Chapter 10
Her vast, leathery wings were folded neatly across her sides, their membranes shimmering with the delicate translucence of sunlit parchment.
Yet she was not whole.
As I took a hesitant step closer, the full horror of her condition unfolded before me.
The Matriarch was dying.
Her flanks were scored with hundreds of ancient, jagged wounds. Across her golden spine lay the rusted remains of colossal iron harpoons—war-iron driven deep between her scales decades ago, the metal weeping toxic orange rust into her flesh. Thick, calcified chains of cold silver, each link the size of a man’s torso, were bolted directly into the quartz floor, pinning her four massive talons to the dais in a cruel, unyielding sprawl.
Her chest rose and fell with an agonizing, shuddering slowness. Each breath rattled in her lungs, a dry, papery wheeze that blew faint puffs of amber dust across the floor. She was starved, her ribs pressing sharp and prominent against her golden hide, a fallen queen rotting in the silence of her own desecrated throne room.
A lump the size of an iron ball lodged in my throat.
*This* was what the High Empire had fought? *This* was the monstrous terror that Julian feared so desperately?
She was broken. She was already half in the grave, bleeding out her final embers in the dark.
I reached for the iron broadsword at my hip, but my fingers refused to close around the leather grip. Instead, my hand drifted down toward the black sealing dagger Julian had pressed upon me. The dead, rancid metal seemed to hum against my thigh, hungry for the slaughter.
*Do it,* Julian’s voice echoed in my mind, frantic and pleading. *Do it for our future. A mortal thrust to the throat-cleft.*
I stepped onto the quartz dais.
The sound of my iron-shod boot clicking against the crystal was no louder than a dry twig snapping in winter woods.
Yet the Matriarch’s massive ear-frills twitched.
A shudder ran through her colossal golden frame, making the rusted iron chains rattle against the stone with a deafening, metallic groan.
Slowly, with an effort that seemed to drain the last dregs of her ancient life, the dragon mother opened her right eye.
The eye was the size of a human shield.
It was an orb of pure, liquid sun—a sea of molten gold ringed with threads of brilliant amber, split by an upright pupil as black as the midnight sky.
When that eye found me, the air in the Sanctum changed.
The furnace heat vanished. The smell of sulfur and rot was wiped clean from the hall. A profound, absolute stillness fell over the world, so deep that the sound of my own racing heart became the only drumbeat in the universe.
The dragon did not roar. She did not snap her jaws or flare her ragged wings.
She simply looked at me.
And then, she sang.
It was not a sound that traveled through the air. It did not hit my ears.
It rose from the quartz beneath my feet, from the golden magma pulsing in the floor, from the very marrow of my bones. It was a telepathic lament—a melody of such staggering, unendurable beauty and sorrow that my knees went weak instantly.
It was a song of open skies.
It was the feeling of wind tearing through outstretched wings; of diving through purple storm clouds charged with lightning; of warm, sun-baked cliff ledges where hundreds of voices answered one another in soaring harmonies of flame and ozone. It was the taste of pure rainwater falling on mountain crags. It was the memory of a colossal, golden chest, warm as summer noon, curled around a tiny nestling to shield it from the winter frost.
And beneath the song, running through the melody like a weeping river, was a name.
*Aurelia...*
The voice spoke not to my mind, but to the pulse behind my ribs. It bypassed the silver torc completely, slipping past the cold wards like smoke through iron bars.
*My light... my lost breath... my stolen child...*
A violent gasp tore from my throat.
My sword belt loosened, the broadsword clattering onto the quartz floor. I clutched at my chest with both hands, my breath coming in ragged, weeping sobs.
The migraine that had haunted me for two years did not return. There was no pain. Instead, the thick, gray fog in my head began to thin at the edges, stirred by the impossible resonance of that voice.
*Child... look at what they have done to you...* the Matriarch wept, her golden eye welling with thick, iridescent tears that spilled over her lower lid, washing down her golden scales to pool on the white crystal floor. *They bound you in their dead cold metal... they stole you from the nest before your wings could open...*
“No,” I choked out, taking a step backward, shaking my head frantically. “No... I’m human. I’m Sariyah. Julian found me in the ash... my family was burned...”
*You have no mortal mother, little flame,* the song hummed, ancient, patient, and shattering in its grief. *You were born of the sun upon the peak of Mount Caelis. And the small thieves took you in chains, blinding your soul so you would forget your home.*
Flashes of impossible light flared against the darkness of my mind: towering golden cliffs smelling of sweet amber; the crushing cold of iron nets; ancient words carved into silver that silenced the dawn.
I couldn't piece the fragments together. My head spun, trapped in a terrifying twilight between the life I remembered and the vast, aching grief pouring from this dying leviathan.
The Matriarch did not raise her head to defend herself.
With a slow, agonizing sigh that smelled of dying summer, she stretched her long, graceful neck along the quartz floor. She pulled back the heavy gold scales at the base of her throat, exposing a pale, soft fold of radiant skin beneath.
She bared her heart to me.
*Strike, if the chain demands it,* the song whispered into my soul, full of pure, unconditional absolution. *Better to die by your claws than to see you caged forever.*
“No!” I cried out, falling to my knees on the dais. Hot tears streamed down my cheeks. “No, stop... please, stop!”
My hands reached frantically for my throat, clawing at the silver torc.
The braided metal was no longer cold.
It was scalding hot. It hissed against my skin, sending curls of white smoke rising from my collarbone. The intricate knotwork carved into the metal flared with an angry, malignant purple light, vibrating with a frantic, shrieking hum as it fought against the ancient call humming in my blood.
“Sariyah!”
A harsh, frantic roar shattered the sacred quiet of the Sanctum.
I jerked my head around through a blur of tears.
Julian had crossed the threshold.
He was not shivering. He was not stumbling.
He was sprinting across the quartz floor with a terrifying, predator-sharp speed that no frail scholar should have possessed. His wool traveling cloak had been cast aside, revealing a tight-fitting vest of blackened wyrm-scale leather lined with rows of bone phials and silver needles. His slate-gray eyes were blown wide, stripped entirely of their scholarly gentleness, burning with a wild, feral fury.
