From just behind me, Kaan mumbles a series of familiar and unfamiliar words in Bulder’s busty language, and in a sequence I wouldn’t have thought of. Rocks shift and soften into a staircase fit for a palace, woven between the dragon’s ancient remains like a shrine, each step appearing to be of equal height.
Seems I’ve still got a lot to learn …
“What were you doing all the way out here, Moonbeam?”
Kaan’s deep voice rattles the silence again; my entire body responding to the words. Like I’m a Creator; his voice, a baritone key to my chest cavity.
My heart.
I swallow. Unbunch my fists and tuck loose tendrils of hair behind my ears. “I’d escaped from someplace,” I murmur, moving down the stairs, drowning thoughts of a snow hut I shaped with a shard of ice and bloody hands. Of waking from a frosty sleep to find Fallon cold and stiff beside me.
Gone.
“After making my way across the Ergor Plains, I climbed down through that hole right there,” I say, pointing above our heads. “It was storming so bad I was forced to find refuge in the lower shaft.”
“A carter dropped you here?In the middle of a storm?”
The outrage underscoring his tone is palpable. Like he’s preparing to murder some poor folk who doesn’t even exist.
“Of course not. That’d be bad for business,” I say, scanning for any sign of predators. The collapse is just big enough for an adolescent dragon to claw through. We might survive a chatterling attack, but a wild Moonplume seeking shelter … well.
We’d be dead before we had a chance to react.
“So youweren’twith a carter?”
“No.”
“Then how did you get across the plains?”
“I walked.”
His steps halt.
“Moonbeam, that would’ve taken—”
“A while,” I finish for him. So long, that by the time I clambered all the way down to the bottom of this cavern, I could barely lift a limb.
Not that I say that.
Nor do I tell him the first time I saw my own reflection was in one of the shop windows in Gore, just daes after Sereme saved my life.
I remember the fierce slap of shock. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to see, but I’d pictured myself visually strong and capable. Sturdy.
What I saw was the opposite.
I reach the cleft between the rocks, dip my head, and edge through, leaping down into the sheltered tunnel. Heart in my throat, I wait for Kaan and Ahvi to follow as I scan my surroundings, seeing old blood still splashed all over the rough-hewn walls.
This is it.
The spot I thought I’d die.
I look left to the small ingress I recoiled within, then balled up like a dying dragon; starved, feet sliced up, body littered with wounds that had begun to fester.
Wounds in my heart that had done the same.
My thoughts delve toward the many carcasses I have strewn about the shore of my internal icy lake, stuffed under rocks or pushed in dark corners I so rarely glance in the direction of. I exhume one from where it’s wedged between two rocks and examine it—the bones stripped so bare of emotion they’re chalky in my hands:
The masked guards came while I slumbered. Tried to capture and drag me back to Arkyn’s lair.
