Joran stumbles against me, swearing under his breath.
“What in all the cursed hells—” he says, trailing off as he looks around, eyes wide with fear.
Harlan yanks free from my grip, crossing himself with shaking hands. His lips move fast, words tumbling too low to catch. Prayers, or maybe bargains.
The younger Zmaj stops in his tracks, wings tucking close to his body. His throat bobs, and for the first time, he looks less like a restless warrior and more like a hatchling staring at a shadow.
“This is wrong,” he says, voice tight. “This place… it is for the dead. We should not be here.”
I hug my arms tight against the wind, staring up at a rib as thick as a tree trunk. The sheer size of it makes my stomach twist. I’d thought the lizard-creature terrifying, but this—whatever these bones belonged to—must have been bigger than anything I can imagine. Not a predator of men, but a predator of worlds. A low whistle escapes me before I can stop it.
“What could’ve killed something this big?”
No one answers.
The scarred warrior strides ahead without pause, lochaber strapped across his back, the storm tugging at his braid and the edges of his scars. His black eyes flick once over the field, sharp, searching. The barest tightening of his jaw is the only sign that he knows this place.
He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t need to. The set of his shoulders tells me enough—he’s seen something like this before. If not in person, then in stories, or maybe in whispers, but no matter what, he doesn’t like it.
My pulse quickens. I should be afraid. Everyone else is. But the longer I stare at the looming ribs, the more I feel something else—small, yes, but also… alive. Like the desert itself is bigger than anything I’d dared believe, and somehow, I’ve been allowed to walk inside its oldest secret.
The storm moans through the hollows of the bones, a sound like a dying creature’s last breath. Joran curses louder. Harlan prays faster. The younger Zmaj mutters again that we shouldn’t stay.
But the scarred warrior presses on, and my feet follow before I think better of it.
Wherever he leads, I will go.
Wind screams through the ribs like a thousand hollow flutes, a chorus of the dead. Grit bites into my cheeks, fills the cracks in my lips. My eyes burn, watering, but the scarred warrior never slows. He moves with the inevitability of stone, stride sure, head high, as if even the storm bends around him.
Behind me, Joran stumbles again.
“This is madness,” he rasps, spitting grit. “Shelter in a graveyard? We’ll be buried with them before the suns rise.”
Harlan doesn’t answer. His voice is a constant drone, words too fast and too soft to understand, prayers tripping over themselves until they sound like begging. His fingers worry the beads strung around his wrist, snapping them against his palm hard enough to leave bruises.
The younger Zmaj mutters sharp syllables under his breath. Not prayers, but close enough. His eyes dart from shadow to shadow, wings folding tight to his back, restless but wary.
The storm howls louder, filling every hollow of the bones until I can’t tell if the sound comes from the wind or from something inside them.
Then I see it.
At first, I think it’s a cliff face, smooth and curved, pale against the storm. But as we stumble closer, the shape sharpens into detail. Cracks mar the surface like old scars. The curve dips into sockets black as night. And below, the jaw yawns wide—teeth jutting like spears, long enough to skewer a horse, half-buried in drifting sand.
A skull.
Massive. Ancient. Big enough that its gaping mouth would swallow us whole. Joran stops dead, throwing an arm out as if that could block the storm that buffets him from side to side.
“No. I won’t step in there. You hear me? That’s not shelter, that’s a tomb.”
Harlan’s prayers break into whimpers. He presses his forehead to his hands, shaking so hard his teeth chatter. The younger Zmaj hisses a word in his own language that I don’t know, his voice low and fierce.
“Omen. Bad omen,” he says in Common.
My throat tightens. My skin prickles. But I can’t look away. The skull terrifies me—the size of it, the thought of crawling inside, of hiding in the hollow head of something that once ruled this desert. And yet… the air inside looks still. The storm batters its crown and whistles through its cracked sockets, but the cavern behind its jaws is sheltered, shadowed, quiet.
Shelter.
The scarred warrior doesn’t hesitate. He turns toward the gaping mouth, his braid whipped by the gale, scars stark in the grit. His gaze sweeps back once, sharp and commanding. No words. He doesn’t need them.
