“Work?” He chuckles, shaking his head.
“Yeah,” I say, cheeks flushing despite the constant heat of the double suns. “You know. Did you break the siege?”
He lowers his head, and his wings open, flapping idly at the air, stirring a warm yet cooling breeze over the two of us.
“In a manner, yes,” he says. “I retreated, leaving him.” He falls silent for a long moment. “The last time I saw him, he was atop a rock outcropping, his lochaber flashing as he wielded it against six of the monsters.”
“Six?” I exclaim.
I saw the Invaders when they returned to Tajss. They were terrifying—massive, blue, four to six arms each. Unstoppable. Marching through rifle bolts, beating down mighty Zmaj warriors with little to no effort. Losing to them was what led the powers that be to set off the massive bomb that drove the surviving humans and Zmaj underground: into the Bunker, which then led us to leave it and go deeper beneath themountains, where we met the Cavern Zmaj and the orc-like Urr’ki.
“Yes,” he murmurs. “They overran him. I saw him disappear as I was dragged away by healers.”
“You don’t know he died, then,” I whisper, desperate to give him something, anything. “He could have lived.”
His eyes finally meet mine—black, fathomless, filled with something jagged and raw.
“If he lives, it is because I left him. If he died, it is because I failed him. Either way, I carry it.”
I stumble on the sand, my chest twisting.
“You were injured?—”
“I am Zmaj,” he snaps, not at me but at the memory. His voice drops, guttural. “And Zmaj do not leave their kin. Not ever.”
The silence is heavier than anything I can imagine. I share his burden now. Understand it. Without thinking, I catch his hand. He lets me. His claws curl, careful, holding without crushing, and for the first time I feel a tremor under his scales—a crack in the warrior’s armor no one else sees.
His voice falls into silence after the confession of leaving his brother behind, and I think that’s the end. I think he’s given me all he can bear. But then his jaw flexes, his wings twitch tight against his back, and he adds, almost as if the sounds are being dragged out of him,
“There is more.”
My chest knots. I stay quiet, letting him choose the words.
“When the bombs fell,” he says, voice low and rough, “I believed I had saved something of my brother. Something to… lessen my failure. A way to make up for not being there at his side…” He falls silent, but his hand clenches tighter on mine and his wings rustle.
“His mate. His treasure. She was all he had left beyond me, so I found her. Ran with her, got her to shelter before the bombing began. Fled the city for an old cavern system he and I would play in as younglings—deep underground. Far enough from the surface to be safe.
Or so I thought.”
He falls silent, dark eyes staring over the dunes. The suns make the sand sparkle, waves of heat rising, making it hard not to hallucinate. I blink, wiping grit from my eyes. That’s all it is. Not tears. Tears are wasteful on Tajss. Water is too precious.
“I hunted and fed her with what I could find,” he continues. “Not easy. What life survived the bombing… was changed. Some of it was not safe to eat even if I found and killed it. Others were… changed. More dangerous than ever. Still, I guarded her as though she were my own blood.”
The desert wind whistles between us, thin and empty, and I feel the weight of every word drop like stones into my chest.
“Then she became ill. At first it was… weakness. Tiredness. I thought it was only sadness and melancholy at all that had been lost. I thought…” He trails off, shaking his head, a low grumble slipping out. “It doesn’t matter.”
His eyes fix on the horizon, unblinking.
“Soon enough I came to understand it was the poison in the air, in the ground, even in the meat I was bringing her. It took her slowly. Her scales paled, eyes dimmed day by day. She clutched my hand and begged me to make it quick at the end, but I… couldn’t. I watched her die. Every breath drawn through pain and blood.”
His voice catches—the smallest fracture—quickly smoothed over by a swallow, by the tightening of his jaw. But I hear it. I feel it.
“I thought saving her would mean I had honored him. That maybe, when we met again, in the next life, I could tell him she lived. That I had kept her safe.” He shakes his head once, sharp, violent. “But… I failed him twice. Failed them both.”
The air leaves me in a rush, sharp as pain. My hand curls at my side, aching to touch him, to take some part of this weight from him. To do something, anything.
“That was the last breaking,” he says at last, his voice nearly a whisper. “The scars are nothing. The silence, the exile, the battles—nothing. But losing her after losing him…” His hand curls into a fist, claws cutting into his palm. “That ended what was left.”
