The tremors grew worse the deeper we ran.
At first, they were distant—low shudders through the stone, the kind of vibration you feel in your teeth before your ears make sense of it. Then they came harder. Faster. Cave walls groaned around us. Dust sifted down in thin veils. Somewhere ahead, Ilyon was tearing through Othalyss’s lair in his true form, and if we did not find him soon, he was going to bring half the mountain down on all of us.
Then the shaking stopped.
The silence that followed was worse.
Seraphine lifted one hand and sent a sphere of radiant energy spinning into the dark. It rose above us, bright as daylight, burning away the gloom in one clean sweep.
And we saw him.
Ilyon lay in his draconic form across the far side of the cavern, silver scales cracked and slick with blood. Three massive wounds punched through his chest and abdomen, each one wide enough to show the ruin beneath.
Seraphine screamed.
The sound tore through the cavern with such force that my eardrums burst.
Pain dropped me to one knee. The world went muffled, then silent, then white around the edges. I pressed a hand to the side of my head and forced healing magic into the damage, sealing what her grief had ruptured. By the time the sound returned, everything had already gone to hell.
Three half-dragons stood between us and Ilyon.
Not like the others.
No. These were stronger.
And then I felt it.
Tamara’s light. Whole. Willing. Unmistakable. Not stolen. Not forced. Given. The realization struck harder than any claw ever had, because Othalyss had not corrupted some stolen scrap of mercy. She had taken Tamara’s freely offered blessing and taught it to help monsters survive.
That holy thread again.
Tamara.
Her blessing of vitality was woven through them, bright and clean and grotesquely misplaced. Not Tiamat’s corruption. This was Tamara’s power, twisted into endurance by monsters too blind to understand what they had stolen. Liliana’s brood had taken something meant to preserve life and used it to make their abominations harder to kill.
For one stunned breath, I could not decide whether to be horrified or fucking furious.
Mira chose for me.
She shifted mid-charge, bronze wings and claws ripping free as she launched herself at the nearest half-dragon. She was fast.
Not fast enough.
The creature kicked off the cavern floor, hit the ceiling with enough force to fracture stone, then launched downward like a siege weight. It slammed Mira’s head into the ground so hard the impact cratered the rock beneath her.
Darian caught my shoulder and hauled me fully upright.
“Move,” he snarled, already charging.
I glanced toward Seraphine just as she shed her human shape in a rush of gold and light, wings snapping wide as she flew to Ilyon’s side.
“Darian,” I called after him. “Stay in this form. They’re built to punish dragons.”
He did not slow. “Noted.”
The largest of the three half-dragons turned toward me.
Female. Huge. Eight feet even before counting the posture, with black hair braided tight against her skull, green eyes sharp with actual intelligence, and a mouth full of too many teeth. Not mindless like the others. Not empty.
Othalyss.
Her body was not her original draconic form. I knew that immediately. This was a vessel. A crafted half-dragon shape, dense with stolen blessing and brutal augmentation. She had made herself into her own experiment.
Of course she had.
She smiled at me.
“There you are,” she said. Her voice was low, rich, almost delighted. “The great Lendys. I admit, I expected more.”
I tightened my grip on Judgment.
She looked past me to where Seraphine was already trying to pour life back into Ilyon. “Tamara spoke of you with such gravity. Such ache.” Her grin widened. “From the way she described you, I thought I’d be meeting a god. Not a tired little hatchling in borrowed skin.”
She wanted my rage.
Worse, she knew exactly where to put her hand to find it.
I lunged.
Judgment came down in a white arc meant to split her open from shoulder to hip. Othalyss caught the blade between both hands.
She caught it.
Holy light burned through her palms, spilling smoke and blood, but she held.
“Interesting,” she murmured. “You hate that name now.”
I drove a knee into her abdomen. She bent with the impact, then headbutted me hard enough to snap my vision sideways. I staggered. She followed, fast as a thought, one claw raking across my armor while the other reached for my throat.
I twisted away and cut at her ribs.
She parried with her forearm.
Steel met scale with a shriek.
Our fight became a vicious, intimate thing—too close for grand strikes, too fast for clean form. She fought like pain had taught her everything worth knowing. Every movement was economical. Every wound she took became information. She let Judgment bite when the angle benefited her, let my strength carry me too far, then answered with elbows, claws, knees, teeth.
“You feel it, don’t you?” she said between strikes. “The vitality. The blessing. She gave us such beautiful material to work with.”
“She gave you nothing.”
“Oh, please.” Othalyss ducked beneath a slash and drove her fist into my ribs. “Gods always give. They just hate admitting who makes better use of their gifts.”
I answered by slamming the pommel of Judgment into her face.
Her nose broke.
She laughed through the blood.
Across the cavern, Darian fought Mireth.
She was smaller than Othalyss, slender and eerie, black hair cut blunt at her jaw, her hands marked in ink-and-scale tattoos that flared with trigger-script every time she moved. She fought with a kind of detached curiosity, testing Darian’s reactions, smiling whenever pain crossed his face as if she were taking notes inside her skull.
Darian feinted high.
Mireth read it, or thought she did.
He changed the angle at the last second, stepped into her guard, and took her head clean off.
Good.
The odds shifted.
Then Varkesh roared.
Mira had shaken herself awake by then, fury blazing through her bronze form. She saw the half-dragon who had crushed her into the stone turn toward Darian, and she lashed her tail with enough force to pulp an ordinary giant.
Varkesh caught it.
The sound alone was obscene.
