I'd known that intellectually, the way I knew the sun rose in the east. But I'd spent my adult life in underground temple chambers. I'd never actually seen—
His eyes flashed pure silver.
The transformation started with sound. A deep cracking, like ice breaking on a frozen lake, but coming from inside his body. His spine arched. His shoulders expanded. I watched his collarbone snap and reform, the bone visibly moving under his skin, lengthening, thickening, reshaping itself into something designed to anchor wings.
I should have looked away. Should have given him privacy for something so intimate, so fundamentally vulnerable.
I couldn't stop staring.
His skin rippled. Storm-cloud gray scales emerged, overlapping in intricate patterns that caught the morning light. They looked like rain-slicked granite, each one edged in silver that hummed with barely contained electricity. His faceelongated. His jaw cracked and reformed, teeth sharpening, lengthening, becoming something that could tear through steel.
His arms stretched. His hands became talons, each claw as long as my forearm, wickedly curved and gleaming black. His legs reversed at the knee, digitigrade now, built for springing into flight.
And then the wings.
They erupted from his back in an explosion of membrane and bone. The sound was like thunder compressed into a heartbeat. They unfurled—fifty feet, sixty, maybe more—translucent skin stretched between skeletal struts that crackled with lightning. Each beat of those wings sent gusts of wind across the plaza, scattering debris and making the few remaining onlookers stumble backward.
The dragon stood where the man had been.
He was massive. Easily fifty feet from nose to tail tip, with a serpentine grace that made him look both predatory and impossibly elegant. His scales shimmered in the morning light, each one reflecting colors that shouldn't exist—violet electricity, silver starlight, the deep purple-black of thunderclouds. His eyes were the same electric blue they'd been as a man, but larger, more intense, crackling with power that made the air around them shimmer with heat.
Through the bond, I felt his reassurance. A wordless pulse of calm, of patience, of complete control. He wasn't some mindless beast. This was still Zephyron. Still the man who'd stood on that platform shaping lightning with casual ease. Just in a form that could level cities without trying.
The crowd that remained screamed and ran. Smart of them.
He lowered his enormous head, bringing one eye level with me. Up close, I could see the vertical slit of his pupil, the way lightning arced in the depths of that blue. Could smell ozone and something sharp and clean, like the air after a storm.
His shoulder dropped. An invitation.
Climb on, that gesture said. Trust me.
My legs shook. Three days of running. Three days of terror and infection and guilt. My body was done. But through the bond, I felt his certainty. His absolute conviction that he would not drop me, would not let me fall, would carry me to safety.
I stumbled forward. Reached out. My scarified palm pressed against his scales.
They hummed.
The electricity wasn't painful. It was a vibration that traveled up my arm, resonating in my bones, making my teeth ache in a way that wasn't quite unpleasant. The scales were warm. Smooth. Hard as steel but with a texture like polished stone, each one fitting perfectly against its neighbors.
I gripped the ridge between his shoulders and pulled myself up. My arms screamed. My back—the carved intelligence—sent white-hot agony through my entire nervous system. I bit down on a whimper and hauled myself onto his back.
The moment I settled into place, gripping the ridge with both hands, he moved.
The launch was nothing like I'd imagined. One moment we were on the ground. The next, those massive wings beat down and the world dropped away. My stomach stayed on the platform while the rest of me shot skyward.
Wind tore at my torn robes. The fabric whipped and snapped, threatening to tear away completely. My hair—unwashed, tangled from three days in the Thornback Woods—lashed across my face. I couldn't see. Could barely breathe. The air was too thin, too fast, too cold.
I pressed myself flat against his neck, gripping his scales so hard my knuckles went white. Under my body, I felt his heartbeat. A deep, powerful rhythm that pulsed through his scales with electrical energy. Each beat made my hands tinglewhere they gripped. Made the bond mark on my temple flare with sympathetic electricity.
Through the bond, I felt his focus. The calculations he was making—wind speed, optimal trajectory, thermal updrafts to ride. His mind worked like one of those clockwork mechanisms I'd seen in the plaza, each gear turning in perfect precision.
He banked left and suddenly I could see.
Tempest Reach spread below us like a map come to life. The glass towers glittered in the morning sun. The streets formed neat grids, packed with people who looked like ants from this height. I could see the plaza we'd left behind—the platform where I'd crashed into my fate, the three smoking bodies the city guard was already surrounding. Could see the outer walls, the farms beyond, the Thornback Woods in the distance looking small and harmless from up here.
We'd climbed so high. Too high. The air was thin and cold and my lungs couldn't pull enough oxygen. Black spots danced at the edges of my vision.
Zephyron adjusted course. We spiraled up and up, following the line of the Sky-Spire Citadel as it reached toward the clouds. His wings caught an updraft and we glided, the wind roar quieting to something almost peaceful.
