“You are nothing but a job,” the phantom said, stepping closer. “A debt to be paid.”
She reached for me, and I flinched, bracing for the touch. But when her fingers grazed my cheek, they were freezing.
No.
Reality crashed against the lie, because Lysa ran hot. She burned with the heat of the healing hearth, with the fever of overused magic, with the proximity to dragonfire. Even when she was terrified, her skin radiated a warmth that seeped into my bones.
I shoved the memory of that cold touch away, replacing it with the truth. I remembered the night she’d arrived, how she’d ignored my commands, how she knelt beside my maddened wyrmling. She hadn’t looked at the beast with the revulsion the Illusion-Lysa wore now. She had looked at it with a fierce, stubborn compassion. She had touched the monster, and she hadn’t pulled away.
“You’re hurting everyone,” the false Lysa whispered, her image flickering like a candle in a draft. “You’re a monster. You deserve to be caged.”
“Stop,” I growled. I remembered the storm. The study. I remembered the way the air had thickened. The lie Kelda had fed me for thirteen years, that my emotion was poison, that my desire was destruction, tried to hold its ground. I summoned Lysa’s hazel eyes. Not the flat, dead things the illusion offered, but the real ones, gold-flecked and widening with shock, then deepening into a brown so dark it stopped my breath.
I remembered pressing her against the wall, the beast in me surging, demanding, taking. I had shown her the monster then.I had stripped away the aristocrat and given her the predator, claws bracing beside her head, teeth grazing her throat. I had given her every reason to run, to scream, to look at me with the disgust this phantom wore. But she hadn’t. The memory surfaced with the force of a breaking dam, sweeping away the debris of Kelda’s manipulations.
I felt the phantom weight of her body against mine, soft where I was hard, trembling not with revulsion, but with the same hunger that was eating me alive. I heard my own voice, warning that I would ruin her.
And then, her answer. It rang through the silence of the void, shattering the glass walls of my prison.
“Maybe I want you to.”
She hadn’t asked for safety. She hadn’t asked for the Lord of Stormgarde. I was the man she wanted. The false Lysa screamed as she disintegrated into smoke. The darkness burned away, scorched by a sudden, blinding flash of silver fire. My silver fire. I opened my eyes.
Maybe I want you to.
For thirteen years, I had believed the lie. I had believed that my hunger was a defect, that my need was a poison that would corrode anyone foolish enough to touch me. Lysa wanted the beast. The insects crawling beneath my ribs, that rot I had called a curse, stopped their frantic skittering. They were incinerated in a sudden, blinding rush of heat. I threw my head back in the void, a roar building in a throat that finally felt like my own. The dark sludge that had bogged me down for over a decade tried tocling and suffocate the rising tide, but it was like trying to hold back a volcanic eruption with paper walls. The thing inside me, therealthing, the legacy my parents had died protecting, woke up.
It was heavy, yes. Ancient. Dangerous. But it was brilliant.
Mine.
The word thrummed through the ley-lines of my body.
I saw the beast, the image was sharp. Massive wings, not tattered by decay but bright as polished shields, unfurled in the darkness of my mind. They beat once, twice, and the tar around me was blasted back. Scales formed over my vulnerability—impervious, gleaming silver armor that didn’t hide the man beneath but protected him. Horns, sharp and proud, crowned a head that would no longer bow.
I stopped fighting. That was the truth Kelda had buried under layers of false memory and guilt. I had spent every waking moment of my adult life acting as a dam, bracing myself against the flood, thinking the pressure would kill me. I wasn’t the dam. I was the river. I let the walls come down. I let the governor valve snap. The magic that I had pushed away, the chaotic energy I had feared would level the town, rushed into me. But instead of tearing me apart, it filled the hollow spaces the shadow had carved out. I expanded. I became immense.
The parasite, that leech made of Kelda’s ambition, shrieked as I turned the flow. It had been siphoning me dry, feeding on my suppression. Now, I reversed the polarity. I inhaled. I claimed every scrap of magic in the room, every ounce of the ley-line’swild potential. I was afraid the shadows would consume this new light, thankfully the light scorched the shadows from existence. The water around me evaporated in a hiss of steam. There was only the fire now. The beautiful, terrible, silver fire.
I opened my eyes in the real world, and the room turned white. I took that silver inferno, that torrent of potential I’d spent so much time suppressing, and I turned it inward. I aimed it straight at my own chest. The parasite panicked. For a decade, it had been the apex predator in my body, a fat spider sitting in the center of the web, sipping on my misery. It tried to clamp down, to strangle the flow of power before it could consume us both. It tried to sound like Kelda.Be careful, Fenrik. You’ll hurt them. You’re too much.
“No,” I snarled. “I am enough.”
I drove the silver fire into the black mass coiled around my heart. The pain was blinding, white-hot and absolute.Get out.I grabbed the shadow-thing with claws made of mind and will, and Isqueezed. The parasite shrieked. It was the screech of metal tearing under immense pressure that rattled my teeth and vibrated through the marrow of my bones. I felt its tendrils whipping frantically, trying to anchor themselves in my fear, in my shame, in the gaps of my memory.
But there was no purchase left. Lysa had filled those cracks.
“LYSA!”
The name ripped out of my physical throat, a thunderous roar that shattered the silence of the void and, I knew, shook the very stones of the manor above.
The scream of the parasite reached a fever pitch, dissolving into a high, thin wail as the silver fire incinerated it. I felt the weight lift, literally felt the pressure evaporate from my chest. With the sound of a thousand windows breaking at once, Kelda’s illusion shattered. The shards of false memory and twisted guilt rained down, dissolving into mist before they could touch me.
I inhaled, expanding my lungs fully for the first time in such a long time, without anyone’s help or healing. Then, I slammed back into my physical body in the ley-chamber with the force of a falling star. The calcified bindings which had turned brittle and grey under the assault of my awakened magic shattered, but not without a price. Pain seared through my right side as I tore my arm free. My shoulder dislocated with apopthat reverberated in my skull, but the agony was distant, muffled by the roar of the beast claiming my skin. I dropped from the suspension, landing in the silver sludge of wasted magic. My vision swam, a kaleidoscope of grey stone, violet light, and the terrifying image of Kelda raising a spear of magic, aiming at Lysa. I didn’t have any more time for thought, I launched myself across the floor.
I hit Lysa a fraction of a second before the spear did, curling my body over hers. The explosion detonated against my back, a sledgehammer of heat and force that drove the breath from my lungs and embedded shards into my scales. I collapsed to my hands and knees, my body shuddering in a half-shifted state. Silver scales rippled across my chest, itching and burning as they fought for dominance over human skin. My claws scrapedsparks against the stone floor as I dragged myself forward. My vision was tunneling, restricted to the heat signature beneath me.
I was terrified. Terrified that the explosion had killed her. Terrified that she was another one of Kelda’s cruel marionettes, waiting to dissolve into smoke the moment I offered my heart. I reached out with a clawed hand to touch her face, needing proof of her existence. My talons grazed her cheek, stopping short of drawing blood. She was warm.
