Hear his groan of relief when he breaks free of gravity’s grip, like he pushed his final breath into the sound.
He eases into the luminous aura of a nearby Moonplume moon, soaring almost close enough to bump against its pearly hide, like he’s seeking its quiet comfort.
It’slight.
Something that makes it feel as though the ribs around my heart are snapping.
With one final thump, he tucks into a ball and sweeps a wing over his face, then goes chillingly still—creaking, crackling sounds echoing through the din as his body turns to stone.
The silence that follows is deafening.
Something’s coiled in me. A serpent waiting to pounce as we soar west through a void of gray and white. Heavy storm clouds above, writhing mist below. And pinched between … howls of wind, scatters of snow, and too much time tothink. To toil over everything that just happened and calculate the pending repercussions. Which will come.
Hard and heavy.
Kaan shifts deeper into his seat, his body a hot weight at my back.
My gaze drops to his scarred hands fisted around the reins—tendons stretched, knuckles blanched. Then to his strained forearms and bulging veins I want to trace down to his thick wrists, thread my fingers underneath to the spot where his tendons bunch, and feel the beat of his pulse. A rabid compulsion that’s almost impossible to fight. As hard as it is to scrub the vision of him leaping before me.
Absorbing those Creators-forsakenpins.
I stab my stare forward. Pull my hood farther down to stop the snow from pelting my eyeballs, and bite so deep into my tongue I taste blood.
There are things I need to say. Words searing up my throat. Feelings like embers I’m not sure how to handle without sustaining some sort of burn. So they sit within, simmering while silence thickens between us.
We encroach on a steep mountain ridge, its peaks hidden amongst the clouds overhead. The mists claw up the sides like some hungry beast intent on swallowing the world.
Maell cuts closer to Rygun’s wings, as though seeking his protection, breaking my view of Pyrok and Roan. Kaan’s firm body presses forward, and we spear into the storm in great, heaving torrents—climbing up.
Up.
I’m so crushed between Kaan and the saddle blanket that my only view is the inside of my hood until we explode into the open sky. Maell shrieks at the rising aurora and flicks out her wings, tossing the crust of gathered snow from her pretty plumage, bursting with adolescent joy.
Pyrok coaxes her steady with a tenderness that warms something within me.
I ease my hood back to scan our vast surroundings, eyes wide on astretch of gilded clouds kissed by the sun’s distant rays, jagged mountain tips poking through as far as I can see. And I realizeexactlywhere we are.
Near the border between The Burn and The Fade, the mountains no longer rounded by lashes of wind and rain, but steeper, sharper. Mountains that are, by all accounts, riddled with wild Moltenmaws that hunt and strip the range of their trees like pecking flesh from bones. Trees used to build their nests in Bhoggith, not too far away.
Mountains most folk give averywide berth … unless they have a death wish. Which I certainly do not.
“Have we cut too far south?”
No answer.
Rygun levels his flight, coasting just above the peaks as I twist, look back at Kaan.
And still.
The skin around his eyes … it’s just as split as it was when he knocked me to the ground, fire welling between the cracks. A potent reminder that Rygun’s still sharingsomethingwith him. Bolstering him in some way. Protecting him, maybe.
Probably both.
Kaan’s gaze flicks down. He blinks, and his slit pupils round out, some of the cracks closing, though the fire in his irises rages on.
He loosens his hand from the reins and settles it on my waist, gripping gently. “You okay?”
No.
