About pushing past every warning sign my body screamed at me until the magic itself turned against me, until pain became the only reality and the world dissolved into grey static.
About falling.
About Kaelen’s claw closing around me like a cage of emerald and impossible gentleness, his words the last tether keeping me from drowning entirely.
By the time I finished, Varyth was standing at the window with his back to me, his shoulders rigid with fury.
“You pushed yourself that hard?” His tone was dangerously soft. “Past pain, past warning, past the point where your own body was screaming at you to stop?”
“There were six shadow dragons,” I said defensively, even as exhaustion pulled at my eyelids. “What was I supposed to do, just let them kill us?”
“You were supposed to listen when the dragon told you to stop.” He turned to face me, and the anger burning across his features was incandescent. “Do you have any idea what that kind of power drain can do? You didn’t just burn yourself out, Isara. You nearly tore yourself apart.”
The words landed like blows, but I was too tired to flinch properly. Too wrung out to feel anything except the bone-deep exhaustion threatening to pull me under.
“Next time,” Varyth continued, his voice turning sharp and commanding. “When your dragon tells you to stop, you fucking stop. Understood?”
My dragon.
The words registered slowly, filtering through layers of fatigue. Not ‘the dragon.’ Not ‘Kaelen.’Yourdragon.
“My dragon?” I repeated, blinking at him through vision that had started to blur at the edges.
“Yours.” Something complicated flickered across his features, exasperation and resignation and maybe a little amusement. “But you need to ask your dragon about that. Not my place to discuss.”
I wanted to press. Wanted to demand answers about what the fuck that meant, about why a dragon who’d met me all of five minutes ago would beminein any capacity. But my tongue felt thick in my mouth, and the bed beneath me had started to feel less like furniture and more like a gravitational pull I couldn’t escape.
“When I wake up,” I managed, the words slurring slightly, “I have questions. So many questions.”
Varyth’s lips quirked, close enough to a smile to count. “I would expect nothing less.” He crossed to the bed in two strides, his hand coming up to press against my shoulder—gentle but inexorable, guiding me down into the pillows. “Now rest. Before you collapse on me entirely and I have to explain to your dragon why I let his rider pass out from exhaustion.”
He moved toward an armchair positioned near the fireplace. The leather creaked as he settled into it.
“You’re staying?” I asked, hating how small I sounded.
“Someone needs to make sure you don’t burn down what’s left of my castle in your sleep.”
It should have been insulting. Should have made me bristle with indignation. Instead, it was... comforting. The idea that someone would keep watch, that I wouldn’t have to face the nightmares alone.
I pulled back the covers and slipped beneath them. The silk was cool against my skin, soft enough to make me want to sink into it and never surface. But every time I closed my eyes, I saw Mireth’s terrified face. Heard Eryx’s heartbroken wails.
The tremors wouldn’t stop. They wracked my body in waves, making the bed shake beneath me as I fought to find some kind of calm. Sleep felt impossible, like trying to relax while standing on a precipice.
The nightmare had felt so real. The soldiers, the fear on my children’s faces, the helplessness that had nearly drowned me. Even knowing it wasn’t true, I couldn’t shake the sensation that somewhere in the dark, something was coming for them.
I drew my knees up to my chest, trying to make myself smaller, trying to contain the power that thrummed beneath my skin like a second heartbeat. But it was like trying to holdback the ocean with cupped hands, futile and exhausting and ultimately pointless.
Footsteps crossed the room toward me.
The mattress dipped beside me, the bed sighing under additional weight. I felt the warmth of another body settling against my back, not quite touching but close enough that I could feel the heat radiating from his skin.
“Your pulse is loud enough to wake the dead,” Varyth murmured.
“I can’t make it stop,” I admitted, my voice muffled by the pillow. “Every time I close my eyes, I see them taking my children. And I can’t—I can’t move, can’t fight, can’t do anything to save them.”
The bed shifted as Varyth moved closer, and then his arm came around me. Careful, hesitant, like he was afraid I might shatter at the contact. When I didn’t pull away, didn’t protest, he tugged me more firmly against him—a solid anchor against the storm raging inside my skull.
I could smell him now, sandalwood and dew and power. It should have made me tense, should have triggered every survival instinct I possessed.
