She doesn't answer straight away, and I wait long enough that I start to wonder if I used the connection wrong again. I'm just about to try a second time when her voice cuts through.
“Why did you run to try and save her?”she asks. “Surely your human brain is large enough to know it was pointless.”
The question squeezes around my chest, and I swallow hard against the tears threatening to spill. “It wasn't my brain that made me do it,”I swallow once.“It was my heart.”
Silence greets me for a beat, broken only by the steady rhythm of her wings carrying us through the clouds.
“Then that is my answer also?—.”
Warning stabs down the bond, sharp enough to wipe my mind clean, and then I see it too—bursting through the mist on our left, jaws stretched wide, teeth aimed straight for her neck.
Ahria’s muscles bunch beneath my thighs. She folds her wings in, and we drop.
The sky falls with us as we spiral down at horrifying speed, wind lashing at my face and tearing the air from my mouth while my fingers scramble for the ridges in her scales.
“Hold on,”she growls.
Before I can brace, she banks hard left, and the sudden change in direction shoves my gut sideways, nausea rolling through me as the world tilts, drops, then swings level again.
“Is it gone?”I stutter, but my question is answered before the words are even out. The yellow dragon bursts through the mist again, an orange furnace building in the back of its throat before a deafening roar tears free and fire explodes toward us.
Terror strikes through me at the sight of it and my Threads lash out in every direction.
Mine, Ahria’s.
They slam into the yellow dragon, and an ear-splitting wail tears from its throat, but my magic doesn't stop.
I feel the exact moment they also strike Ahria.
Not through the bond.
Through me.
The impact punches through her and up through my legs, and then suddenly her massive solid body beneath me disappears.
Not moves.
Not drops.
Disappears.
“Ahria—!” I scream as my hands close around empty air, my stomach racing upward, and for one seemingly endless heartbeat there is no sound at all.
Then the wind hits.
And I’m falling.
Limbs flailing, breath gone, I tumble out of the mist with the world spinning in broken flashes around me.
Sky. Clouds. Green scales. Ground. Sky again.
With each spin, I catch another glimpse of Ahria’s tiny form below me, flipping through the air as she falls too.
No.
No, no, no.
Bile filling my mouth, the acid burning, I reach for my magic, for anything, a shield, a gust of air, some way to slow us down, but there’s almost nothing left. Only a thin, useless sliver that slips through my grasp before I can shape it.
