“I’ll be back for you at first light,” Atlanta says.
Ninon kneels at my side. “Remember to breathe. Envision the shifts you saw today. It makes the transition easier.”
“Yeah?” I ask, the word strained. I can already feel a crawling sensation under my skin.
“Yes.” She grips my hand through the net, solid and warm and real. “I’ll see you in the morning.” Then they go, leaving me alone. I hear the scrape of chains in the enclosure next to mine. The sound of locks clicking into place. Lying there, unable to move easily, I remember the pain of the transformation last night, the wrongness of my mind disappearing from me.
I don’t have a chance to do as Ninon advised. Night falls and I hear the high-pitched scream of a dragon. Myskin feels hot and itchy and I squirm and breathe hard, fighting against what’s coming. A roar shakes the walls, so close it rumbles through my core.Ninon—that was Ninon. I know it with every fiber of my being. Then, my own body betrays me. Twisting and breaking and cracking, the beast bursts its way out of my skin, my mind slipping, slipping, until it’s nothing but fear and terror. I know only snippets of images—hands digging into the ground, shifting from talons back into hands, over and over, the long column of a pale throat, head tossed back. Clouds by day and stars by night, and endless rows of scales and teeth and claws. I have a deep, pressing need to exert this power, this strength, but no way to do it, no real goal. Only anger. Only sheer, undiluted outrage. So much power, taken from me. This thing that is somehow impossibly me, taken and reclaimed, but not what it should be. Not at all.
Then, oblivion.
The next morning follows the pattern of my first, except instead of taking me to Ozias when Atlanta releases us, we’re led to some rooms in the Alcazar to rest. By afternoon when we wake, we watch the children shift, trying to figure out how to do something we should have naturally done in our own youths. A precious, glorious time of our lives, stolen from us. I learn nothing new about the Realm or Dyeus. I eat with everyone, but only speak to Ninon, and on occasion, Atlanta. I do not see Ozias. I wonder what he’s doing, where he is, if he’s in the Realm or out beyond it.
That night, the transformation takes hold again. I turn bloodthirsty. Savage. Desperate. And the next night it happens again.
And again.
And again.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE NIGHT I shift into my scales without pain, my mind stays sane and I no longer feel the savage pull of the curse placed on the Realm.
I look with my dragon eyes and see the material of the world in shining dots and shifting colors. With it comes a keen sense of knowing. Of everything that has been. Of everything that ever will be. The sensation is vaguely familiar, like some long-distant dream I’m only now remembering. The sensation is too grand, too great. A part of me, the part I know most, tucked into the cavity of this great beast who knows so much, trembles and shies away. She cannot look upon this knowing without her heart racing. She cannot look upon this with acceptance and because her will is strongest still, even in this skin, I too have a sense of feeling unsettled. So, I don’t dwell there. Instead, I crane my neckup, looking at this new world right in front of me to discover. Dragons drift lazily overhead, like clouds on a hot day, or else tear across the sky as fast as a shooting star. The color of their scales bring new brilliance to the night sky, the gleam of their teeth and talons like clusters of stars. Night is but a concept in this form. I hear change in the air with every twist and turn of a wing, and see the energy their passage leaves behind. It’s as if I’ve seen the world with gauze tied over my eyes, and now it’s lifted. The human in me is terrified. This gift is crushing and if she were not already accustomed to staring out at the endless Sere, the vastness with which the draconem can experience would crush her. How can she exist now in this great knowing of the world, when there is so much she didn’t know before? This does not sit well with her. She is angry.
I shake my head hard and fast, mane swaying and sliding across my neck. My dragon is thinking of me, separate from myself—or maybe I’m thinking of myself as separate from this creature. I sigh, coming out as a huff from my nostrils.
I’ve tried to deny what I’ve seen and felt and experienced here in the Realm. Every time I work to convince my mind that the Realm is trying to deceive me and turn me against everything I’ve ever known, I remember the dragons of Dyeus who claim to be our protectors in the name of stealing our children. Here, though, I’ve only seen kindness. I’ve seen their children transform freely, with ease and patience. Each time I remind myself that Ozias wants something of me, I remember that the dragons of Dyeus demanded much more. Every time I try to deny that my skin is as much a dragon as it is a woman, this unnamable thing within me cries and screams and thrashes their head, unwilling to be silenced. Like ignoring my instinct on a hunt in the Sere, which has only led to missed marks and empty stomachs.
Deny as I will, I’ve watched the symbol on my abdomen fade. Deny as I will, I’ve witnessed young girls here transform into dragons at will during the day, safe and unchanged in the place they were born. I see them, and Iknow, I know, this is what I always should have been. Until the Sar Dyeus stole it from us. From me. I close my eyes and breathe, but my heart does not rage out of control like it does in my human form when I think of him—his bone white hair, his pale skin and high cheekbones and full lips, his eyes a green so dark they register black. I studied his face every moment I was in his presence when others cast their eyes down, a small defiance even when I didn’t know the truth.
