I surge in close again, under its reaching claws. My blade drives into the seam beneath its carapace—between ribs, just left of center.
The sting tail convulses.
Then stills.
The silence afterward is brutal.
My breathing roars in my ears, hot and fast. The blood from the beast—green-black, acidic—coats my hands, my face, steaming against the cold night air. It runs in slow rivulets down my arms, hissing where it hits the sand.
But I don’t feel it.
I feel her.
She’s still there.
Still alive.
She hasn’t run.
I lift my head slowly. The world narrows. Shrinks. She is the only thing that exists now.
She stands just ten paces away, frozen, breath caught between inhale and exhale. Her eyes are wide, luminous in the dark, locked on me—not the body at my feet.Me.
Not screaming.
Not crying.
Just…watching.
I shift slightly, blades dripping, my breath coming ragged and low. She sees me now—fully, undeniably. There is no shadow to hide in. No clever angles. No distance between the truth of what I am and her fragile, human understanding.
And still she doesn’t move.
We lock eyes.
It’s not a long moment.
It stretches, warps, crystallizes. One breath, caught like sap in amber. The night holds its breath with us.
Her eyes—gods, her eyes—don’t shrink away. They study me. Not in horror. Not even confusion.
In recognition.
And that’s what undoes me.
Because in that moment, with the blood still warm on my skin and the sting tail’s body twitching beside me, I see it bloom in the space between us.
That ancient word.
Jalshagar.
I haven’t thought of it in years. I’d buried it with the rest of my past—alongside the wreckage of war, the shattered oaths, the exile. The rituals of bonding, of trust, of sacred balance—they don’t belong to me anymore.
But it rises now like an echo through marrow.
Unspoken. Uninvited. Unyielding.
She doesn’t know the word. She can’t. No human tongue could shape it right.
