50. Eradin #2
Riders cried out, reaching for people and things that weren’t there.
They fell when their dragons couldn’t hold them any longer.
Reece yanked the reins so hard his dragon spun sideways, corkscrewing toward whatever he was chasing. The dragon’s wing caught mine on the way past, and Selira shrieked, dropping hard before righting herself.
“Reece.” Fen drove Aristus in from the other side, cutting off the dragon’s path. “Look at me. Reece!”
Reece white-knuckled the saddle horn, his body pitched forward. I worried he’d jump.
Fen grabbed the harness with his good arm, hauling back. The strain crossed his face, but he held on.
“They’re not there,” Fen said, his voice low and fierce. “Whatever you see, they’re not there. Turn away. Ignore it.”
Reece finally slumped, his hands opening.
His dragon steadied, shuddering, and pulled away.
Lyndie’s dragon had stopped responding, her rider frozen over its neck, her hands limp at her sides. Whatever she was seeing, it had stolen her completely.
I flew Selira in close.
Lyndie’s lips moved. The same word, over and over.
I didn’t mean to read it, but it was the simplest word there was.
No. No. No.
The rest of us had been reaching toward what the thing showed us. Lyndie was refusing hers. I’d swear she’d been refusing it from the first breath.
I grabbed her arm and squeezed hard enough to bruise.
She came back all at once, a full-body flinch, gasping. Her dragon lurched beneath her, and she nearly went over the side.
I held on until she found her seat. When she looked at me, her eyes were red-rimmed and furious, the kind of fury that lives alongside grief.
“Don’t,” she said.
I released her, and she grabbed onto the saddle horn.
Selira’s scales heated under my thighs, going from warm to scalding. She made a sound I’d never heard before, a half-shriek, half-song.
There.
She’d found something real buried inside this false offering.
A prickle across my skin told me something was watching us.
Waiting.
“Do you feel that?” Fen asked.
I sensed it had been here long before the trials. Before the realms. Before humans rode dragons at all.
The space around us held its breath. Then it inhaled.
The walls, if they were walls, pressed inward, and the fake Tolross opened his mouth and made a sound that wasn’t my brother’s voice at all.
It was older. It came from the same place as the hunger in Selira’s mountain, the thing that had been sleeping before we stumbled into its belly.
Selira screamed back at it, blasting flames into the void.
The scale at my throat flashed hot enough to burn, and I grabbed it, clutching it to my chest. The red lines blazed up my arms.
The ancient thing turned its gaze my way.
It had tasted Fen and me in the drowned dome. It was still deciding how to eat us.
It slammed against the bond between Selira and me, trying to chew its way through. Break it.
Selira’s presence vanished from my mind.
The bond went dark. Gone, the way a lantern goes out, and I was alone in my own skull in a way I hadn’t been since I’d walked into her cave.
Time stretched while I floundered.
Selira jolted back into my mind so hard I groaned.
Her fury churned through me. She shot fire into the void again, in a long, sustained shriek.
Mine, she said, though not to me.
I pushed the warmth back down before it could answer the thing’s pull. It fought me all the way.
Eyes closed, I breathed, focusing on a place of peace, not on Tolross still crying beside me.
Selira’s relief coursed through the bond. She’d been afraid the vision would be too much. She’d been holding her breath since Tolross appeared.
Stone makes copies, she said. Knows what we love. Knows things that break you.
Fear skated across my skin.
The scale at my throat burned hot like it had when she’d led me to her cave and showed me the hunger in the mountain.
The visions collapsed all at once, and we were spit back out, emerging into brisk, thin air. A meadow spread out below us, lush with grass and trees.
But the goosebumps ripping down my spine told me the thing had followed us out.
Selira landed but didn’t fold her wings. She kept them half-spread, ready, her gaze fixed on something none of us could see.
Fen slid off Aristus and ran toward me. He reached me before I could dismount, his hands finding my waist as I slid down. He held me as my feet found solid ground.
“You’re alright.” His hands moved from my waist to my face, tilting it up. His eyes scanned me like he needed to make sure every part of me was still intact. “You’re alright.”
It wasn’t a question. He was trying to convince himself.
“I’m fine,” I said, but my voice shook.
His hands weren’t steady either.
His fingertips brushed across my cheekbone, and the gentleness of it after everything we’d survived made my eyes burn.
“You refused him,” he said quietly. “I felt it when you turned away. What it cost you.”
My throat tightened until it hurt.
“You did it too.”
“Not like you.” His voice cracked. “Your brother. Eradin, you—”
I pressed my fingers to his mouth before he could finish. Because if he said out loud what I’d given up, I’d shatter right here in front of everyone.
My legs had stopped taking orders. His arms banded around me, and I made a decision I’d spent my whole life not making: I stopped holding myself up and let someone else do it for me.
I leaned into him and felt his heartbeat against my cheek.
Other than the four of us, only eight dragons remained, their elite riders scattered across the meadow. Some sobbed. Some yanked at their hair and whimpered. Reece crouched, fingering the grass, a frown on his face. Lyndie stood beside her dragon, her hands twitching at her sides.
Lady Severine’s face said traitor loud enough I didn’t need to hear her shout the word. The calculation underneath stayed with me. She’d stopped being angry. That was worse.
“I saw him,” Fen said, his voice breaking on the words. “My father. He was alive. He said my name, and I had to turn away.”
I wrapped my arms tighter around him. “You chose right.”
He understood the cost. He’d paid the same price I had.
Our four-person team remained apart from the others, moving to set up camp together.
We were a unit now, visible to everyone.
But we weren’t just competing anymore. We’d become prey.
Something inside the race was hunting.
And Selira still hadn’t folded her wings.