The stone floor was formed of hexagonal tiles covered in husks and dried leaves and all kinds of debris. When the dragon spoke, the ground rocked so hard that the tile in front of me cracked into three pieces.
The beast breathed rancid smoke as it slowly advanced. “You know nothing, name breaker. Your mind is too young to even know itself.”
“You’re right.” I felt my pulse everywhere.
In my fingertips. The roof of my mouth. At my temples.
I was going to throw up, for fuck’s sake.
My very first confrontation with a mythical beast, and I was going to lose the contents of my stomach like a fucking coward.
I would not piss myself. Just . . . no. “I am young. But at least I’m not hiding in the dark, waiting to do my master’s bidding. ”
“Saeris.” This time, the warning was immediate.
Out loud. Khydan’s tone suggested he thought I had lost my fucking mind.
And maybe I had. Maybe a little madness was what it would take to make it through this situation alive.
Who knew. But trying to approach this from a sane person’s perspective was beyond me.
A sane person would never have stepped into that pool.
“What master do you claim rules me, girl child?” the dragon hissed.
Lorreth hadn’t told me who ruled Diaxis when we had spoken of this place.
Ren hadn’t, either, as he’d led us up the winding stairs toward our death.
Maybe they didn’t know the name of the god who ruled these dark, dead halls.
Or maybe they didn’t speak his name because, as I knew all too well, to speak a name gave it power.
But Khydan spoke it now, his voice flat and cold.
“Styx. Lord of the charred aerie. King of dragons. He is your master. He is the one you must obey.”
The dragon had been creeping forward, lithe and sinuous. It was too big to conceal its approach, though. It stopped dead now, snarling at Khydan’s declaration.
“Who are you to speak his name?”
“I am Kingf—” Khydan stopped himself. Old habits died hard.
It was true—I had made the shift and referred to him by his true name easily enough, but something inside of me knew it was right.
His whole life, Khydan had only known himself as Kingfisher.
How much of a person’s identity resided in their name?
How much of their soul? A strange thought.
Khydan’s soul was the same as it had ever been.
His personality, too. But . . . something fundamental had changed inside him.
It was subtle. It was because he was free.
“I am Khydan Graystar Finvarra. I walked these halls before, many years ago—”
“Little more than a Faeling, you were then. You were tortured here, I remember. You have come to exact revenge upon this place, then? To destroy my kind, and all who call this place home?”
“No. I come as an ambassador of my realm, as does my mate. We request an audience with Styx, per the rules of engagement between our realms. Etiquette—”
A jet of stinking, superheated air suddenly spewed from the dragon’s mouth, a plume of fire and molten rock chasing after it.
There was no time to react. No time for anything.
There was only the fire, and the heat, and our imminent deaths.
Too late, I drew my shield, bigger and brighter than it had ever been before.
It flickered and guttered as the brimstone tore through it.
We were dead.
We were fucking dead!
We were . . .
. . . hunched over, clinging to each other, panting breathlessly, but somehow still alive.
The flames ripped over our heads, slamming into the wall behind us, flashing blue and green as they struck the stone.
The beast had missed us. On purpose, it seemed.
It could have easily engulfed us if it had wanted to; the fact that it wasn’t roasting us to char and bone must have been intentional.
Khydan’s heart sang in my ears. He cradled the back of my head, pressing my face into the front of his leathers, his blood spiked with adrenaline and panic.
I could smell it roaring through his veins in the hollow of his throat; even now, with death sharing the same air as us, the scent of his blood was enough to drive me toward insanity.
I should have drunk from him. At least that way we’d both go out on a high.
But that was a ridiculous thought. Selfish.
We weren’t allowed to die. There was too much riding on us.
Khydan and I held the future of Yvelia in our hands.
More than that. If Zareth was to be believed, we held the futures of millions of realms in our hands. Billions of lives.
We stood at a nexus in the threads of fate. If we died, so did everything else. For a moment, I believed the dragon had seen that in our minds, and that was why it had redirected its fire. After all, if it killed us, chances were it would die soon, too.
I clung to Khydan so tightly that my hands went numb.
Then they started to tingle. No . . . huh.
