by K Kazul Wolf
But…move where? “Where are we headed? Why are we here?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. But Maur seemed to want us in here. Not that it makes much sense, running from dragons into the heart of their city.” He slumps a bit more against the wall, raises a hand to his forehead.
He’s right, there’s no sense to it. Why would we fly into the belly of the beast? Neither Vito nor I can fly right now, and it isn’t as if there’s a safe escape. So what are we hoping to find here?
I stand straight, barely remembering not to step on my throbbing ankle. There’s only one thing up here that they would be after, the only thing keeping this place, well, up here.
My mom’s story flashes through my head with a painful brilliance, Maur’s words from earlier echoing around my head. There’s something up here, he said, an illusion we have to break. And my mother called it a stone, precious as a gem. It has to be here.
“I know why we’re here. There’s a—”
A roar echoes from beyond the door. Vito leaps upright, practically lifting me up so we can hobble farther inside.
“Vito, there’s a stone somewhere that keeps this place floating, and I think that’s what they’re after. What we’re after.” I gasp for breath, hoping this stupid hall ends soon. “We have to destroy Caelum.”
His steps hesitate a moment, nearly toppling me over. “But it can’t be destroyed. It’s impossible.”
“You know about it?” But of course he does. He probably knows endlessly more than I do. All my life, I was no better than a goat raised for slaughter, after all.
I almost accuse him of not telling me any of it, but how could he have said a word with a beast’s mouth? Maybe he knew when he was younger, maybe he could have told me then, but would I have believed it?
“Yeah.” We walk faster again. There’s an end to the hallway, a brightly lit room ahead. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I pant, taking one of my arms off him, searching through my clothes, praying I still have it. Now that I know why we’re here… “We’ll talk about it later. For now, we have to find it.”
We step into a large room. It’s another hall but this one’s taller, the windows stained to look like dragons and their colorful wings. The floor doesn’t have drains lining the ground, just cobblestone. We came in from one of the many side entrances, one end of the hall having a great set of carved doors, the other an ornate, obnoxiously colored throne.
“But I told you, you can’t destroy it. You just— You can’t.” We’re barely walking along; he’s so tired, I’m so exhausted.
“And who told you that? The king?” My hand finally finds something hard. I pull out my father’s crystal.
The light catches in the crystal, spreading out rays of color. The marks on my arm pulse with exhaustion, heave to the point that I wish I could let it fall off. But I concentrate on it. If that stone is one giant illusion, it should create some sort of tide. Something that I can trace.
The water shimmers in the air, swirling around us in a gossamer sheen. But it doesn’t all tide away from a single point ahead. It’s drawn away from us, pulling in rolling storm tides behind us.
It flows to the doors at the other end of the room. I lean forward, trying to hop along on my one foot, but Vito holds me back.
“Ava, do you have a plan?” His voice is quiet.
I hesitate, still hanging forward a bit. “I… Not exactly, no.”
“Then we should get out of here. We should take shelter, recover. And then we can come back and actually stand a chance.”
“But…” Leave the stone in that man’s hands? After being so close? I can’t digest the thought, it rises like bile in my throat. “Everyone’s fought so hard to get us here. Vito, we can’t turn around.”
As I turn to him, wrinkles grow around his eyes in worry, in hopelessness. “This is suicide. I can’t— They can’t take you, Ava.”
I reach out, place a hand on his cheek, the rainbows ceasing for one moment. His face is too warm, nearly feverish. He closes his eyes. “If we don’t win this battle now, they’ll take us all. They won’t stop until they find us. But right now, none of them are here. They’re off fighting their battles. We can find the stone. We will find a way to take them down.” He opens his eyes then, meeting mine. “We have to.”
Slowly, he nods. We hobble forward again. I raise my crystal high enough to catch a little light and water.
The doors at the end of the room slam open.
More light filters in, a figure moving in through the light and color.
The king.
43
The Stone
If he’s here, that means he got through my mother.
If he’s here, that means he got through Maur.
A coldness creeps through me, crawls down my spine and freezes my limbs.
No.
“You two do love the chase, don’t you?” He grins, a twisted thing that crawls across his face in a starved sort of way.
Should I run? No, I can’t. Neither can Vito. He was right, we should have escaped while we could. We all should have run. Most of us may already be dead and it’s my fault. The room begins to tilt and I almost fall out of Vito’s arms. This can’t be happening.
He hesitates a few yards away from us, then laughs. “And what are you two doing in my throne room, of all places? Thought you’d serve yourself on a silver platter, receive some misguided mercy? Well, I have to say it’s been quite a day and I’m not feeling merciful at the moment.” His skin shivers, barely keeping the beast under.
What can I do? Vito grips me tightly, painfully. More than anything, I don’t want him to let go, but at the same time, I do. Maybe he can get out alive. Maybe he can run. But with my foot and my wing, there’s no way I will survive.
“Has one of my hunters cut out your tongue?” His head tilts.
I take a breath and let go of Vito, though he still holds me. “I’m here for the stone.”
The smile wipes clean off his face, all other emotion falling away with it. “You…what?”
