Kara pulled back from her mate's embrace, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. She looked younger like this, softer. The competent woman who'd found me in Thornhallow had been replaced by someone who'd let herself be small.
Let herself be cared for.
The words echoed in my mind, foreign and frightening. Was that what it looked like? Choosing to be soft? Choosing to be held?
"Come," Kara said, her voice steadier now. "You should rest before we fly again. And eat. The Shadow Lands are cold."
I followed her into the keep, but I couldn't shake the feeling that something fundamental had changed. Like I'd been walking in darkness for twenty-seven years and someone had suddenly shown me a candle—distant, unreachable, but real.
For the first time in my life, I wanted something for myself.
I just didn't know yet what it was called.
Therestlastedlittlelonger than an hour. I slept without dreaming—a rare mercy—and woke to Kara's hand on my shoulder and the smell of something volcanic on the wind.
"Time," she said, and that was all.
We flew again.
This time, I was prepared for the cold. Someone had given me a traveling cloak lined with fur—dragon's fire couldn't warm a rider at this altitude, Kara explained, but good wool could. I wrapped myself in it and held onto her waist as Davoren's massive form rose from the Black-Glass Keep, and I tried not to think about everything I'd left behind. The guest house in Thornhallow. The garden with its stubborn winter roots. The boy named Bram who would grow up and probably forget, eventually, the strange woman who'd saved his life.
I was good at being forgotten. It was one of my only talents, besides swallowing pain.
We'd been flying for perhaps an hour when the others joined us.
They came from different directions—east, west, below—rising through the clouds like living myths. Three more dragons, each distinct, each impossible. One was white as glacier ice, scales catching the light with prismatic fire. Another was gray-brown and massive, built like a mountain given wings, moving with the slow deliberate grace of stone. The third crackled with storm-light, silver scales flickering with captured lightning, smaller and faster than the others but no less magnificent.
They fell into formation around us. Five dragons—I counted them twice to be sure—flying in a pattern as old as the world itself. And on each dragon's back, I saw figures. Small against all that scale and wing. Human, or human-shaped.
The mates.
I couldn't see them clearly from this distance, but I saw the marks on their skin. Golden fire on one. Crystalline frost onanother. Storm-silver. Stone-gray. Each one claimed. Each one belonging to something ancient and powerful.
Each one held.
I tightened my grip on Kara's waist and told myself the ache in my chest was just the cold.
We flew north. The land below changed—green giving way to gray, warmth bleeding out of the air until my breath came in visible plumes. The other dragons stayed close, and sometimes I caught glimpses of their riders: a woman with white-blonde hair who moved like a dancer, a man with kind eyes and hands that looked like they'd built things, a laughing figure with storm-marks crackling up their arms.
They looked happy.
They looked like people who had found where they belonged.
I looked away.
The mountains rose ahead of us, jagged and dark, and at their heart stood something that stopped my breath. Mount Noctis, Kara had called it during one of our brief stops. The Void Master's domain. The Shadow Lands.
The peak was shrouded in perpetual twilight—not quite night, not quite day, but something in between. A veil of darkness hung across its face like a living curtain, and as we approached, I felt something shift in my chest. A pull. A recognition I couldn't name.
"Hold on," Kara called back over her shoulder. "The crossing can be disorienting."
I held on.
We plunged through the shadow-veil, and the world unmade itself.
For one terrible moment, there was nothing—no up, no down, no light, no sound. Just darkness pressing against me from all sides, intimate and consuming. I couldn't breathe. Couldn'tthink. Could only feel myself dissolving into something vast and velvet and eternal—
And then we were through.
