“Jyn, we have to get out of here!”
She stands firm, but I can feel her resolve shattering. She knows as well as I that there’s no escape from this hell. Too weak for escape, too tired to fight on. We’re done for.
An arrow slices through the air and hits Jyn square in the chest. It pierces through her bloodied scales and sinks deep. With one final wail, she shifts, her body shrinking as her magic begins to fade. I catch her in time, but we fall nonetheless.
I cradle her body close, tenderly brushing strands of her hair away from her face. She’s distressingly pale and growing colder by the second.
“It will be all right, my love,” I whisper against her cheek. The throbbing ache in my lungs leaves me gasping, sobbing. “It will be all right.”
With a trembling hand, Jyn reaches up and caresses my jaw. “I will be back,” she rasps.
“No, please—”
“Iwillbe back.”
“Jyn, I—” I choke on my own tongue. “There’s still so much I wish to do with you in this life.” I press a kiss to her forehead. “I wish to braid your hair.” A kiss to her temple. “To watch the morning sunrise with you.” A kiss to her lips. “To annoy you with my stories.”
Jyn coughs. Her weak smile breaks me. “I don’t mind your stories.”
I want to scream.
Gods above, please—not now. Not when we’ve finally found each other.
“Let me rest,” she whispers, impossibly quiet. I hear my own heart shatter around her words. “I’m so very tired.”
My eyes sting with tears, and my chest threatens to cave in. I can already feel her slipping away.
“How am I to live without you?”
“Promise me,” she mumbles. “You must return so that we might find each other again.”
Her light is quickly fading, drifting out where I have no hope of following. My mouth is dry. “I promise.”
“I love you, Sai,” she says on a weak exhale. “I have loved you in every life, and I will love you in every one hereafter.”
“I love you, too,” I mumble back. “Always.”
It happens quietly. One final breath, and then she’s gone. She’s gone, and I suddenly know a fraction of the pain she has endured all these years. When she dies, I die along with her; yet I am cursed to remain on this wretched earth.
The thread between us—our sacred connection—turns an inky black. And then it crumbles away, mere dust on the wind.
I am hollow.
Broken.
He has taken her from me.
I look up at the emperor, who raises an amused brow. “What a shame,” he says. “It appears I have finally vanquished the last dragon of the east. But I’m sure we can do something with the meager amount of dragon’s blood she has left us.”
I lay Jyn’s body down onto the tile floor, silently promising her a resting place more befitting of her station, that of a forgotten queen. I rise slowly, my knees cracking as I do. As I stare up at the emperor, the grief I feel quickly becomes something darker. It threatens to tear me in two.
“You’re wrong,” I hiss. I tap into the unbridled rage, so intense it threatens to consume me. I have felt it before. But it’s far stronger now than I remember it being in any of my other lifetimes.
The rage of a beast.
“Oh?” the emperor asks. “How so, boy?”
The magic that has been sealed away within my blood finally ignites, a million sparks arcing at once as my skin transforms, rigid red scales the color of an inferno taking its place.
