“It’s called a phone.” One of Lakhu’s servants—a human woman with tired eyes and a permanent flinch—hurries forward to retrieve the device I’d knocked from the table. “It makes noise when someone wants to communicate. It’s not... it’s not attacking you.”
I stare at the thing in her hands. Small. Flat. Glowing with unnatural light. It makes another sound—a cheerful chime that makes my teeth ache—and the woman taps its surface with her finger. The noise stops.
“How does it work?” I hate how uncertain my voice sounds. Hate how everything in this new world makes me feel like a child stumbling through darkness. “What powers it?”
“Electricity.” She says the word slowly, as if I might not understand. She’s right—I don’t. “It’s like... lightning, captured and controlled. It powers most things now.”
Lightning. Captured. Controlled. Put into boxes that scream at you.
I sink onto the edge of the bed—another strange contraption, too soft, with metal coils inside that squeak when I move—and try to absorb yet another impossibility in a world that seems built entirely of them.
Yesterday, they showed me a metal carriage that moved without horses. Roared down a paved road fast enough to blur the trees on either side. I’d gripped the seat until my knuckles went white, certain we were about to die, while Lakhu watched me with something that might have been amusement.
The day before, I’d nearly set fire to my quarters when I touched a switch on the wall and light exploded from the ceiling. No candles. No torches. Just... light, appearing from nothing, bright enough to hurt my eyes.
Everything is wrong. The clothes are wrong—tight in strange places, made of materials I can’t identify. The food is wrong—too sweet, too fake, wrapped in crinkly substances that makemy skin crawl. The air itself is wrong—thick with smells I can’t name, tainted by the residue of a thousand machines I don’t understand.
And my magic is wrong.
I stare at my hands, at the shadow-flame that flickers across my knuckles without my permission. Before—before I died—my fire burned gold. Warm and bright and alive. Now it burns black, cold despite its heat, responding to emotions I can’t control.
The woman is watching me. I feel her gaze, wary and pitying in equal measure.
“Leave me.” The words come out harsher than I intend. “Please.”
She goes without argument. The door clicks shut behind her—another wrong sound, too mechanical, too precise—and I’m left alone with my fractured memories and my twisted magic and the growing certainty that I don’t belong in this world.
That maybe I was never meant to come back to it.
Ten daysafter resurrection
“Tell me about Zyphon.”
Lakhu’s voice is gentle, but something in my chest tightens at the name. We’re sitting in his study—a room full of books and artifacts and the faint smell of old magic—and he’s poured me tea that I haven’t touched.
“I don’t...” I shake my head, trying to grasp memories that slip away like water through fingers. “I remember him. But it’s hazy. Fragments.”
“What kind of fragments?”
I close my eyes. Try to focus. “His face. Dark hair. The way he looked at me like...” The image wavers, refusing to solidify. “Like I mattered. Like I was something precious.”
“You were precious to him.” Lakhu’s tone is carefully neutral. “Or so he claimed.”
My eyes snap open. “Claimed?”
“I’m sorry.” He sets down his own cup, the ceramic clicking against the saucer with precise control. “I shouldn’t have said anything. You’re still recovering, and the memories will come back on their own?—“
“Tell me.” I lean forward, my shadow-flame flickering in response to my agitation. “Whatever you know, tell me.”
Lakhu studies me with those bruised-twilight eyes, and I see calculation behind the sympathy. See him weighing options, choosing words.
“Zyphon Koros,” he says finally. “One of the Brotherhood dragons. He pursued you for months before your death. Claimed to love you.” A slight emphasis on claimed. “Your brother tried to protect you from him.”
“Balroth.” My brother’s name surfaces instantly, wrapped in warmth and grief. “I remember Balroth.”
“He was the only one who saw through Zyphon’s obsession. Tried to warn you. Tried to keep you safe.” Lakhu’s voice drops, soft with false reluctance. “And Zyphon killed him for it.”
The words land like blows. I feel the blood drain from my face, feel my heart stutter and stop and start again.
