12. Kailin
KAILIN
"Prophecy is not a gift. It is a debt that the future collects from the present."
—From the writings of Shaman Kethris, Second Era
We made love twice more before exhaustion finally claimed us.
The second time was slower, lazier, both of us pleasantly worn out and content to let the pleasure build without urgency.
The third time surprised us both. I'd been drifting toward sleep with my back against Alar's chest and his arm draped over my waist when his hand started moving, tracing the curve of my hip with a touch that shifted from absent to deliberate, and the next thing I knew we were tangled together again, breathless and laughing at our own insatiability.
Now, I lay in the dark, listening to Alar's breathing deepen into sleep, feeling his heartbeat slow against my back, and I was so thoroughly satisfied and depleted that even Morgateth's reservoir couldn't keep my eyes open.
The best part was that I didn't fear falling asleep for a change.
I hadn't drunk the tea that amplified my visions, and I hadn't worn Saphir's medallion for the last two days. There was no reason for the prophetic channels to activate tonight. I was safe in Alar's arms, warm and loved.
I fell asleep smiling.
The dream didn't start the way the others had.
There was no gradual descent into vision, no shifting of animal perspectives, no slow buildup of dread. One moment I was asleep. The next I was in the sky, disembodied and watching.
The clarity was staggering.
Everything was sharp, hyper-real, as if someone had polished the world until every edge gleamed and every color popped.
The mountains below me were rendered with such precision that I could count individual rocks along the ridgelines.
The auroras above blazed with surreal colors I'd never seen before and had no names for, pulsing with a rhythm that felt like a heartbeat.
That was Morgateth's doing.
His energy had amplified everything, just as Saphir and Nyxath had warned.
My prophetic channels weren't just open, they were blown wide, and the vision that poured through them was more vivid than anything I'd experienced in real life, let alone in a dream, and that included the nightmare about Podana.
A dragonia flew below me, banking through the peaks with the typical grace of an apex predator. The man on her back was leaning into the turns and adjusting his weight, and he seemed to be a skilled rider.
Her scales caught the auroral light and shattered it into a cascade of shifting colors, silver and pale gold and turquoise and pink, rippling across her body like light refracting through crystal.
Veynathei.
There was no doubt this time. No ambiguity, no fuzzy details that I could explain away. This was Alar's dragonia, and the rider on her back was Alar, and the scene playing out before me was as clear and sharp as if I were watching it happen in real time.
They seemed to be on a training exercise, a routine flight through one of the mountain passes that the Dragon Force used for advanced maneuver practice. I'd flown the same route with Onyx during my sessions with Ravel. It was challenging but not dangerous for an experienced rider and dragon.
But Alar and Veynathei were not yet experienced. They were still learning to navigate the bond together, and she was a young and impulsive dragonia. She was practically an adolescent.
The wind pattern suddenly changed, and a violent gust caught Veynathei at the wrong angle as she banked into a narrow gap between two peaks. She corrected, but the correction was too sharp, and Alar shifted his weight at the worst possible moment.
I watched his hands scramble for the riding straps. Watched his fingers close around leather that slipped through his grip. Watched the horrible, slow-motion arc of his body separating from the saddle.
Veynathei roared, the sound tearing through the vision with a force that made the mountains tremble. She folded her wings and dove after him, her iridescent scales flattening against her body as she plummeted, desperate to reach him before the rocks did.
She wasn't fast enough.
No dragon could have been fast enough. The gap between the peaks was too narrow for her wingspan, and the wind that had dislodged Alar was now slamming her against the rock face, scraping scales from her flank as she fought to descend.
Alar fell.
I had seen him die before. Three times, in three different nightmare scenarios. But those visions had been fuzzy around the edges, sufficiently dreamlike that I could almost convince myself that they weren't real.
This vision was not fuzzy.
The lens through which I was watching this disaster zoomed in on his face, and I saw the moment when fear gave way to the realization that this was how his life was going to end.
I saw his mouth form a word that might have been my name or might have been Veynathei's.
I saw his arms reach upward, fingers grasping at air that offered nothing to hold.
Alar hit the rocks.
I shouldn't have been able to hear the terrible sound from this distance, but the vision delivered it directly into my mind. The crack of impact. The silence that followed. The golden thread of the bond between Alar and Veynathei snapping like a wire pulled past its breaking point.
Veynathei's anguish flooded the vision, grief so raw and enormous that it threatened to tear the mountains apart. She landed beside Alar's broken body, her own wings scraped raw and bleeding, and pressed her snout against his chest, as if her touch could restart a heart that had stopped.
It couldn't.
Some fates can't be changed.
The words echoed through the vision, the same words that had haunted me through three previous nightmares. But as in the third nightmare, the vision didn't end there.
The scene rewound.
The same mountain pass, the same wind, the same flight path. But something was different. A presence in the sky that hadn't been there before.
A woman.
She appeared above the scene, a disembodied apparition like me, but unlike me, she could intervene.
As in the last nightmare, she wore deep crimson and gold robes, the fabrics looking heavy and the colors vivid and rich despite the ethereal nature of the vision.
