“Where are you taking us?” Elza’s voice is a shout, nearly lost in the roar of the wind. Her body is rigid, tense with a mixture of terror and defiance.
“Somewhere safe,” I reply, my voice a low rumble against her ear. It is the only answer I can give.
“Safe from who?” she demands. “From you, or from them?”
The question is a barb, and it finds its mark. I do not answer. There is no logical answer that will comfort her. My mind, once an orderly chamber, is now consumed by a single imperative:protect them. The mission, duty, my entire ten-thousand-year existence—all of it has been rendered down to this singular, desperate flight.
I push onward, flying not toward any Vrakken stronghold, but away from them all, toward a place of memory. A place of power.
As the jagged, black peaks of the Dragon’s Tooth mountains rise to meet us, Lyren stirs. He cranes his neck, his small face peeking out from the shelter of Elza’s arms, his silver hair whipping in the wind. His eyes, wide and dark, are not filled with fear, but with a startling, unnerving awe.
“We are flying,” he breathes, his small voice filled with wonder.
The simple, illogical purity of his reaction is a crack in the ice of my focus. A chaotic, unwelcome warmth spreads through my chest.
“Hold on,” I command, my voice rougher than I intend. I dive, banking sharply into a narrow, hidden canyon. The walls are a blur of dark stone on either side, and the wind screams through the needle-thin spires of rock.
Elza cries out, clutching Lyren tighter. “What are you doing?”
“Surviving,” I grunt, pushing my aching wing harder. At the canyon’s end, a massive waterfall crashes into a churning, misty pool, its roar deafening. I do not slow. I fly directly into the wall of water.
For a moment, there is only the cold, crushing weight of the cascade, and then we are through, into the vast, hidden cavern behind it.
I land, my legs nearly buckling from the strain, and gently set Elza on her feet. She stumbles, and I steady her, my hand on her arm. She flinches at my touch but does not pull away, her own strength spent.
“What is this place?” she whispers, her gaze sweeping the cavern. The air inside is warm and humid, thrumming with a palpable, living energy. The only light comes from veins ofglowing, emerald-green moss and the swirling, opalescent mist that rises from a deep, circular pool in the floor. A Wildspont.
“A sanctuary,” I say. “One they will not find.”
Lyren, his fear forgotten, slips from his mother’s grasp. “It’s glowing,” he says, his face alight with wonder as he approaches the moss, his small fingers reaching out to trace its light.
“Lyren, stay back!” Elza calls, her voice sharp with worry.
“He is safe,” I state, my gaze fixed on the boy. In the supercharged atmosphere of the cave, his innate Purna aura, the golden light I have always seen around him, glows with the intensity of a small sun. He is a beacon of perfect, radiant health.
My gaze shifts to his mother. She leans against the cavern wall, her face pale and drawn, her breath coming in shallow pants. The dark circles under her eyes are stark against her skin. She is depleted, a candle burned down to its wick. Her own Purna light, which should be amplified in a place like this, is a faint, flickering ember, almost imperceptible. She is a shadow, and he is a sun.
The discrepancy is a jarring note in a complex equation. “You are exhausted,” I observe.
She shoots me a glare, her eyes still holding their fire despite her weariness. “I have just survived a battle and a flight through a hurricane with a monster. What did you expect?”
I watch as Lyren, laughing now, chases the glowing motes of light that dance in the air above the Wildspont. His vitality is absolute. And Elza, watching him, sways on her feet. A transfer of energy. He is not merely sustained by his own life force. He is drawing it from her. The thought is a logical leap I have, until this moment, refused to consider. He is healthybecauseof her.
My mind flashes back to the Aethel cell. The taste of her blood. It was not merely life. It was fire. Pure, raw, undiluted power. A concentration of life force so potent it shattered my apathy and remade me. For centuries, our Vrakken life forcehas been thinning. The Fading is a dilution. Her blood is the opposite. It is a pure, unblemished concentration of life itself.
The pieces of the puzzle, observations I have made but failed to connect, now slide into place with a horrifying, simple clarity.
Lyren is a perfect vessel, a flawless hybrid. But he is not the source of the cure. He is merely the result of being sustained by it. From the moment of his conception, he has been feeding on a constant, pure supply of the cure his entire life.
The horrifying truth dawns on me, a conclusion so simple, so elegant, and so utterly monstrous it freezes the breath in my lungs.
The child is not the cure.
The mother is.
And to save my race, to extract the cure in the quantities needed to reverse The Fading, they would not need to study her. They would need to drain her. They would need to bleed her dry until her Purna light, that faint, flickering ember, was extinguished for good. They would have to kill her.
21
