“Yeah,” I exhale. “But you know? It doesn’t matter. Once he was something; now he’s something else. It’s a new world and somehow Tajss keeps reinventing itself or us.”
“Tajss provides,” Korr says softly.
He steps closer, placing his arm around my shoulder and pulling me tighter against him. I put my arm around his waist and rest my head on his shoulder. The tension that has lived under my skin for months doesn’t vanish. It settles. Becomes something I carry — instead of something that carries me.
Across the chamber, Illadon laughs at something the human boy says. The sound is bright and startling in the cavernous space. A few Zmaj glance toward it. One of them, an older, scarred warrior, allows the faintest hint of a smile.
Rverre resumes her humming, softer now, weaving between conversations like thread through cloth, as she drifts towards him.
“They’re already changing each other,” I say.
“Yes,” Korr answers.
“And you?” I ask, turning toward him. “Are you satisfied?”
His gaze moves over the chamber. The light. The children. The Zmaj who cast sidelong glances at him.
“I am… hopeful,” he says carefully.
The word feels larger than any vow. I squeeze him. Above us, sunlight filters through fractured steel and broken glass, cutting gold lines across stone that has known only survival for too long.
“We will build something here,” he says.
“We already are,” I answer.
The city is still wounded. So are we, but the light reaches farther than it did yesterday.
EPILOGUE
The city does not sleep so much as soften.
Light from low fires and reflected suns flickers up through broken floors and open steel ribs, turning ruin into something almost ceremonial. The edges are still sharp, the walls still fractured, but there is motion And laughter.
I stand near the edge of what used to be a mezzanine, one hand resting on a rusted railing that probably hasn’t held weight in decades. Below, in the open stretch of what must once have been a grand lobby, Illadon is holding court.
I don’t think he knows that’s what he’s doing. It comes to him naturally.
Three young Zmaj cluster around him, wings half-spread in restless curiosity. One of them crouches to better see the way Illadon is sketching in charcoal across a slab of broken tile. Rverre stands beside him, hands clasped behind her back, head tilted slightly as she watches not the drawing but the reactions.
“They reinforced Draconov like this,” Illadon is saying, voice carrying upward in confident waves. “Load shifts here, not here. If you anchor too high, you lose the whole upper quadrant.”
The Zmaj exchange glances. One of them glances up toward the fractured ceiling as if imagining the shift.
“And your father taught you this?” one asks.
“My father,” Illadon says, lifting his chin, “and my mother. And others.” His gaze flicks briefly toward where he knows I’m standing, then returns to his audience. “We didn’t survive by accident.”
Rverre steps forward then, pressing her palm briefly to the stone floor. The nearest Zmaj goes very still, watching.
“It holds,” she murmurs. “But it wants weight evenly shared.”
They don’t scoff or laugh. They lean closer. I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath until I let it out slowly.
“They’re in awe of them,” I say quietly.
Korr stands at my side, arms folded loosely across his chest. He isn’t tense. He isn’t on guard. He’s watching the room with something deeper than vigilance.
“Yes,” he says.