Strange. Only my right hand was tingling.
The sensation was neither pleasant nor painful.
It built until the unnerving feeling had traveled all the way up my arm and settled in my shoulder, blooming up my neck and prickling along my jaw.
The air was alive, as if a thousand flies were buzzing around a corpse. The brimstone kept coming. It spattered as it hit the wall, throwing burning gobs of glowing molten rock and metal in every direction.
Khydan stiffened, his fingers digging into my back, but he didn’t let me go.
A hollow thrum pounded inside of me. A hammering at a door. A second pulse that served no purpose. Magic. Unfamiliar. Unrealized.
The brimstone. My body was reacting to it. It drew me to it, but I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t reach it. And even if I’d been able to, I wouldn’t have known what to do with it once I had.
We would die soon. What else was there to do? My power over the quicksilver wouldn’t help me here. Khydan was more powerful than most of the Fae, but his shadows wouldn’t be enough to bring down this beast. The air burned, scorching my airways, but all we could do was endure.
Eventually, the torrent of fire stopped.
Mercy. The reprieve from the heat alone was a mercy . . .
“I am Arissan, keeper of this gate,” the dragon boomed. “And I have not spared you out of mercy. That word does not exist in this place. Your lives are temporary. I have spared you for one reason, and one reason alone.”
“Why?” My voice echoed around the dragon’s lair.
Khydan reached out and gripped my hand. The muscles in his jaw ticked as he glowered up at the megalithic monster. Flames and smoke wreathed her teeth as it ducked its head and snarled. “Your mate knows the answer to this question. Don’t you, Khydan Finvarra?”
Slowly, Khydan nodded. “You’ve spared us so that I can be brought before your master for judgment.”
“And your criiiiime?” Arissan’s tongue dripped blue-tinged flames as it flicked back and forth through the air like a switch.
“I’ve committed no crime. I have done nothing more than defend my people and my lands. But you’ve seen my thoughts . . . and my past. You have seen me on the mountainside at Ajun. The undergods of Diaxis will charge me with murder—”
“The murder of my offspring!” The dragon roared.
There was fury in the deafening sound, but also anguish.
A pillar of flame erupted from Arissan’s throat again—though totally different from the thick, molten brimstone it had spewed at us just now.
This was white hot hellfire. It bloomed against the ceiling of the cavern and fanned outward, rolling over the soot-stained rock as if defying gravity.
The heat swelled beyond imagining. Too much. Too hot. I was physically far stronger than I had ever been, but there were still limits to what my new body could endure.
As my vision tunneled, Khydan’s voice echoed inside my head.
Don’t speak. When you wake, for the love of all the gods, do not say a single word.
Metal.
Hot metal.
I knew the smell well. So well, in fact, that I could identify it in my sleep. I was back in the forge. Elroy was chiding me for spilling metal shavings all over the floor. I was—
Fuck!
I was upside down! I was hanging over a hall ten times the size of the one at Ammontraíeth. I was fucking swinging . . .
Blood rushed in my ears. A thunderous swelling of sound, so loud my head spun. But it wasn’t my blood. It was the crowd.
Below, a thrumming mass jostled and shouted. Thousands of people were gathered beneath my head, and from their raised voices and the way they were throwing their fists in the air, they were celebrating something monumental.
Khydan.
Where the fuck was my mate?
I couldn’t spin. Couldn’t turn. Open space stretched out around me, eventually giving way to darkness. My arms hung loosely over my head. Pain sang along every nerve I possessed as I tried to reach down to my hips. My short swords. My knives. Were they still there?
Relief exploded in my chest as my hand found hot metal.
The hilts of my god swords were almost too hot to touch, but they were there.
And so was Khydan. When I’d moved my arms, I’d turned a fraction—just enough to see him hanging upside down in the air next to me.
His chest plate was still strapped tight, Nimerelle still in her scabbard.
Khy’s face was pale and running with sweat.
His eyes were closed, eyelashes stark, midnight-black against his skin.
Even passed out, he looked troubled, a small frown drawing his brows together as if he were hammering at the door of his consciousness, demanding to be let back into his body.