Her nails shot out, darkened to sapphire blue, thickened, and then curved into wicked points that gleamed.
Claws?!
Blue as winter twilight.
Sharp as frozen daggers.
Beautiful.
Terrible.
Entirely inhuman.
The transformation surged up her arms. Her skin ballooned to epic proportions, rippled, then split—but there was no blood.
Instead, scales emerged from beneath!
Oh gods!!!!!!
Shimmering scales. Some white as bone. Others blue as the deepest ice. They erupted across her flesh in waves, layering over enlarging muscle and expanding sinew.
Sol tried to scream again, but what emerged was not a scream.
It was a roar.
The sound erupted from her throat and shattered the air around her. And it was the explosive sound of mountains collapsing and glaciers calving.
Her spine snapped backward with a sickening crack—then erupted into a grotesque elongation of vertebra multiplying, splitting, doubling, and punching outward through her flesh.
A massive tail burst from her newly large tailbone, whipping violently through the air with enough force to slice clouds apart. Razor-edged spines erupted along its length, crystallizing into lethal blue-white glittering daggers that dripped with frost.
Her face—oh gods—her face.
The bones beneath her skin cracked and splintered, reconstructing themselves with the sound of a thousand icicles shattering at once.
Her jaw didn't just push forward—it erupted, tearing through flesh as it elongated into a savage, predatory snout.
Her human teeth ripped free from bleeding gums, each one a small death as fangs slammed in place, growing with such violent speed they scraped against each other, crystalline daggers that could shred steel.
Her skull fractured with the sound of thunder, brain pulsing exposed for a horrific instant before new bone encased it, horns drilling out from her temples in spirals of pale blue crystal that sang like glass being tortured.
And through it all. . .
falling,
falling,
always falling.
Power ignited—and kept igniting. This wasn't the polite whisper of her ice magic or the tame frost that once kissed her fingertips. This was something older. Hungrier. It tasted like the heart of a glacier, like the silence before an avalanche, like the first killing frost of winter. It flooded her cells until she couldn't tell where she ended and the cold began.
She was not human.
She had never been human.
She was a dragon.
The realization struck her with the force of a physical blow. All those years of hiding and believing she was broken, wrong, Lowly. . .
