It came out of the dragon’s jaws as a line of white, and Adrien’s eyes never caught it. There was the open mouth, and after it a scar of light burned across the clearing from that mouth to where he stood, and the space between the two events did not exist as far as human sight was concerned.
Absolute Comprehension caught what his eyes could not. The talent opened by itself the way it always did, took hold of the shape flying at him, and read as much of it as it was able to before the thing arrived.
[New Spell Observed: ??? | 8 Stars]
[Affinity: ???]
[Aspect: ???]
[Absolute Comprehension active]
[Comprehension: 1%]
One percent, from a creature that had been keeping that spell in reserve for eleven hundred years, and it arrived in Adrien’s head at the same moment the spell arrived in his chest.
There was no dodging it. There had been no time to dodge it from the instant the plates along that throat began to lift, and a One Star body in the open at forty paces was a thing being informed of its own death rather than one taking part in it. The light went through him, and the ice behind him went to steam in a corridor twenty paces long, and the ground under his boots turned to glass.
That should have been the end of Adrien Clairmont. The dragon watched him come apart in the light and felt the last of its own mana drain out of its throat, and the thought it had was not triumphant. It was the flat, tired thought of a creature that had paid everything it had left to buy one more hour of being alive.
And in the middle of all that white, something refused to finish dying.
[Fatal damage detected]
[Bearer of the Severed Heart: condition met]
[Physique: Unawakened → Dragonic Physique]
[Awakening...]
What happened next did not happen to Adrien so much as it happened around him, and there was nothing in him with an opinion about it. The heart that had been keeping its own slow enormous time under his own since the day he woke stopped keeping time separately, and everything it had been holding back for eighteen years came out of it at once and went everywhere he had a body.
It found the burns first and it went through them. It found the ribs the light had opened and closed them from the inside. It found bone and rewrote what bone was allowed to be, and it did all of it in under two seconds, and every part of it hurt.
And of course it hurt like a bitch, more than the chair had. Dying in that bunker had been a bullet and a floor going cold, and it had taken minutes, and it had happened to his outside. This was happening under the surface of every bone he owned, and there was no part of him left over to be somewhere else while it did.
The white cleared, and the dragon looked across forty paces of glass at a human being who was on his feet, and for the first time in a very long life it did not understand what it was looking at.
The boy’s coat was gone from the chest down to the hip. The skin under it had been burned through and was not burned any more, and something was moving beneath it, and the black lines running up from the sternum toward the collarbone had not been there ten seconds ago.
’That was my breath. That was everything I had, and he is standing in it.’
He was not standing the way a man stands. There was nothing in his face at all, no fear, no triumph, none of the small ugly things a creature does when it has survived something. His eyes were open and there was nobody behind them, and he came off the glass and started walking.
’What is he?’
The dragon tried to move and its legs did not answer, because there was nothing left to pay them with. It had spent its last on the breath and the breath had not worked, and now the thing it had spent it on was crossing the clearing at a walk.
Umbral Root came back into his hand out of nothing, and the first lance went into the crater in its flank and did not break apart. It went through the ice and through the meat and into what was underneath, and the dragon felt it arrive somewhere no weapon had reached in eleven hundred years.
The second went into the same place, and so did the third, and the fourth after it. He was not throwing them faster than before. He was throwing them the same way he had thrown a thousand of them in the last two hours, at the same spot, with the same patience, and the difference was that a body which had rewritten itself two seconds ago was pushing them.
The dragon got its head up on the fifth and could not get it any higher. On the sixth, the crawl of cold that had been working toward its core for two hours finally arrived, and everything it had ever been went quiet in the order it had been built.
The seventh was not necessary and he threw it anyway, and the enormous black shape in the middle of the frozen clearing stopped being a creature and became weather-worn stone that happened to be shaped like one, and the sound of it settling went out through the trees and came back off the ridge.
Adrien stood over it for a while with the staff hanging from one hand. Whatever had been holding him upright went out of him gradually, the way a fire goes out, and he came down onto his knees beside the head of the thing he had killed without any idea of how he had got there. His hands were shaking. The black lines under his collarbone had begun to fade back toward his sternum, and the pain that was going with them was somehow worse than the pain that had come with them.
A window opened in front of him, and he was in no condition to read a word of it.
[Dragonic Physique | Stage One]
[Further stages exist. Requirements unknown.]
The light in the clearing changed. Something passed between Adrien and the sun and did not pass on, and the shadow that came down over the glass and the ice and the black corpse was wide enough to cover all three of them at once. The air moved. Somewhere above and behind him, wings that were not damaged in any way at all were coming down slowly, in no hurry whatsoever, because there was nothing left in that clearing that needed hurrying for.
Adrien did not look up. He fell forward onto his hands, and then he did not have hands either, and the last of it went dark before he heard whatever landed behind him touch the ground.
...
AN: Add the novel to collections and send (power stones and golden tickets) support if like it ;)