The air shifted. Salt and something older—iron, ash, and the faint sweetness of rot—breathed up from the cracks in the shell. A sound followed, low and deep, like a bell tolling underwater.
“Was that—?” Emille began.
“Yes,” Dilly said, too fast. “And before anyone asks, it wasn’t wind. Aspidochelones exhale through the fissures in their carapace when they dream. If she wakes—”
“She won’t,” I said. “Not tonight.”
She couldn’t.
The moonlight spilled over the island’s crest, silvering the strange, twisted trees that crowned its back. From afar, they’d looked like coral reefs petrified mid-motion, but up close their bark was a deep, burnished red—bleeding sap that shimmered in the dim light.
“The Dragon Tree,” Dilly whispered, reverent again. “Gods preserve us. It’s real.”
It was smaller than I expected, gnarled and bent like it had been growing under the weight of eternity, but the color—blood and ember mixed—glowed faintly from within its trunk. The ground around it shimmered faintly, damp with a dark residue that wasn’t water.
Emille stepped forward with slow, deliberate care, every motion a prayer. He knelt beside the roots, opening his leather satchel and drawing out two glass vials.
“Make sure it does not touch your skin, Emille,” Dilly said, voice quiet, but firm. “You will have to be precise with your cuts. Blunt force will destroy it.”
Emille didn’t ask why. He knew we only ever knew what we needed to know on this crew. That he still pulled out his scalpel said a lot about his faith in Dilly and me.
I watched him work, hands steady despite the enormity of what we were doing. He cut through the bark with a surgeon’s precision. Each stroke enough to gather, but not to do damage. That was the risk of harvesting a Dragon Tree. Unless one had the skill to gather the sap, it would dry up before one drop slipped by.
The others stood silent—Inu scanning the horizon, Val picking at her blade hilt, Dilly chewing her lip raw. I could feel the pressure building inside my chest, the kind that came before a storm broke or a heart shattered.
The air throbbed again.
Not wind. Not wave.
A heartbeat.
“Rose,” Inu said quietly. “The ground’s moving.”
I turned.
And then Iheardit. A groan from the deep, like the earth itself remembering pain. The moss underfoot rippled, and the “island” shifted.
“Faster, Emille,” I hissed.
He didn’t answer, too focused on drawing the sap—thick as blood—from the cut in the tree’s trunk. It filled the first vial halfway before the ground lurched again.
“Captain,” Val barked. “We need to go—now.”
“Not until we have both,” I said, though my pulse roared in my ears.
Failure now was not an option. Not when we were this close. If Dilly was right about the dragon blood, then I would be able to make one last move that would haunt any ship captain bold enough to step into the ocean that now belonged to me.
Another tremor rolled through the shell, stronger this time. The air around us thickened, vibrating with a low hum that came frombelow.Dilly’s map fluttered out of her hands, caught by a wind that didn’t belong to this world.
“She’s waking,” Dilly gasped. “By the stars, she’s waking—”
“Then we’d best not keep her waiting,” Emille said.
Emille corked the second vial just as a fissure split open near the base of the Dragon Tree, releasing a burst of steam and something like a sigh. The moss rippled outward in concentric circles.
I grabbed his arm and yanked him back toward the boat, shouting over the rising sound—a sound like mountains grinding together.
“Move!” I ordered.
