The words disappear into smoke and burning rubber. No one’s coming. Luke and Ember are gone—safe,I tell myself,they’re safe—and I’m here, pinned like a lab rat in a trap that I practically walked into.
I agreed to this mission. Volunteered, even, because I thought I could redeem myself for exposing the existence of dragonkind to the human race. Maybe get some good footage of a yeti while I was at it.
Now I’m going to burn alive for content I’ll never get to post.
The irony would be hilarious if I had oxygen to laugh.
Another sound cuts through the crackling behind me. Metallic, ominous. Something giving way under stress and heat. The fuselage shudders, metal groaning like a dying animal.
The fire’s reached something critical.
I know it before I see it, feel it in the sudden surge of heat, the way the air itself seems to ignite. Behind me, through the twisted gap where my seat used to be, orange light blooms into gold. Something makes a muffledwhumpfsound that rises to a roar.
This is it.
I close my eyes… because watching myself burn seems like adding insult to fatal injury. My last thought is absurd,mundane: Mom’s going to be pissed I didn’t call more often. That I was too busy chasing conspiracies to be a good daughter. Maybe if I’d tried harder, we could’ve had something more—
Something explodes.
Oh God. Oh God… I’m going to die.
Then everything changes.
Pressure.
Not pain. Not exactly. Something wrapping around me. Heat slides over my skin like silk, impossibly gentle for something that should be peeling flesh from bone. Not burning. Just… present. Aware. The sensation moves across my arms, my face, seeps through my clothes without igniting them.
It starts at my chest, where my ribs are screaming. Warmth seeping through fabric and skin, sinking deep into bone. It doesn’t hurt. It should hurt; it’s heat, fire-heat, the kind that blisters and destroys.
But it doesn’t.
It feels like… safety.
Like being held.
My eyes snap open.
Gold. Everywhere. Streaked with purple.
The fire’s not fire anymore; or it is, but wrong. Beautiful. It moves like liquid light, coiling around me in patterns that seem almost deliberate. Almost intelligent. Where it touches exposed skin, I feel pressure instead of pain. Like being cradled rather than consumed.
I should be screaming. Should be thrashing, fighting the inevitable with every last second of consciousness.
Instead, I just… watch.
Maybe this is what death feels like?
The flames form shapes. Abstract at first, then more defined. Something spreads across my field of vision, massive andterrible and alive. For half a second, I swear I see eyes in the blaze—ancient, knowing, fixed directly on me.
Then the fuselage detonates.
The sound is biblical—a roar that swallows every other sensation. One second, I’m staring at the golden glow. The next, the world explodes into noise and heat and violence.
The light around me surges. It wraps tighter, cocooning me in molten gold. The heat intensifies, but still—still—it doesn’t burn. It presses against my skin like a second body, shielding, protecting.
I see flames through the cocoon. They lick at the golden barrier, hungry and furious, but they can’t penetrate.
Physics stops making sense.