For all that I want to sound brave, it’s hard to do when you’re facing certain death. “I’m here to knock your damned city from the sky.”
His face twitches, rage and anger and outrage flooding through his features. “You think you can take down this citadel? It’s stood for centuries longer than any dragon’s life, and you think a broken illusionist and a bastard of the dragon breed can take it down?”
My heart’s beating like it’s shaking my whole body. Despite knowing I’ll have to push Vito away, exhaustion weighs me against him as he leans on me, like we only exist in each other’s gravity. But it needs to end. I need to distract, and Vito needs to run.
“Yes.” I stand as tall as I can. “Yes, I can steal your entire country out from under your feet.”
It’s almost like the anger makes him expand, makes him grow taller as he takes slow steps toward us. “Did I not warn you? If you destroy me, this world will tumble into chaos. The stone is hidden beyond your grasp for your own good, you worm.”
Why hasn’t he changed into a beast? Why isn’t he taking the bait and fighting?
Is he…afraid?
I meet his eyes, wide and frantic.
Yes. He is.
It hits in a dizzying wave, my thoughts pulling and pushing around like the current.
Of course.
His control and his power don’t exist. Those words aren’t wrapped into his illusion. Anger and fear. That’s all he is. The only time he ever fought was when he was sure he could win. From then on, he had hunters by his side. Maur was right. He lives in fear, hides behind illusions and the people of this city. But now he’s completely alone.
And I know where the stone has to be.
A small grin flits across my face, a rush flushing the exhaustion from my veins and lifting me, making me feel as light as the clouds.
I raise my hand, catching the sunlight in an arc of rainbows. “I choose chaos.”
<
br /> The king seems to move so much slower compared to the shimmer around him, the waves of the illusion tumble and crash from his person. But there’s a focus, a place where the water is thickest and the and the pulse is constant.
It’s the only place he’d ever trust to put the stone.
On himself.
The waves pull in mighty currents from his calf. He’s starting to change, the slow glimmer of golden scales rolling across his skin. But it’s too late.
My arms go numb as my words drag along the inside of my skin, my vision blurring as I focus the water closer to his leg, calling to his blood. He sends an illusion to stop me, but his weak, fearful words don’t compare to mine. I pull harder on the blood in his calf, screaming as he does, until finally, it bursts and his leg tears away from his body.
Warm blood splats against my face, hard as pebbles. The king falls forward, and so do I. Vito doesn’t react in time to catch me, his fingers grazing my middle as I fall.
I can barely keep my eyes open. My wings feel as if they’re the weight of the world pressed against my back.
Pressure on my neck. Fingers dig deep into my skin and I choke, unable to find air.
“You will lose, worm. No matter how you fight against the current, it will pull you and your little rebellion along, all the world soon to—”
The weight leaves my neck, scraping as it lifts. I gasp in a breath, barely realizing I’d lost my sight. I struggle to my elbows, a roaring echoing through my ears. My blood crashing through my head? Or maybe Maur came for us, maybe we’re saved.
But, no. Vito’s shape blurs, the waves of an illusion pulsing through the air as he spreads his wings, broken as they are. His brown scales nearly glow in the light of the stained glass, his breaths coming as fast and ragged. The air smacks across my face as another wave follows Vito’s ripples. The mutilated king—twice the size of Vito, his hide like the sun—returns Vito’s howl, charging forward on three legs.
“No!” The scream scratches along my lungs, but Vito doesn’t hesitate, snapping forward to the king’s golden throat.
The king catches Vito’s face with his paw, but Vito presses back, ramming into him with his horns, his sharp crest.
The king roars again, and they snap and claw so fast that my tired eyes can’t tell the brown and the gold apart.
N-no, this isn’t what was supposed to happen. He can’t die. Not for me, not for this. We should have run. It’s my fault that he’s here, fighting for his life. Again.
Crimson springs between them, the cobblestones gleaming like rubies. How much of it is Vito’s? How much of a fight can he manage while he’s so exhausted, so hurt? No matter how much I scream, neither look toward me. Neither stop. What can I do?
I crawl forward, but my palm slips. My cheek smacks hard against the stone, the liquid sticky as I push away from it.
The king’s blood.
I look up and the stump of his mangled leg is in front of me.
And buried in the flesh and bone and tendon is something not very leg-like.
I claw and crawl my way to the bloody flesh as fast as I can, stumbling and slipping and practically falling onto it as the dragons snap and snarl and slam in their fight.
My stomach rolls as I dig into the still-warm muscle, the palm-sized stone popping out of the flesh with a squelch. He actually put it in his leg? It is a lot smaller than I would have thought. I open my hand and can’t help but stare for a moment. The blood rolls off it, as if the stone’s rejecting it. The flat rock’s clear around the edges, but in the center it’s like a black cloud, blue racing around it in a way that looks like it’s light, as if all the stars and galaxies are trapped in this small stone.
A cry from the beasts snap me out of it. It’s Vito. He stumbles back, his pinioned wing bleeding, the joint ragged with pale flesh. But he rams back against the powerful dragon without hesitation, without giving me a chance to stop him.
