Erik straightens. His claws extend while his teeth sharpen.
I grip my axe and ready myself, preparing to change my weapon’s form if I need to.
“Graviter Rex,” I shout, standing firm as the dragon takes a thudding step toward us. “I didn’t hurt your son, but I heard his voice. I felt his pain?—”
“What do you know of pain?” Graviter’s talons rake through the snow as he thrashes his head again. “You are a Blacksmith! There is nothing but betrayal and darkness in your heart.”
For a short time, I believed that to be true. But not now.
“My name is Asha Silverspun,” I say. “I’m not your enemy. I don’t want to fight you or kill you?—”
“My only child is dead!” he screams. With his breath comes heat, the burning light of dragon’s fire glimmering around his snout.
The snow at his feet begins to melt. White bones swirl within the sludge.
“The light has been taken from my heart,” he cries. “Do not try to reason with me, Blacksmith. I will not stop until your race is wiped from the face of this Earth. That is the only way this evil will come to an end.”
I exhale a heavy breath. Beside me, Erik has lowered his fists. He, too, once wanted to annihilate all Blacksmiths.
This dragon doesn’t know us, must surely know we had nothing to do with his son’s death, but rage and pain are clearly driving him.
Heat continues to build around his mouth. “I promise I will kill you quickly, Asha Silverspun. The wolf, too. Even Milena. But when I find Malak’s son, I will tear him apart, limb by cursed limb.”
Malak’s son?
I’m suddenly frozen to the spot. Erik has jolted backward.
I can barely form a whisper. “Malak had a son?”
Erik’s shaking his head, his eyes wide. He keeps his voice low. “If he did, he didn’t know.”
I believe him. The shock radiating off Erik is palpable.
“The Betrayer!” Graviter snarls. “A child with eyes and hair as dark as night and all his father’s cursed strength. Milena brought him to us. She thought he would undo the damage his father wrought on this land.” Graviter Rex spits. “There is nogoodin pure darkness.”
My mind is a storm of thoughts, all centered around a single fact: On the night she supposedly died, Milena went out to welcome a new Blacksmith baby into the world.
That baby wasn’t in the city eleven years later when Erik ended Malak’s reign.
“The baby,” I whisper. “Milena must have taken him with her when she left.”
“Not a baby anymore,” Erik says. “A grown man.”
I shiver. “He would be capable of… anything.”
He would have the power to create monsters. To fashion dark devices like his father did—especially because he would have had the prototype that his father created, since Milena stole it and presumably took it with her.
If Malak’s son is behind all of this, then it explains why Milena’s actions seemed so contradictory—it answers the questions I had about why she would alienate the humans and the dragons.
Shedidn’t. It was him.
And the message she sent, saying that she wants her city back… If she has merely been a puppet, then it’s becausehewants his city back. He wants the city that belonged to his father and would have belonged to him.
In response to that message, we came out to hunt Milena.
We found her on this cliff’s edge, where he left monsters to kill us and, if they failed, well…
He could count on Graviter Rex to seek revenge and finish us off.
