Looking down at my body now, I am still surprised by how much of it has survived me.
The scars are everywhere if one knows how to read them. Old lines. Pale seams. Marks from teeth, claws, magic, divine punishment, and choices too ugly to leave no evidence behind. Some are older than the monastery Maire was raised in. Older than the faith she once gave her whole life to. Older than the name Lendys became in mortal mouths.
And somehow, she does not ask.
Maybe she is waiting. Maybe she already knows there are questions that will open doors neither of us can close again. Or maybe she trusts me enough to tell her when I am ready.
That last possibility sits badly in me.
Trust always has teeth when you have lied long enough.
We have been walking for hours now, pressing farther through the forest while the others begin to show the first signs of fatigue. I should be watching the path. Listening for threats. Calculating distance, risk, and whatever fresh catastrophe this place decides to gift us next.
Instead, I am watching Maire.
Of course I am.
She walks ahead of me, black hair catching bits of light through the canopy, her body moving with the steady confidence of someone who has spent her life learning terrain through her feet. Every shift of her hips is a problem. Every glance over her shoulder is worse. She knows I am looking. She absolutely fucking knows.
At one point, she turns just enough to catch my gaze.
The look she gives me is not innocent.
Not even close.
It says wait.
It says later.
It says she knows exactly what she is doing to me and intends to make the delay worth suffering through.
Gods help me, the woman is cruelty in clothing.
By the time the group finally calls for a ten-minute rest, my self-control has been reduced to a thin, ornamental concept. The others drift toward shade and waterskins, muttering about sore feet, bad trails, and the questionable wisdom of continuing west without a longer stop. I am about to pretend I care when Maire takes my hand.
No discussion.
No warning.
Just her fingers lacing through mine as she pulls me toward a pair of trees thick enough to hide us from easy view.
The second we are out of sight, I have her against me.
Or she has me.
There is very little distinction anymore.
The kiss is immediate and starving, the kind that makes it clear we have both been counting steps for the last hour and pretending otherwise. My hands find her waist. Hers slide into my hair, pulling just hard enough to make a sound leave me before I can bury it against her mouth.
She smiles into the kiss.
The little menace.
Heat moves through my chest, fierce and disorienting. Not lust alone, though there is plenty of that. This is something worse. More dangerous. Desire braided with devotion until the two become indistinguishable. I want her body, yes. Badly enough that my tight pants have become a personal failing. But I also want the rest of her—the pulse under her jaw, the cleverness behind her eyes, the stubborn soul that keeps choosing me even when she should know better.
She wraps herself around me for one reckless moment, legs at my waist, mouth demanding, fingers knotted at the back of my head like she needs me closer than flesh allows.
I almost forget we are not alone.
Almost.
Maire remembers first.
One of us has to.
She breaks the kiss with a ragged breath and slides back down to her feet, though she does not move away. Her eyes stay on mine, dark and bright and full of several thoughts that would ruin the next hour if she said any of them aloud. Then she bites her lip.
I actually shudder.
“Rasvim,” I warn, voice rougher than I intend.
Her answering smile is evil.
Beautiful.
Entirely unfair.
Then she turns away before I can make a worse decision, and I stand there for a breath longer, trying to remember how walking works when a woman has left me half-mad and painfully aware of every inch of my own body.
My only clear thought is that I should never have worn tight pants.
It is ridiculous, the things memory chooses for its doorway.
That ache, that restless want, that irritation of being denied the person your body has already decided it needs—it drags me backward. Not to Tamara. Never to Tamara in this way. She had my reverence once. My worship. My resentment. My ruin. But not this sharp, bodily hunger sharpened by laughter and delay.
No, it takes me to Mira and Darian.
To the Cloud Peaks.
To the early days of testing the half-dragon vessel I had stolen from Varkesh’s corpse.
I remember seeing them then with new eyes: the way Darian tracked Mira across a room like gravity had rewritten itself around her, the way Mira would brush past him on purpose just to watch him lose his train of thought, the way their restraint always looked more like combat than patience. I had thought them indulgent at the time. Distracted. Irritatingly mortal in their need to touch when the world was still full of enemies.
Now, I understand.