I grip the stone tighter, close my eyes to the fight, to my urge to crawl away. Maybe I can’t save us, but I’ll be damned if I don’t save everyone else.
The words on my arm sting like they’re fresh wounds, my illusions draining my energy and dragging on my focus. Water pulses in the air around me, so much stronger up here than it ever was on the ground. I try to press it into the strange grooves on the side of the stone, but it’s like it can’t touch it, like the rock’s refusing to let my illusion near it.
Vito might have been onto something. Maybe I can’t do it.
No. I’m not letting myself fail. Not again.
I push harder, pulling on my words, every syllable and meaning and memory beating through me in a weak beat. It isn’t enough.
I’m not enough.
My concentrations slips, like sweaty fingers gripping onto the edge of a cliff. This entire time, at every struggle, I’ve never been enough. Everything that happened, all the people who have died and suffered because I ran from a fate that was unavoidable.
All of it: the lies and deceit, the blood spilled and chaos wreaked, the deceptions and false illusions that crowded out the truth in my mind. It’s mine. They’re my crimes to bear. They course through me, a current that sweeps through, scraping against the old words of my skin.
They travel up from my arm, pressing along my skin as they go. Not only words this time, but symbols and images and stories of my struggles and failures. They spread and I can feel their weight, feel them press against my skin as if they were made of lead and not illusion.
I open my eyes, the dark marks wrapping around my hands shocking in their newness, but also in their rightness. My guilt is mine, same as my love and my loss.
It all seems very clear. I call an illusion that’s a sharp, powerful, and crazed edge that I push against whatever barrier the stone’s surrounded by.
For a moment, nothing seems different. It repels the illusion as if this stone wasn’t an object created by an illusion, but of something opposite, polar to water. But I press harder. It feels as if my new marks are constricting around me, pulling tight and strangling me the more I push every bit of energy I have out. But I keep going.
The illusion moves a hair closer into it.
I drive and dig at it until I’m screaming as my words squeeze me apart. Let them. Let me take my guilt and let me suffer from it and let me break this damn thing to set us all free.
As I’m sure my lungs are going to burst, that my limbs are going to be severed into minuscule pieces, it gives. I crack whatever that barrier is protecting it.
A roar, desperate and pleading and fearful makes its way to my ears, through my concentration. The king stumbles away from the fight, running toward me. His form stutters, ripples and shrinks halfway to me, and he falls to the ground on his one leg, those ornate clothes now torn and stained brown and red.
“Please!” His voice echoes along the long room.
I close my eyes on his desperate face, on the world. I press my illusion closer.
The stone breaks.
44
The Seed
For a moment, nothing happens. The king stares at the stone with his pale, hollow face, and I stare at him, my heartbeat the only noise hammering in the empty room. Vito lies on the ground against the wall behind him, and I can’t focus enough to see if the scales around his chest rise and fall.
The king gasps.
I jump, looking at the stone. The cloud of blackness and stars is swirling inside the clear rock, faster and faster until I’m dizzy looking at it.
It seeps from the crack in twirling tendrils. I drop it, flapping my wings to jump back—without remembering my injury. I slam to the floor, hearing the king scramble across the cobblestones.
He can’t get it. I struggle to crawl forward, too, but my arms will barely move, I can barely crawl. My muscles feel like they’re full of sand, so heavy and grating, absorbing the little energy I have left.
His fingers wrap greedily around the stone as it seeps the vines of darkness. But he can’t get it o
ff the ground. It presses along the gaps of the cobblestones, digging into and fracturing them. He yanks and it gives an inch, the vines coming up a little, tendrils of shadow hanging toward the ground like roots.
“You can’t do this!” he howls, yanking it more and more from the floor. There’s snapping, the vines and their roots pulling the stones of the floor apart. “You are mine. I own you and this city, and you are not allowed to destroy us!”
It spreads out, the floor cracking louder as it digs into the ground, through the foundation.
What is this thing? Maybe it really isn’t an illusion, maybe all the tales were wrong and the ancients who created the city didn’t use any water-based illusion to raise it—they used this curling darkness to lift it from the ground. Or perhaps it’s exactly what the legends say. It’s the life that the dragons once captured crawling free, breathing and living and taking back what once was stolen from it.
Except for the king trying to steal it back.
“You are mine!” His shriek echoes through the long room, above the quiet slithering of the shadows. But I look past him and his panic, seeing the vines creeping toward Vito.
I reach an arm out, hauling myself forward, to him.
The king keeps struggling, as do I. All I want to do is stop and give in and let the shadow take me, but I can’t stop. Vito might still be alive and to stop would mean him dying.
I’m not ready to give up yet.
One aching pull after another, I finally make it around the king. His screams become unintelligible as the vines wrap around his arms, his ankles. Once I’m past him, I pay him no mind. I can see my dragon. And I can see his chest rising and falling.
Finally, I place a hand on his ribcage, hefting myself up. He has scratches everywhere, the worst being a long gash along his cheek. Nothing looks mortal. Only time can tell.
Something touches my ankle, light as a feather. I turn, falling against Vito’s stomach. The vines slither around us.