53. Eradin #2
Storm-feel. Frustration bled through the bond, hers tangled with mine. Old magic gathers slow and strikes fast. Can smell lightning. Cannot tell where it lands.
“When?”
If I knew, we would already be flying.
“We should eat while we can.” Lyndie started pulling food from her pack.
We gathered by the fire as full darkness settled. The flames sent shadows dancing across our faces.
The food tasted like dirt, but I forced myself to chew and swallow. My body needed fuel even if my mind couldn’t register hunger.
“We need to reach the Oracle together,” I said in a low voice.
Pack, Selira sent through the bond. Pack survives together.
“Maybe the Oracle will kill us all for asking,” Lyndie said.
“The next leg of the race will probably kill us anyway,” Reece snapped. “At least this way we choose how we go.”
Fen was watching me. “We’ll refuse to follow their rules.”
He threaded his fingers through mine, his pulse jumping through my palm.
“Let’s swear on it,” I said.
Lyndie frowned. “Like shaking hands when making a deal?”
“Something more.”
Yes, Selira said in my mind. Form pack.
When I was small, I’d asked my mother why the elite needed ceremonies and bands of metal to make a bond. She’d said, wild things don’t need permission. They just need a witness.
I told them what she’d said.
Reece’s brow furrowed. “What does that mean for us?”
“I’m not sure yet.” I looked at Selira.
She was already watching me, waiting.
Show me what pack looks like, I said. What it costs.
She answered in the way she always did when language wasn’t enough, by sifting a memory into mine.
Wild dragons in a hollow, old stone around them. Gathered close. Sharing everything. They hadn’t done this for a very long time. The hunt had driven them apart. Now too few remained, and those that still lived were scattered, hiding.
But they craved what they’d had before the nobles broke them apart.
Pack wasn’t a ceremony or a promise. It was a fact you made true by choosing it.
It holds, she said. Or doesn’t. No middle.
“We put our hands together,” I said slowly, working it out as I spoke. “And we mean it.” I looked at each of them. “We decide the others matter as much as the wish. That’s what we need to swear.”
Reece was quiet for a moment. “Even if it costs all of us the wish?”
“Even then.”
His throat worked, and he looked at his dragon. “Willa needs me to come home. She and my wife are all I have.”
“I have a younger brother who’s dying,” I said. “Fen has Aristus. Lyndie has her mother.”
The fire had burned down to coals between us, but nobody moved to rebuild it. It felt like the dark had been waiting too.
“We’re each holding someone we love,” I said. “And we’re choosing to hold each other too. All of it at once.”
Selira made a low sound that moved through the ground under us. The other dragons shifted their feet. Grimstone lifted his head. Even Reece’s dragon turned toward our small circle.
We witness you. You witness each other. That is all it is.
I didn’t know if what we were about to do was anything more than four exhausted people touching hands over a dying fire. But the magic in my palms had awoken, a warmth that knew where it wanted to go before I decided to send it.
I scanned each of them. If this went wrong, I’d be the one who pushed them into it. My magic. My idea. My fault.
“If we do this,” I said quietly, “I don’t think we can undo it. I also don’t know what making a pack bond means. I don’t know if it’s permanent or what happens if one of us dies.”
“Eradin.” Fen’s voice was gentle. “We know.”
“I don’t want to be responsible for—”
“You’re not responsible for us,” Reece said. “We’re responsible for each other. That’s the point.”
Fen reached out, his hand extended toward the center of our circle. He didn’t look at the others when he did it. He looked at me.
“Together,” he said.
Reece’s hand joined his. “Together.”
“Together,” Lyndie said, her hand settling over theirs.
I laid my palm on top of the pile. “Together.”
The red lines woke without my asking. They crawled up from my palms and into my wrists. The heat behind them didn’t give gentle warmth anymore. It burned.
Magic spread from my hands into theirs, reaching out to each of them. Fen first, his awareness of me sharpening until his heartbeat echoed in my own chest. Reece next, his grief settling into my spine, a weight I now carried beside my own. Lyndie last, her kindness brushing against mine.
I could pull back. This was a door, and I was choosing to open it.
The warmth built, spreading outward from our joined hands. The air tightened. Our dragons shifted closer, forming a second ring around ours. Selira’s eyes caught firelight. Aristus’s scales brightened. Reece’s damaged dragon lifted his head higher than I’d seen since we’d started.
Pride, Selira sent. Pack-pride.
“Do you feel that?” Lyndie’s whisper barely made it past her lips.
Something bigger than all of us was watching, waiting to see what we’d choose.
We were choosing each other over the system that said only one of us mattered. Over everything we’d been taught about our place in this world.
Tears trickled down Lyndie’s face. Reece’s jaw flexed as he fought not to break. Fen’s hand tightened in the pile, his fingers finding mine through the others’, connecting.
Without planning it, we all leaned in. Our heads came together over our joined hands, creating a circle within the circle.
The dragons moved as one, their snouts touching above us.
Heat poured through me, starting where my palm pressed against theirs and flooding outward. It filled my chest, my throat, and the space behind my eyes. Too much. Too fast. I couldn’t—
The magic detonated.
Light exploded from our joined hands, blinding white, turning the meadow into noon. The shockwave followed, rushing through our bodies and into the dragons’. It kept going until it hit the boundary of the valley, where it stopped.
Silence dropped so complete my ears rang with it.
The light faded quickly, bleeding back into our skin.
The red lines on my palms glowed brighter than they ever had, but now I could see matching lines on the others.
Barely visible, but there. Running up Reece’s forearms. Curling around Lyndie’s wrists.
Tracing patterns across the back of Fen’s hand where it still held mine.
We’d marked each other.
“What did we just do?” Lyndie’s voice shook.
I didn’t have an answer.
Satisfaction bled through the bond with Selira. We made pack.
Across the meadow, every awake elite had turned toward us. They’d seen the light and felt the magic. They knew we’d done something.
Fen traced his thumb across my knuckles before releasing me.
I found my own fear reflected back in his gaze. We’d painted a target on ourselves. But we’d also done something no one had tried before.
I pressed my palms together, and they did not tremble.
This felt like something my mother would’ve done.