the floor, his oversized wings flapping uselessly for balance, and crashed into Fenrik’s shins.
He wobbled, shook his head, and then let out a defiant, high-pitched scree at the exploding ley-line, as if scolding it for being too loud.
“He followed you,” Fenrik said, wincing as the little dragon head-butted his knee. “Or fell. It’s hard to tell with him.”
“He led me hear, dear Kirion. I’m so glad he had the wits to hide,” I said. “You should have stayed in your hiding place, firend.”
“Miss Lysa! Master Fenrik!”