Her hair was dark, arranged in an elaborate style, and everything about her spoke of royalty and power.
She couldn't be Alar's mother as I had assumed when I'd first seen her in the previous nightmare. With the vision sharpened to crystalline clarity by Morgateth's power, I could see her more clearly, and she was much too young to be the Queen of Catonia.
Nevertheless, her presence changed everything.
The wind that had caught Veynathei shifted. The gust that had dislodged Alar weakened. The moment of disaster bent around this woman, finding a different path.
In this version, Alar's hands found the straps, Veynathei corrected in time, and they flew safely through the gap.
The woman faded, and so did the vision.
I woke up gasping and bolted upright.
Alar was awake instantly. "What's wrong?" His hand shot for the dagger he kept under his pillow, and he was out of bed and crouching in a fighting stance, naked as the day he was born. It might have looked comical if I weren't so shaken.
Realizing that there were no assassins to kill, he turned back to me. "What happened?"
I shook my head.
He dropped the dagger on the bed and put his hands on my shoulders. "Look at me, Kailin."
I couldn't.
The vision was still burning behind my eyes, the crack of impact still echoing in my skull, the feeling of the bond snapping still resonating through my body like the aftershock of an explosion.
"Kailin." His hands moved to my face, cupping my cheeks, forcing me to focus. "Look at me."
I looked. Blue eyes, wide with concern. Alive. Warm. His heart beating beneath the hand I pressed against his chest.
I burst into tears.
He held me, his arms tight around my shaking body, murmuring words I couldn't process. I clung to him with a desperation that must have frightened him, my fingers digging into his back, my face pressed against his neck, sobbing uncontrollably.
A loud knock sounded on the door. "Kailin?" Shovia's voice was sharp with alarm. "Are you okay?"
"She's okay," Alar called back. "She had a nightmare. Go back to bed."
A pause. "Are you sure?"
"Yes."
Retreating footsteps. The sound of a door closing.
Alar held me until the sobs subsided into shuddering breaths, stroking my hair with a patience that made me want to cry all over again.
"Was it the same dream?" he asked.
I nodded against his neck.
"How did I die this time?"
"You fell off your dragonia." My voice came out ravaged, barely recognizable. "But it was so real, Alar. Every detail was so sharp. Morgateth's power amplified it." I choked on the words.
"In what way?"
I pulled back enough to look at him, and the sight of his face, alive and concerned and so heartbreakingly precious, made the words catch in my throat.
"It was Veynathei," I managed. "I saw her scales.
The shifting colors. Silver and gold and turquoise.
It was her, Alar. The dragon in my dream is Veynathei.
She's bigger than most dragonias, so I thought she was a male in the previous nightmare, but it was very clear in this one that it was her. There's no doubt anymore."
His expression didn't change, but I felt his body go rigid beneath my hands. "How did it happen?"
"A training exercise," I said, forcing the words out despite the rawness in my throat. "She was flying through a mountain pass and a wind caught her at the wrong angle. You lost your grip and fell. And she couldn't—" My voice broke. "She couldn't reach you in time."
The silence that followed was worse than the scream that had preceded it.
"It's just a dream, Kailin," Alar said, sounding calm, measured, and completely unconvincing. "You said yourself that the previous dreams showed different scenarios. Different ways that I—"
"This one was not like the others. Morgateth's energy made everything sharper. I could see details I hadn't seen before. Your face. The specific pass you were flying through. The exact moment when—" I stopped. I couldn't say it again.
Deep in the back of my mind, a vast presence stirred.
Morgateth.
He had been sleeping, but my distress must have woken him up.
"What's wrong?"
"I had a dream. I'm okay. You can go back to sleep."
"Are you sure?" he asked.
"Yes. I'm fine. Alar is here with me."
I didn't want to burden Morgateth with my nightmare and have him relive the same kind of devastating loss he had experienced three times already when his own riders died.
"You don't feel fine to me, but I will respect your wishes. Goodnight." His presence faded from my mind.
Alar had to go home.
I had known it since the first nightmare, and the certainty of it increased with those that followed.
He was going to die if he stayed.
"Kailin." Alar's hands were on my face again, his thumbs wiping away my tears. "Talk to me. Where did you go just now?"
"Morgateth," I whispered. "He felt my distress and wanted to know if I was in trouble. I told him it was just a dream and that he should go back to sleep."
Something flickered in Alar's eyes. "Did he just agree because you asked?"
"Yes. He wasn't happy about it, but he said that he respects my wishes."
I wished it was as easy with Alar, and that he abided by my wishes as well.
He needed to go home, but I couldn't say it right now.
Not while I was naked and raw and still trembling from the violence of the vision.
If I said it now, it would come out as begging, as hysteria, as a frightened woman clutching at her lover and demanding he run away.
I needed to gather my strength and present my case in a way that Alar would respect. Clearly, rationally, with evidence and reasoning rather than tears.
But that would have to wait for daylight.
For now, all I could do was hold on to him and breathe and remind myself that he was here, that his heart was beating, and that the terrible future I'd witnessed wouldn't come to pass because a Catonian royal in crimson and gold robes would intervene and prevent it from coming true.