9. Chapter 9
DREADSCALE
The hollow was thick with grave-moss, the kind that only grew where dragons had died. I found her there, between the peaks where Pyrrath’s mother fell three centuries ago.
I had been young then. Young enough to scream. Young enough to tear my fingernails on the granite, trying to dig her back out of the nothing that had claimed her.
The moss had grown over the place where I'd dug. Grey-green and soft, absorbing every sound that touched it. Absorbing grief the way dirt absorbs rain—slowly, completely, until no trace remains.
Most avoided this place. The silence unnerved them. No footsteps. No wind. No echo of your own heartbeat. Just nothing, pressing in from all sides like water.
I came here often. This time, Serenya was waiting in the center of it, the Codex heavy on her knees.
She hadn’t heard me approach. The moss had taken the sound from my steps before they reached her. I watched her pen scratch across the page, stop, then scratch again. She stared at the fresh ink like she was trying to translate a foreign language.
I knew that stare. A rider named Veleth had worn it a hundred years ago.
She carried the same memory-weaving Mark as Serenya.
The Veil-sickness fed on it like rot on fruit.
Took her memories in patches—first the small things, then the faces of her children, then her own name.
By the end, Veleth had sat in this exact spot, writing I am Veleth until the pen ran dry, convinced every time that she had just discovered the truth.
Serenya looked up.
She didn't call a greeting. Words were useless here anyway. She just watched me wade through the moss, my weight sinking into the sponge-like growth.
I understood why she was here. For someone whose mind was filled with static, with gaps, and memories that slipped through her fingers—this place would be a relief.
No noise to process. No conversation to track.
Just the soft grey moss and the vast black sky and the permission to simply exist without performing coherence.
I dropped down beside her. Then leaned back, feeling the cold of the mountain seep through my tunic.
Above us, the stars were sharp enough to cut.
Thousands of them, undimmed by torchlight or dragonfire.
They had burned over the first King of Velmyra, and they would burn over this one’s grave in due time.
She nudged the Codex against my arm.
I keep stopping mid-sentence, she had written. The letters were shaky. Forgetting what I meant to say.
I nodded.
She wrote again, the quill digging into the paper. I'm recording everything. Before I lose it.
She flipped the page. It was covered in lists. Names. Dates. Physical descriptions of the mess hall, the armory, the way the light hit the peaks at dawn. My name was there. Maxx's. Amaria's.
Her finger traced Amaria's name, smudging the wet ink. She wasn't erasing it. She was learning the shape of the letters, trying to force the muscle memory to hold what her mind couldn't.
Through trembling sacrifice, not conquest, shall the world be rewoven.
I hated that prophecy. I had heard whispers of it before Serenya was born. Before her grandmother was born. I had always assumed it was a distant catastrophe, something I would watch from the safety of history. I hadn't expected to train the girl who would have to die for it.
Serenya stared at the half-blurred name. Her throat moved. Then she turned to a fresh page and wrote in careful, deliberate strokes:
What happens to the people who love them?
My chest tightened. I had watched a hundred heroes march toward their fate. I had never once been asked what it cost to stay behind.
She wrote again, smaller. Can I ask you something?
I waited.
She pointed up. A dragon cut a silhouette against the moon, banking toward the eastern peaks. The rider on its back sat with the easy, careless grace of a creature born to the sky.
Could I ever?
I looked at the hope in her eyes. It was the dangerous kind. The kind that didn't know the price yet. Could I have this? Could I belong here? Could I become something new before I lose what I am?
I thought of Veleth. She had flown until the end—her dragon compensating for the rot, steering her home when she forgot the way. The bond had held longer than her mind. It had been the last thing to go.
I didn't answer. Some questions weren't meant to be answered in a single moment. Some questions were meant to be lived.
But I reached into the leather pouch at my belt and pulled out a scale. Black as void-iron, veined with orange that still held warmth after all these years. Umbra had shed it the day we bonded—the only one I'd ever kept.
I pressed it into her palm. Closed her fingers around it.
Her eyes went wide. She understood how precious it would be to me.
I lay back down and let the silence hold us.
After a moment, she lay down too. The scale clutched against her chest like a promise.
We stayed like that—watching the sky turn slowly overhead.
A shadow crossed my peripheral vision.
Maxx.
He moved across the moss without a sound. But it was his face that stopped me. The smirk was gone. The hard, deflective glitter in his eyes—gone. He looked at Serenya the way I had seen warriors look at funeral pyres. The way you look at something precious already beginning to burn.
He didn't ask. He just dropped to the ground on her other side.
The three of us, shoulder to shoulder in the dead dragon's hollow.
Serenya’s hand found mine. Her skin was cold. I closed my fingers around it, feeling the faint tremor she was trying to hide. On her other side, Maxx took her other hand.
Above us, the dragons flew their silent patrols. The stars wheeled slow and ancient. The moss drank our grief and gave us nothing back but stillness.
Hundreds of years, and I had learned to let go of everything. I tightened my grip on her hand. I wasn't ready to let go of this.