Gods, I understand too well.
I wonder if they pitied me then.
I wonder if they knew I had never had that with Tamara. Not truly. Not with the softness. Not with the stupid private looks. Not with the kind of want that makes even strategy feel obscene because it keeps getting in the way of the person you want under your hands.
Maybe they held their tongues out of mercy.
Maybe they were too busy wanting each other to care.
That would be more like them.
The memory sharpens.
I had woken after ten years in a small mountain room, wearing a body that was no longer the same one that had collapsed in Othalyss’s buried lair.
The facts were simple. The living of them was not. A decade had vanished, and what remained of me had been poured into a vessel made from the very violence I had sworn to end. Varkesh’s half-dragon strength had saved the vessel. The taboo magic had worked.
Of course it had.
The worst ideas often perform beautifully before they collect payment.
My companions were nearby, speaking with a dwarf and his family. Vaelen, though he was no High Ascendant then. Just Vaelen the stone mason, broad-handed and stone-dusted, with a wife who watched us like she was deciding whether we were saints or bandits, and four children peeking from behind half-built walls.
The place was barely more than a stubborn idea at that point.
A dwelling in the Cloud Peaks.
A refuge, perhaps, if one wanted to be generous.
Not yet a monastery. Not yet a faith. Not yet the beginning of something that would take my name, Tamara’s, Darian’s severity, Seraphine’s healing hands, and braid them all together into doctrine.
I wish I had told Maire that part sooner.
That the earliest bones of her holy place were not really built from me and Tamara at all. Not in the way the histories claim. They were shaped by Darian’s uncompromising protection and Seraphine’s mercy. My name became useful. Tamara’s became sacred. But the living example? The thing mortals could actually see?
That was them.
Darian taught Vaelen what defense looked like when justice stood between evil and the vulnerable. Seraphine showed him what healing could become when mercy was not passive, but active. Fierce. Relentless. Holy in its own damn right.
And somehow, years later, Vaelen would become High Ascendant Vaelen, figurehead of a “joint” faith supposedly born of Lendys and Tamara.
I would learn later that Vaelen had not used my name for power alone. He had used it as a bridge, taking a god remembered for judgment and binding that memory to Tamara’s mercy so peace might have sharper teeth in a frightened world. But I did not know that then.
If Maire knew that the foundation of her beloved tradition was built as much from my oldest friends as from the gods they claimed to honor, would it change anything?
Surely not.
Then again, I have learned to distrust the word surely.
I woke to fragments first.
Darian’s voice, low and annoyed.
“He is breathing. Stop glaring at him like that.”
“I am not glaring,” Seraphine said.
“You have been glaring at him for three days.”
“I have been considering whether to kill him when he wakes.”
Ilyon’s voice followed, weak but unmistakably dry. “That would rather undermine the resurrection.”
“Not if I resurrect him afterward.”
Mira laughed at that, soft and hoarse. “Sera, love, I think that becomes a hobby after the second time.”
I opened my eyes.
The room tilted.
My body felt wrong. Dense. Heavy. Too aware of itself. Scales lay in places there had been only skin before, subtle but undeniable. Strength sat in my bones differently. Not draconic in the pure way. Not mortal either. Something between. Something stolen.
Darian noticed first.
“He’s awake.”
Four faces turned toward me.
Seraphine’s expression cracked before she could stop it. Relief, fury, grief, and exhaustion all moved across her at once. Ilyon sat propped against pillows, pale and alive, one hand wrapped in hers. Mira stood near the hearth with one arm bandaged and her hip leaned against Darian’s side. Darian himself looked like he had not slept properly in a decade.
Which, apparently, he had not.
“Ten years?” I rasped after they told me.
No one answered quickly.
Then Ilyon said, “Nine years, eleven months, and several weeks. Darian insists rounding up is dramatic.”
Darian crossed his arms. “It is ten years.”
“It is nearly ten years.”
“It felt like twelve.”
Mira pointed at him. “For once, I agree with the brooding wall of bronze.”
I tried to sit up and failed.
Humiliating.
Seraphine moved immediately, but stopped short before touching me. The hesitation was small. Barely there. It hurt anyway.
