Behind him, talons scraped stone. When Lykor glanced up, Jassyn blinked, round-eyed and dazed, as if he’d surfaced from drowning and his lungs hadn’t remembered how to work. His wings twitched, then vanished. Scales receded. And his face…
Rage drained, leaving only remorse behind.
Lykor hated that look most of all.
“I–I’m sorry,” Jassyn stammered, staggering away. Hands bracing on his knees, his breath came in bursts. “That’s why I don’t stay fully shifted. I can’t always control what I’ll do. If I’ll overreact. Or hurt someone.”
“You didn’t hurt me,” Lykor said, regret gnawing at his ribs because Jassyn took the blame for a fire he’d lit himself.
Without thinking, Lykor stepped forward. His hand lifted, almost bridging the space between them. He’d never flinch from whatever Jassyn became when the beastblood rose. It wasn’t monstrous to him, but something honest. Unmasked.
Yet Lykor buried the truth before it left his tongue, the way he always did. Better Jassyn think him unmovable than glimpse the fracture inside. Instead, he curled his hand into a fist, reaching for the druids’ neat little assurances—a framework Jassyn could cling to. And perhaps he needed something rational to blunt the edge of what had almost broken loose.
“Kaedryn’s people learn to master it,” Lykor said. “Unlike us, they come into power young and temper instinct throughdiscipline. They insist that when the magic settles, the emotions will too.”
Jassyn just stood there watching him. Lykor waited for the rebuttal, for the challenge.
It never came.
“I’ve seen the scars on your spine,” Jassyn said.
Lykor’s pulse scraped his throat. The words weren’t an attack, merely surgical. Of course Jassyn would circle back to the one thing Lykor had given him. The truth.
Jassyn stepped closer. “But I haven’t gotten to look further. Will you let me decide if it’s beyond repair?”
He waited with that infuriating patience, as if Lykor’s fire had already burned to ash. It made him want to punch a boulder. Or throw himself off the cliff.
Instead Lykor reached for the hem of his tunic.
Fine. He’d do it. If this was what it took to make Jassyn understand that it wasn’t some wound begging for healing. It was fact. Damage wrought to permanence.
Let him look. Let that be the end of it.
Lykor stripped his tunic off in a single motion, exposing his scars to the stars. The night breeze hit his back, biting against skin stretched taut over ruin.
He didn’t lift his eyes as Jassyn drifted behind him, but he felt the stir in the air, the stillness settling thick as smoke. He sensed the gaze honed by study. Assessment. Diagnosis. As if he were a puzzle missing a piece, not a broken body.
“Your wings?” Jassyn asked quietly.
Lykor’s jaw locked. He didn’t want to stand like some sacrificial beast at the altar of false hope. But with Jassyn behind him, every scar revealed, he’d let the evidence speak for itself.
Reaching inward, Lykor gripped the ember in his chest. The shift came in bursts. Wings erupted like swords wrenchedfrom rusted scabbards. They unfurled with all the violence of something forged for the sky yet condemned to crawl.
Technically whole.
Functionally wrecked.
The left wing sagged like a severed sail, membrane trembling near the ground. The right fared only slightly better, but still quivered from the effort, the claw at the apex twitching in protest.
Breath hissing through his teeth, Lykor bowed beneath the weight. He couldn’t fold them. Could scarcely move them, let alone wrest flight from a twisted spine.
His fingers curled into fists, bracing for the mockery. Every muscle tensed as Jassyn stepped closer behind him, as if expecting fingers to trail his spine, flicking each golden spike in turn.
As Galaeryn once had. Lykor still felt that echo sometimes, rattling through his bones.
“I’ve tried everything,” he growled, voice threatening to break. “So did Aesar. Building strength won’t make a difference.” His gaze dragged toward the lake below. “I’m done chasing hope.”
Jassyn stepped closer still. So close his breath brushed Lykor’s shoulder. “May I?”