A thunderclap of displaced air. Stone cracking beneath his feet. His claws dug into Mira’s tail, and before she could wrench free, he pivoted and hurled her across the cavern like she weighed nothing.
She crashed into Seraphine.
Seraphine’s spell broke.
Ilyon’s body jerked beneath her claws.
“No!” Seraphine screamed, and panic made her dangerous.
Radiant energy burst from her maw in a confused defensive blast, striking Mira and shoving her away from Ilyon. Then Seraphine folded over him, shaking, pouring every scrap of power she had into his ruined body.
“Wake up,” she begged. “Illy, wake up. Please. Please, damn you, wake up.”
Darian shouted my name.
I turned just enough to see Varkesh holding him off the ground.
The half-dragon had him by the torso, claws sinking through armor, one arm drawn back to punch straight through Darian’s chest.
There are moments when restraint becomes cowardice.
This was one.
I let go.
The self-imposed limits I had wrapped around my divinity snapped apart.
Holy energy flooded through the vessel, too much, too fast. Pain followed instantly. Cracks of light formed beneath my skin. Wings erupted from my back—not flesh, not fully, but radiant and terrible, a ghostly architecture of what I had once been. A halo burned behind my head. Two luminous horns formed above my brow, detached and hovering where my true horns would have crowned me in dragon shape.
The cavern went still for half a breath.
Even Othalyss stopped smiling.
I drew Judgment back.
I looked at her.
Then pushed off the ground.
The force of my movement blew her backward before the blade ever touched anything, the air itself cracking around me. I crossed the cavern in a streak of white-gold ruin and drove Judgment through Varkesh’s skull.
The blow killed him instantly.
His body carried into the wall with the momentum, stone bursting around the impact as Darian fell free and hit the ground hard.
I did not stop.
I planted both feet against the wall beside Varkesh’s corpse and launched back toward Othalyss.
This time, she had no clever remark.
No prepared angle.
No charming little wound to press.
Judgment took her at the waist and cleaved her in two.
The force of the strike hurled both halves of her body down the tunnel behind her, blood and holy light and pulverized stone carried in the pressure wave. The cavern shuddered once more.
Then the tremors stopped.
For several seconds, no one moved.
Then Seraphine made a broken sound over Ilyon.
That brought me back.
I crossed the cavern to them, the cracks in my vessel spreading hotter with every step. Ilyon’s draconic body was still. Too still. His heart had stopped before we reached him. Seraphine, lost in terror, had been healing flesh that no longer held life.
“Sera.”
She did not hear me.
“Sera.”
Still nothing.
So I forced both her and Ilyon back into human form with a pulse of divine command. She gasped as the shift took her, collapsing over his chest, hands still glowing uselessly against him.
I grabbed her shoulders and shook her once.
“Sera, move.”
Her eyes snapped to mine, wild and wet. “No—”
“Move.”
I pushed her aside harder than I wanted to and knelt over Ilyon.
Resurrection is not healing.
Healing asks the body to remember itself.
Resurrection asks the soul to turn around.
I cut my palm and pressed blood to his mouth, then laid Judgment beside him so its light formed the spine of the rite. Words older than the Starlight Palace left my tongue. Not prayer. Authority. A demand written into the marrow of creation.
Come back.
For one terrible second, nothing happened.
Then Ilyon inhaled.
Seraphine sobbed.
The sound nearly undid me.
He was alive. Weak but breathing.
And I was coming apart.
The cracks in my vessel widened across my arms, chest, and throat, holy light spilling through them in thin, jagged lines. I stood because pride demanded it, took three steps away from Ilyon, and collapsed onto the stone.
Darian came to my side, still bleeding, still half-dazed.
“Are you going to be all right,” he asked, “or do you need help?”
I stared at him.
Cracks of divine energy were actively splitting across my body.
It was, without question, one of the dumbest things he had ever asked me.
And still, an idea came to me.
A forbidden one.
The sort of idea gods bury in old languages and pretend they never considered.
“Bring me Varkesh’s body,” I said.
Darian blinked. “What?”
“Now.”
He hesitated only a second before obeying. Good man. Sometimes trust means not asking the question until after the atrocity.
He dragged Varkesh’s corpse from the stone grave I had made of the wall and laid it in front of me.
I placed my hand on the dead half-dragon’s chest.
“What are you doing?” Seraphine asked, voice hoarse.
“Surviving.”
Then I used taboo magic.
Not the clean rites of gods. Not the sanctioned disciplines of priests or dragons or old councils pretending they had never needed monstrous solutions. This was consumption. Assimilation. A brutal theft of structure from a dead vessel strong enough to hold what mine could not.
Varkesh’s half-dragon body broke apart beneath my hand.
Bone. Scale. muscle. blood. Draconic architecture unraveled into light and matter and agony, then poured into me.
I screamed.
I remember that much.
Not the words after. Not Darian cursing. Not Mira dragging herself upright. Not Ilyon, newly alive, trying to move and failing.
Only pain.
And the cost.
The vessel remade itself around what I stole. Stronger. Half-dragon now, not merely the brittle human form I had been forcing godhood through. It worked.
Of course it worked.
The worst magic often does.
Then everything vanished.
When I woke, ten years had passed.
I opened my eyes in a small mountain room that smelled of stone dust, wool blankets, and woodsmoke. My companions were nearby, speaking quietly with a dwarf and his family. Beyond the window, I saw high peaks, half-built walls, and the first bones of what would one day become a monastery.
Just a beginning.
And I knew, before any of them turned to see me awake, that whatever price I had paid in that cavern had not finished collecting.