And then I feel his strong arms gathering me against his chest. His lips press against mine, and cool breath fills my lungs. A rich taste blooms across my tongue. His blood. Somehow, I know it instantly. It dances across my taste buds and sinks into my very cells.
I should be repulsed, should pull away, yet I press closer instead, my lips parting wider to receive what he offers.
His invasion becomes my salvation in the same heartbeat. More air floods my starved lungs, expanding tissue that had collapsed in surrender, while his blood, metallic yet oddly sweet, slides down my throat and ignites my veins with liquid lightning. For the first time since the ash pit claimed me, I draw breath on my own, ragged but alive.
Chapter Fifteen
LUROK
One moment, she walks just behind me, footsteps falling in my tail’s prints. The next, my name on her sharp intake of breath is the only warning before the ground crumbles like rotten ice into a churning vortex that swallows her whole. The heartglass flies from her grip, its light spinning into darkness as she vanishes. No scream. No hand. Just gone, as though she never existed. My roar breaks the dead silence of the Ashlands, her name wrenched from my throat in a sound I barely recognize.
"Serin!"
I lunge forward and throw myself at the spot where she disappeared. My claws tear into the ash. Frenzied arcs fly as I dig with desperate, brutal strength. The pit gapes beneath my efforts, widening rather than yielding access to her. Each handful I claw away simply invites more to rush in, like water filling a depression in sand. Only this is not water. It is death. Fine as powder, loaded with microscopic glass that slices my palms with each frantic motion.
"Breathe through your sleeve!" I call down into the churning gray void, though I know the futility of such advice. She isalready beneath the surface, already choking, already dying while I scrabble uselessly above.
The ash moves with malevolent intelligence, flowing back into spaces I clear faster than I can remove it. Frustration claws at me. I plunge my arm into the shifting mass; it closes around my scales with hungry persistence. Cold dread tightens my chest. Nothing solid meets my grasp. No hand, no arm, no sign of her.
"Serin! Fight! Claw upward!" My voice breaks, the words dissolving into a guttural hiss of fear.
How deep has she sunk? Ash pits can reach twenty to thirty feet deep. Some are bottomless, dropping into forgotten caverns where the Great Burning collapsed underground chambers. The knowledge freezes my blood. If she is sinking that fast, that deep...
I widen my search, digging in concentric circles around the point of her disappearance. Blood from my lacerated palms stains the ash pink, marking my increasingly frantic pattern. The heartglass has sunk halfway into the ash nearby. Its light still glows beneath the gray surface. I lunge for it, claws extended. If I can just reach it before it disappears completely, but the ground shifts again. The crystal slips deeper. Its glow fades from the thickening layers of ash now entombing it.
Without light, I am reduced to blind desperation. I plunge both arms into the ash up to my shoulders. I ignore the thousands of microscopic cuts slashing my scales. My tail lashes behind me, seeking purchase in the treacherous ground. I lean farther into the pit.
"You will not have her," I snarl at the ash, at the wasteland, at the legacy of human weapons and naga vengeance that created this hellscape. "She is not yours to claim."
But the Ashlands make no distinction between naga and human, between warrior and innocent. It consumes withoutpreference or mercy. And now it is consuming Serin while I fail to save her.
The ash shifts again. The pit deepens farther with a sickening lurch. The edges begin to collapse inward, threatening to bury me alongside her if I do not move back. But moving back means giving up. It means accepting that she is gone, that our journey ends here with her as one more victim of the Ashlands.
I raise my head. Rage and denial burn through my chest. Something builds inside me, gathering like a storm beneath my breastbone. I do not understand or recognize it. But I welcome its fury.
I will not stop, no matter the cost. I will tear this wasteland apart with my bare hands if I must. My determination is absolute: for Serin alone, I will defy the very earth that seeks to claim her, challenging the Ashlands themselves until she is safe.
I throw back my head and roar at the lightless sky, the dead land, the legacy of hatred that created this place.
Something ancient and elemental splits open inside me, answering my call with a power I have never felt before. Like a seed cracking its shell after centuries of dormancy, it unleashes what was always there but never awakened until this moment.
The sensation starts beneath my breastbone. Pressure builds until I think my ribs might shatter from within. Then it explodes outward, racing along invisible channels through my body, into my limbs, my hands, my very fingertips. I gasp as the power surges. It is foreign yet familiar, like remembering something I never knew I had forgotten. The air around me responds instantly. It erupts into violent motion, whipping my hair across my face as ash blasts away from me in perfect concentric circles.
I stare at my hands in stunned disbelief. Air currents eddy around my claws. They are visible not through any change in color but through the ash they manipulate. Thousands of particles suspended and swirling at my silent command. I flexmy fingers. The wind answers, howling as it scours the ground clean in a widening spiral.
"What...?" The question dies in my throat as understanding crashes over me like a physical blow.
The Threadborn Prophecy unfurls in my memory like a scroll written in blood,Fire first, the Sovereign Flame. Earth and air shall heed his claim.Fire has already awakened in Varok through his bond with Leira, the human Threadborn. And now air stirs within me, obeying my will as though it has merely been waiting for my call.
Which makes me...
A bitter laugh escapes me, harsh and grating. The air shivers in response, creating ripples through the suspended ash around me. I am the air elemental. I, who swore the prophecy would only lead my people into disaster. Now I coil in the wastelands with elemental power surging through my veins. It awakens by my desperate need to save a human female—the very kind of bond I warned Varok would lead us all to ruin.
The irony would be delicious if it were not so horrifying.
I know what follows in the prophecy. Some like the TrueCoil, and I call it doom, the end of naga. The Temple Guardians call it rebirth, the dawn of a new age of harmony.
Prophecy can wait. Serin cannot.
