Frustration and disappointment curdle in my gut as I pull on my other boot. He warned me he played dirty; I should have listened. I should have known he’d try to beat me at my own game.
“Well.” I clear my throat, pulling my hair down and running my fingers through it until it’s somewhat tame. “Looks like you win, Commander.”
I finally look up at him and instantly regret it. He looks angry, wholly unrepentant, and devastatingly beautiful. “Not yet, not completely, but I will.”
With that, Aeson walks away.
I watch him go, wondering exactly what that’s supposed to mean, and worrying that I already know.
Chapter 26
A LOUD ROAR SHAKES THE ground under my feet and vibrates through the stone bench I’m sitting on. A shadow flickers over me, the gloom devouring my perch one second and disappearing the next as a mighty acidic orange dragon streaks by overhead. I watch the majestic beast catch a current in the direction of Talon’s Reach, and then I turn around and observe the next initiate preparing for their run.
“Burner. Ash dragon,” Herm calls out from where he’s standing behind me next to a large arch covered in stunning magenta flowers.
“Na, I think he’s a Channeler. Mist dragon maybe,” Blay counters, his purple scale armor only a few shades darker than the blossoms surrounding him.
I ignore the banter, just like I’ve been ignoring it all morning, and watch as a new male prepares for his turn to showcase how quickly he can shift from his drake form into his dragon. I’ve watched a few of the other Call to Arms events this morning, but when it comes to choosing future Wing members, this one makes the most sense to me. I know better than anyone how important it is to shift, and how fucked you are when you can’t.
As a bonus, the competition is helping to keep Jori, Herm, and Blay occupied with betting and commenting on the initiates’ shifts, which means no one is asking any questions—or giving me any shit—about what happened the other day with Aeson. Which is good because I still don’t know what to make of any of it, and I’ve decided the best way to move forward is just to pretend like it never happened.
I’ve found a little garden alcove on the Render Tier that has a perfect view of the runways on Thrasher Tier, where the Call to Arms is taking place. Down below, the drake waiting for his turn to shift gets the nod from the instructor that it’s go time. He pulls in a few readying breaths, and then he takes off with a surprising burst of speed and sprints down the runway that’s been commandeered for this trial. There are a pair of yellow flags located about halfway down the strip that mark when the drake is clear to reveal his dragon.
The male crosses those flags and promptly leaps into the air. I hold my breath, waiting to see what kind of dragon he’ll shift into, but his reveal doesn’t immediately take over like it did with the others. The initiate catches good air for a moment, but when he doesn’t sprout wings, claws, and scales, gravity has no choice but to humble him.
“Oooh,” Jori groans as the drake crashes back down to the ground hard.
I wince, and the initiate rolls twice, dirt swirling around him in an explosion of limbs, dust, and failure. Just when he’s about to skid to a stop, his shift finally kicks in. Scales overtake skin, spikes replace hair, and wings rip free from the male’s back. His size quadruples and then quadruples again until the drake is gone and the dragon is revealed.
The blue-gray beast bellows an unmistakably irritated snarl and then surges from the ground with several flaps of his powerful wings. The wind kicks up as the massive creature stretches for the sky. He circles the training field once and then heads in the same direction as the orange dragon and all the others that came before them.
“Well, he got up there eventually. If he scores well for the rest of the tests, this might not boot him out of the running,” Blay observes, and Herm and Jori grunt their agreement.
“We all had our own issues with performance anxiety back in our day,” Jori points out thoughtfully.
I bite back a snicker.
“The minute you know your Call to Arms is royal, there’s a lot more pressure on everything and way more eyes watching every move you make,” he adds as he watches the blue-gray dragon weave through the sky.
“True,” Blay agrees. “I had trouble getting up and off a deck during mine. They gave us these huge loads we were supposed to shoot off mid-flight, and I really struggled.”
This time, I can’t hold back my giggle. All three of them turn their puzzled gazes on me.
“Are you three even talking about Wing trials anymore, or is that code for something I really don’t want to know about?”
My smile is wide as I tease the guards, but their faces remain perplexed like they have no clue as to why I’m tittering away over here. It makes me laugh even harder.
Admittedly, I might be a little slap happy. I haven’t been sleeping well, and the last few nights were no exception. I sigh and run a hand down my face as my laughter fades and slowly drops away. The amusement is a welcome reprieve from the melancholy that was starting to seep past my serrated edges. I should have known it was a bad idea to sit here for as long as I have, watching drake after drake do the one thing I wish I could but can’t. Reveal.
I probably should have saved myself the mind fuck and left a while ago—what started out as fun and informative has quickly morphed into something torturous and crushing—but there’s something undeniably magical about being around dragons. I’ve seen them as the enemy, as something to be feared, as the architects of my impending death. But sitting here, watching them like this, it pulls back the curtain on something I’ve never truly appreciated until now.
Dragons are incredible.
Massive and fearsome. Stunning and lithe.
They’re everything I’m fighting to have and everything I mourn.
Every day I spend here in Four Tiers opens my eyes to what I’ve been missing for no other reason than I haven’t taken the time to see it. My focus has been fixed for so long on surviving and trying to break this bloody curse, that it’s given me blinders to everything else. But broken or not, I am a dragon inside, and I’m starting to see and understand what that means.
