“I’m afraid of plenty.” I smiled, tired and voice raw. “I’m just more afraid of losing the people I love than I am of becoming whatever I need to become to keep them safe.”
Ryzen was quiet for a long moment. Then his forehead dropped to rest against mine—the same gesture Zirene used, the same intimate press of skin to skin.
“Same time tomorrow?” I asked quietly.
His answer was almost a smile—the first real one I’d ever seen from him. Small. Reluctant. But there.
“Same time tomorrow.”
Behind us, Xylo let out a long breath. I’d almost forgotten he was there—watching, monitoring, bearing witness to whatever this moment had become.
When Ryzen finally released me, his spirit daggers withdrew at his silent command. One by one, they turned inward, piercing the glowing runes etched along his skin—not violently, but with a practiced inevitability—until each blade dissolved into light and faded into him completely, as if they’d never existed outside his body.
The sight stole my breath.
I stared, unsettled by the questions it stirred. If we ever bonded more deeply—if threads became something else—would I be capable of the same? Would a spirit weapon answermethe way they answered him? Would I summon my own… or would his respond to my will as easily as his?
Through our bond, I felt it—the shift from reluctant teacher to something else. Something that didn’t have a name yet.
But I had a feeling we’d find one.
17
Zyxel
The corridor was not designed for pacing.
He knew this. Zyxel catalogued it with the same methodical attention he gave everything—noted the precise width of the passageway, the weight-bearing capacity of the polished stone beneath his feet, the exact distance between the carved archway and Selena’s door. Twelve steps. He’d measured it eleven times now. Twelve steps from one end to the other, then turn, then twelve steps back, and still the wrongness clawed at his insides like something trapped trying to get out.
Demi-human. He was demi-human.
The form had a technical elegance, he supposed. Two legs calibrated to bipedal locomotion. Two arms ending in articulated hands with five fingers each, no claws worth mentioning, no spines along the forearm. A torso that oriented vertically rather than anchoring in a coil. A face that arranged itself into readable humanoid expressions rather than the subtle language of scale-flush and fang.
Kaede had said: hold it longer. Build the endurance. Make it second nature.
Zyxel was beginning to suspect second nature was not available to him in this form.
He stopped pacing and pressed his palm to the corridor wall—the cool stone a small mercy against skin that felt perpetually exposed. No scales to regulate temperature. No coil to press against the ground and feel the hum of the world. He stood upright on these strange, hinged legs, and the persistent low-grade nausea that came with it was something his scholarly mind had not been able to think its way past.
The wrongness wasn’t pain. He wanted to be precise about that. He’d assessed pain extensively over several decades of field research and the occasional hostile negotiation. This was not pain.
It was displacement. Wearing a life that didn’t fit. Like finding himself inside someone else’s skin and having to pretend, with every movement, that it was his.
He exhaled—a short, controlled breath the way Kaede had shown him, the kind that didn’t vibrate down a coil but simply released through a throat arranged in entirely the wrong configuration.
She doesn’t know.
Through their crimson bond—new enough that he still felt the strangeness of it with something close to awe—he sensed her. The specific quality of Selena’s presence threading toward him: tired, purposeful, moving through the villa with the deliberate pace of someone who’d pushed herself and was still calculating whether she’d pushed far enough. Training with Ryzen. He’d felt the edges of it all morning—her focus, the hard bright flares of effort, Xylo’s steady teal presence anchoring them both.
She was nearly back to her quarters.
Zyxel stopped moving.
His heart—arranged in the wrong part of his chest, beating with a rhythm he’d never trusted because it lacked the grounding resonance of his coil—accelerated in a way it had no business doing when Selena wasn’t even in the room yet.
What if she looks at you and sees a stranger?
He’d done the calculation. He’d done it dozens of times, with the same exhaustive precision he brought to xenolinguistic ciphers and structural assessments of alien ruins. The bond was formed. Permanent. His enax was his enax regardless of what form either of them occupied—this was simply biological fact, not sentiment. The bond didn’t care about scales.