“You should not move,” she said.
“I gathered that.”
“You did something abhorrent.”
“Yes.”
Her mouth tightened. “Do not make that sound casual.”
“It saved me.”
“It cost you.”
“I am aware.”
“No,” she said, and there was heat under the gentleness now. “You are not. Not yet.”
The room went quiet.
Vaelen stood near the doorway, pretending not to listen and failing completely. His youngest child stared openly at my hands, where faint emerald undertones marked the new shape beneath my skin.
Ilyon broke the silence with a soft exhale. “We need to discuss the hunt.”
Darian looked at him sharply. “No.”
“I am not suggesting I leave today.”
“You are not leaving this month.”
Mira snorted. “Optimistic. I was going to say this year.”
Ilyon’s silver-gray eyes flicked to her. “How comforting to be so trusted.”
“You died,” Mira said flatly.
“I returned.”
“You don’t get to be smug about resurrection for at least a decade.”
“I believe a decade has passed.”
“That does not count, and you know it.”
Despite myself, a weak laugh left me.
Seraphine looked at me like she wanted to scold the sound back into my chest.
Darian stepped closer to the bed. “You’re not fit to resume the hunt either.”
“I did not ask.”
“That has rarely stopped you from being told.”
Mira pushed away from the hearth. “Lendys, your new vessel has barely stabilized. Ilyon is alive, which is great, truly, but he still looks like a corpse someone taught manners to. Seraphine has spent years keeping him anchored and you from turning into a divine campfire. We cannot all march out of here because you woke up angry.”
“I woke up informed.”
“You woke up after being unconscious for ten years,” she snapped. “That is not the same thing.”
I looked at Seraphine.
She was still holding Ilyon’s hand.
That was enough to answer enough.
“You’re staying,” I said.
Her eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?”
“You and Ilyon. You stay here.”
“No.”
“Sera—”
“No.”
Ilyon’s thumb moved over her knuckles, gentle and tired. “Beloved.”
She turned on him. “Do not beloved me into agreeing with him.”
“I am not. I am agreeing first.”
Her face changed.
That wounded her more than my command would have.
Ilyon saw it and softened immediately. “I cannot fight like this. Not yet. You know that. And if you come with them while half your attention remains on me, you will be endangered as well.”
“I can heal and fight.”
“You can,” Darian said. “But you shouldn’t have to do both while dragging him by the soul behind you.”
Ilyon’s brows lifted. “Elegant.”
“I was aiming for accurate.”
Mira came to stand beside Seraphine, quieter now. “Stay. Get him strong. Get yourself steady. Then catch up and yell at us for all the stupid shit we did while you were gone.”
Seraphine’s eyes shone, though she refused to let the tears fall.
“You are all impossible.”
“Yes,” I said. “But correct.”
She looked at me then, and there it was again. The fury. The love. The old trust cracking under the strain of too much survival.
“If you leave me behind,” she said, “you do not get to die.”
A simple statement.
An impossible command.
I inclined my head. “I will do my best.”
“That is not what I said.”
“I know.”
Her jaw clenched.
Then she leaned down and pressed her forehead briefly to mine. A benediction. A warning. A goodbye she would never have called one.
“Do not make me resurrect you just so I can kill you properly.”
“I would not dream of depriving you.”
She huffed, but the sound shook.
Ilyon looked at me from the bed, pale and diminished but still entirely himself. “When we are able, we will rejoin you.”
“I know.”
“Try not to resolve the entire war without us.”
Mira coughed. “He absolutely will try.”
Darian added, “And fail, probably.”
“I hate all of you,” I said.
“No,” Seraphine replied, straightening. “You don’t.”
No.
I didn’t.
That was the damn problem.
We left them there with Vaelen and his family, high in the mountains, in the half-built refuge that would one day be rewritten into holy history. Seraphine stayed to heal. Ilyon stayed to recover. Vaelen watched, learned, asked questions, and absorbed more from my companions than any of us realized at the time.
Darian, Mira, and I continued the hunt.
And I, newly remade and still carrying the echo of taboo magic in my bones, learned how heavy survival could become when the people you trusted were no longer all walking beside you.