Chapter 9
"Pip," she whispered, her fingers lingering against the soft ridge of his neck for one brief, agonizing second. "Whatever happens... you were not a mistake."
She pulled her hands back and stepped away.
Pip stood in the vast, empty center of the arena floor.
He wobbled slightly on his crooked back leg. He shook his wedge-shaped head, scattering a few specks of grit, and blinked his cloudy, cataract-filmed eyes into the blazing glare of the noon sun. He let out a low, bubbling wheeze from his clogged left nostril, looked around at the towering stone walls of the coliseum, and then turned to stare directly at the six-foot fossilized rod in Gideon’s hand.
Gideon did not wait. He had no interest in theater now; he wanted blood. He wanted the insolent keeper broken, weeping over a pile of smoking cinders before the midday bells began to toll.
"By the divine blood of the Sun-Throne!" Gideon roared, throwing both hands onto the grip of the Imperial Crown-Rod and channeling the full, violent torrent of his noble ether-veins directly into the runes. "*By the authority of the First Wyrm, who bowed before the iron of man! Kneel, vermin! KNEEL OR TURN TO ASH!*"
He thrust the Crown-Rod forward.
The relic exploded with blinding, apocalyptic fury.
A torrent of incandescent golden fire erupted from the tip of the ancestral bone—a wave of pure, concentrated draconic authority that had enforced the submission of kings and warlords for ten centuries. The air in the coliseum warped, the sand beneath the beam vitrifying into jagged black glass as the crushing weight of a thousand-year-old domination decree screamed across the ten feet of space separating Gideon from the runt.
The execution brand had never failed. It was the absolute, unyielding law of the Empire, guaranteed by the very bone of the god who founded it.
In the center of the glass-scorched circle, the shivering scrap of gray leather did not cower.
Pip did not roll onto his back.
He took half a step forward on his crooked left claw.
His tiny, pencil-thin throat worked once.
Then, deep within that bruised, slate-gray chest, the little runt cleared his throat.
It was not a hiss. It was not a growl.
It was a dry, deafening rasp that sounded like two continental plates grinding against each other beneath the floor of an ocean—a sound of immense, unfathomable age that hit the coliseum like a seismic shockwave.
Pip stepped out of the shadow of Oriana's apron, climbing effortlessly onto the bare skin of her extended wrist.
And as the golden fire of the Imperial Crown-Rod reached him, Pip opened his eyes.
The milky, cataract-crusted film did not tear; it burned away into nothingness, dissolving like morning mist before a rising nova to reveal pupils of blinding, cosmic sun-gold starlight—eyes that had watched mountains rise, crumble, and drown before the first mortal ever picked up an iron spear.
The torrent of divine fire hit the tiny lizard's snout and splashed backward as if it had struck an adamantine fortress.
And then, before ten thousand frozen, horrified spectators, the unbreakable holy relic in Gideon’s hands—the thousand-year-old Imperial Crown-Rod—let out a high, agonized screech and fractured down the middle with a deafening crack.