In the halls of Dyeus I’d watch him from the corner of my eye. He never looked my way, nor did I ever expect him to. My talons dig into the ground as I imagine Dyeus, rich with splendor and food, while we Nevobans get whatever is left. I imagine its grand fortresses and tall spires. Its winding halls and windows so vast you sometimes feel like you’re standing on a cloud. I’m imagining it so well, I venture down the halls that led me to the nursery on that fateful day I found the Sar Dyeus staring at my nephew. The nursery is dark, though it was daylight in my memory. Faint coos and cries emanate from one bassinet or another. Two nursemaids flutter about the room, tending to them all. I blink, as if I’m watching in real time, then turn away, facing a hall I’ve never traversed—the one Alixor warned me against.
As I stare, I realize the hall is not as long as I would have thought, considering it leads to the Sar Dyeus’s personal chambers. Smooth, solid white walls. No windows. Nothing open for a dragon to fly freely in and out of. I move past the nursery into the darkened hall. There’s a shift in the air, a breeze from behind, like an encouraging hand at my back beckoning me forward. I slip through an archway at the end of the hall and stop before dark wood double doors, intricately carved with a scene of the sky—billowing clouds and pairs of dragons, sun rays streaking across. The lower half of the doors depict the ground, peppered with trees and rivers and people—a place I’ve never seen. I move to touch it and watch as my human hand passes through the wood. I jerk my hand back and stare at the solid material my fingers dipped into as easily if it were water. Holdingmy breath, trepidation wracks my body as I reach out again with my fingertips, only for my hand to move through the solid wood as before. Slowly, I let my hand drift through, then my arm. No pain, no change in sensation at all. With a mighty inhale I lean forward until my head passes through into an open room. My feet follow without my mind fully deciding to do so.
Inside it’s dark, like it was in the hall. I can hear the faint, distant cries of the children. An intense sadness envelops me and I press a hand over my heart. It thumps against my palm, fast and deep. This dream is strange and I wonder how my mind has conjured an image of a place I’ve never seen. Venturing further in, I pass an undisturbed bed. Across the wide room from the great wood door I passed through is a circular balcony surrounded by a low railing made of smooth marble stone. The space is hardly bigger than the width of four horses standing side by side and it juts out into the open air from the rest of the room. From here, I can’t see any buildings. No light. The gods eyes, the very gates to the heavenly realm, are perfectly framed between a set of columns on either side, and the depthless sky and stars beyond.
Sitting in the center of the balcony, is the Sar Dyeus.
I enter the circular colonnade, and cast my gaze up to the open night sky. Directly above where he sits, the gods eyes stare. The horizontally stacked ovals take the shape of clouds, but are too perfect in their curves to be natural. From between the two ovals, a kaleidoscope of colors pulse as if the sun or some distant star sits within the clouded center. Tonight, the light is dim, flickering frantically, but faintly. I step slowly, cautiously around the perimeter of the balcony until I’m standing in front of him. The Sar Dyeus’s face is pulled tight with tension, teeth clenched. His head is tipped back, exposing the long white column of his throat. My heart seizes and I have to grip one of the columns to keep myself from falling over. I’ve seen this before. In images that pass by my eyes every night I’ve transformed, I’ve seen bits and pieces of this.
Ofhim.
His eyes are shut tight, though they work furiously back and forth behind his eyelids. He looks so young and so old, all at once. He looks pained. My fingers twitch, itching to smooth over his face, to stop whatever is happening. If he’s in pain, I should let him suffer for all he’s done. Gritting my teeth, I curl my hand into a fist. A question forms on the tip of my tongue, tumbling out of my mind hot and sharp.
What are you doing?
His body bows forward violently, as if he took a punch to the gut, then his head snaps up, his eyes opening and zeroing in on mine. I startle back a step, my spine pressed hard against the balcony railings.
“Get.Out.” His snarl pulls his lip, showing the straight white lines of his teeth. Impossibly, I stumble back another step, through the railings. I fall over the edge. A scream lodges in my throat, but instead of falling, I’m hauled away by an unseen force at unfathomable speed. Everything I saw getting here reverses direction until I slam back into myself, the night still too dark for my eyes, my pulse pounding in my ears, the weight of the chains draped over my body.
My human body. The dawn is near, but it hasn’t broken yet. I should still be a dragon. My breaths come and go in short, frantic bursts as I try to sort out what happened, why I’m like this. Something’s wrong.
A swift wind buffets the air and I shut my eyes tight against the dust churning around me. There’s a resounding thump of a dragon’s landing and I sense the billowing vapor of a shift.
“Kaisa?” The voice is breathless, as if he sprinted here on his feet instead of flying on wings.
I blink open my eyes. “Ozias?” He’s kneeling at my side, adjusting the chains to see my eyes. “What happened?”
