“You can.”
My snarl is suddenly savage. “No, this is cruel. If I could share my light, I could have saved my father. I could have helped my brother. I was told?—”
“One in every generation,” Graviter snaps. “Just like dragons.” He prowls closer as I fight the urge to rage at him.
My whisper is strangled. “No.”
The dragon king leans forward, quiet flames licking around his mouth, hot enough to melt the snow on the nearby trees.
The liquid drips like tears onto the icy ground, a soft patter that curls around my anguish and tears everything away from me.
“I do not lie,” he says.
My voice is empty. “Even if what you say is true, I have no light left.”
Graviter gives me a sad smile. “But you do. I see it.”
“How?” I ask disbelievingly.
His focus shifts to the cabin. “Asha,” he says. “Every time you touched her. Every time you thought of her. Every time you lied and schemed to keep her alive. Every time you raged quietly against your fate and concealed your true intentions. Your deep light built again. Hidden from you beneath the weight of the darkness that rested within your heart.”
“Malak’s device,” I murmur.
“Until she removed it,” Graviter replies. “Look into your heart, Wolf. You will find what you thought you lost.”
I close my eyes, seeking the light within my heart, taking myself back to the moment when I lifted the onyx pole above my head and struck it down onto her grandmother’s mangled medallion.
“Remember who you are.”That’s what I said in that moment.
The bright, melodictingrang in my ears, but all I thought about was that Asha needed the light in that medallion to help her fight the darkness of Malak’s metal.
“Remember who you are.”
My fingertips tingle and my chest hurts, as if there were a cage around my heart.
A cage behind which I’ve hidden myself for ten, long years.
I open my eyes to find that the flames dancing around Graviter’s scaled face are now reflecting the faintest sapphire tinge.
My deep light. It’s radiating out from me, pushing back at his power.
“Erik the Vandawolf.” Graviter speaks gravely. “If you forge this hammer, you cannot hold back. You must give everything.”
A new pain squeezes my chest. “I will need to burn out my light. Once and for all.”
“You must,” Graviter says. “It is the only way.”
I take a deep breath, inhaling the crisp air and listening to the faraway howls of the wolf pack that survived despite the darkness around them.
Farther away is the city and the wasteland that surrounds it. Ashen ground that gives rise to monsters formed from the bones of dead creatures and the creation magic that seeps across the land.
A darkness that is growing and spreading.
Without a hammer, Asha can’t heal any of it. And as for using my claws to fight Thaden and slice through his dragon scales, she can cut off my claws and use them herself.
She hasn’t woken since Graviter returned. Her heartbeats from within the cabin tell me how deeply she remains asleep.
“She wouldn’t let me do this,” I say.
