“No shit!” I spat back.
“You are more powerful than you know.” His confession sounded almost remorseful.
I took a deep breath.
I reminded myself I’d been living on borrowed time for a while. I’d been ready to die many times.
So, if today was the day, then so be it. I would not die a coward.
I would not die afraid. I would not die weak.
The last thing I felt in this life would not be fear.
With bravery I didn’t know I had, I reached my hand toward the Lithovore.
A familiar tingling prickled my palm.
I placed my shaky hand against the cold rocky surface of its body.
To my surprise, the beast allowed it. And in my mind, I heardhervoice:
Lithovore: Return my eggs!
Steam blew from the cracks in her body. “Eggs?” I said aloud.
Titus’s brows pinched together in confusion as he studied the spheres in his arms.
Lithovore: Yes. Those are my last three eggs!
She rumbled, threatening.
Lithovore: I am the last of my kind. Return them, or I will be forced to end your life!
It didn’t make sense. If I could communicate with dragons, why didn’t I sense life in these eggs? When I touch a dragon, my palm tingles, it’s how I sense their life force. It's a current of some kind that allows telepathic communication. But when I pressed my hand to the eggs, there was nothing—no current, no pulse, no living energy within the shells.
I looked around the cavern, then back to the Lithovore, and it clicked.
She was the last of her kind, so these “eggs” must have been unfertilized and over time, crystallized. The Fae had mined them for magic and mistaken them for rare stones because like Titus, they probably thought Lithovores to be myth.
She wasn’t a monster. She was a mother.
She was protecting her last three eggs. I filled Titus in on my revelation.
“But if they would never hatch,” he whispered, “why protect them?”
“I don’t think she knows,” I whispered back. “I think being down here alone for so long has… confused her.”
All this time, the Fae had been taking her unfertilized eggs, leaving only three behind.
If we were going to get out alive, I needed to play into her delusion without setting her off.
She needed to believe they would still hatch. That she wouldn’t be alone.
My heart broke for her. It had been hope that kept her alive all these years. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was a false hope.
Think, Delilah. Think.
I thought back to my first encounter with Draxxinar—how I’d fed his ego, and he decided he loved me for it.
