Near midnight, he stops.
We’ve reached a natural depression in the rock—a shallow cave formed by an overhang, barely large enough for two people. He moves into it without explanation, positioning himself near the entrance with his back against stone.
I hesitate at the threshold.
He closes his eyes.
I stare at him for a long moment. Exhaustion pulls at every muscle. My magic feels hollow, scraping against the inside of my bones. The smart thing would be to rest while I can, trust that his senses will catch approaching threats.
Trust.
I sink down against the opposite wall, as far from him as the small space allows.
In the silence, my bloodline hums.
A shift is coming. I feel it in the dreams that won’t let me rest, in the magic that recognized his name before I knew why.
I close my eyes.
Tomorrow, I’ll figure out how to survive beside a predator who might kill me as easily as save me.
Tonight, I breathe.
The claws don’t find me in my dreams. For the first time in weeks, I sleep without seeing my own death.
Instead, there’s fire. Violence. A vast dark presence that doesn’t care whether I live, except?—
Except I’m still alive.
And that has to mean more than coincidence.
THREE
KASTER
The scout dies before it knows I’m there.
One moment, it’s crouched behind a bone ridge, focused on the distant horizon. The next, my claws tear through the base of its skull, severing the connection between brain and body. It drops without a sound. Clean. Decisive. Final.
I crouch over the corpse and wait.
Thirty seconds. Sixty. The flesh stays still beneath my hands—no residual pulse trying to knit it back, no regeneration forcing me to kill the same creature twice. This one remains down.
For now.
I wipe my claws on the sterile earth and move on.
The Ash Wastesstretch in every direction—flat, scorched, unforgiving. I’ve burned this ground so many times that the soil itself has forgotten how to grow.
Stored dragonfire bleeds from the ground in waves. The temperature never drops below comfortable. Never offers reliefto creatures that need cold to function. The scouts hate this terrain.
They come anyway.
That’s the problem.
I pause at the edge of an old kill site—a creature I ended three years ago, bones picked clean by wind and time. The skeleton is massive, easily four times my shifted size. A god-made thing, built for destruction. It took me six hours to bring down and another two to confirm the death.
Now it’s a landmark. A warning.
