And then we launched into darkness.
The sensation defied every physical law I'd ever known.
Wind that shouldn't exist tore past my face, carrying the scent of stars and ancient magic. My stomach dropped and my heart soared and I heard myself laughing—actually laughing, wild and free, sounds I hadn't made since I was young enough to believe the world might be kind.
He carried me through the impossible sky like I weighed nothing. Like I was precious. Like every beat of those vast wings was a love letter written in motion, a declaration that required no words because the truth of it sang through every nerve I possessed.
The bond blazed between us, his joy feeding mine feeding his in an endless cycle. I felt what he felt—the freedom of flight after millennia of waiting, the rightness of carrying someone who wanted to be carried, the ancient satisfaction of a dragon with his mate upon his back at last.
And beneath my own wonder, something else surfaced.
Memory that wasn't quite mine.
I felt Evara's ghost stir in my blood as we banked through starlight. Felt the echo of her joy, her terror, her desperatelove for a creature just as vast and ancient. She had flown like this once. Had felt this freedom, this terrifying wonder, this overwhelming certainty that she was exactly where she belonged.
And then she had run from it.
I pressed my cheek against Morgrith's scales and let the tears fall freely, carried away by impossible wind before they could cool on my transformed skin. Tears for her. Tears for the choice she'd made and the world it had broken. Tears for the woman I might have been, once, if fear had won.
But I wasn't Evara.
I was Lena—wound-walker, dragon-kin, mate to the Shadow Master who banked and dove and carried me through darkness like I was the most precious thing in all the realms.
I was still here.
And I would never, ever run.
Thevillageemergedfromcoastal mist like something half-drowned, and my transformed senses screamed warning before we'd even begun our descent.
I felt it first as a sour note—a discord in the energy that rippled across my new perception like nails dragged over raw silk. The world had been singing to me since my transformation, everything connected in frequencies I was only beginning to understand. But here, the song had gone wrong. Something had crept into the melody and twisted it, turned harmony into dissonance, made the very air taste of wrongness.
Morgrith felt it too. His flight pattern shifted, wings adjusting as we banked toward the cliffs that rose above the village like broken teeth. Through the bond I sensed his attention sharpen,ancient instincts cataloging threat levels, assessing dangers I couldn't yet name.
The landing was gentler than I expected.
He touched down on the cliff's edge with a grace that seemed impossible for something so vast, then shifted between one breath and the next—shadow and starlight collapsing inward, the dragon becoming the man in a cascade of transformation that still stole my breath to witness. His arms caught me before I could slide from where his back had been, my legs unsteady after the flight, my body still thrumming with the memory of impossible wind.
"Steady," he murmured against my hair. "I've got you."
But his attention had already shifted downward. Toward the village. Toward the people who were running up the cliff path with desperation carved into every line of their bodies.
They weren't running from the dragon.
They were running toward him. Toward us. Toward anyone who might help.
The headman reached us first—an older man with salt-crusted hair and hands that shook as he grabbed at Morgrith's sleeves. Behind him came others: women with hollow eyes, fishermen who looked like they hadn't slept in weeks, a young mother clutching a child who whimpered against her shoulder.
"Please," the headman gasped. "Please, Lord—we've heard stories, we know what you are—please, something is wrong, something has been wrong for days and we don't know how to stop it—"
The story spilled out in fragments. Broken sentences. The desperate outpouring of a man who had watched his village unravel and could do nothing to prevent it.
A week, he told us. Since the dreams started.
Everyone had them. Every single person in the village, from the oldest grandmother to the youngest babe still at the breast.The same dream, night after night: drowning in darkness that wasn't water, being pulled apart and reconstructed wrong, the sensation of something vast and terrible pressing against the inside of their skulls.
"We wake screaming," the young mother said. Her voice had the particular flatness of someone who had cried until there was nothing left. "Every night. My daughter won't stop clawing at her skin. She says there's something inside her, something trying to get out."
The fishing boats came back empty. Had been empty for weeks now, nets returning with nothing but seaweed and the occasional bone-white fish that shouldn't exist, things with too many eyes and teeth that curved the wrong direction. The fish had fled, the headman explained. Fled from waters they'd inhabited for generations, driven away by whatever lurked beneath the cliffs.
