She’s dying in my arms and I can stop it.
The cave entranceappears through the falling snow.
Dark stone framing deeper darkness. The faint orange glow of heated walls visible from outside, evidence of decades of accumulated dragonfire. A threshold that even I register when I cross it—the shift from frozen wilderness to contained heat, from hostile territory to claimed space.
My territory.
In the most literal sense.
I carry her inside.
Heat hitsme like a physical force.
After hours in the frozen canyon, the cave’s retained energy is almost painful—blood rushing back to extremities I’d stopped noticing, muscles unclenching from cold they’d braced against. The walls glow faintly orange in the darkness, heat radiating from stone that has absorbed fire for decades.
The air smells like mineral and heat and old power. My power. Dragonfire concentrated into a space barely forty feet deep, built up layer by layer over years of use. This cave has been my sanctuary when the world became too hostile. My hiding place when wounds needed time to heal.
Now it might become the place where I change everything.
I lay her on the natural shelf along one wall. The heated rock begins working immediately—I see color returning to her fingers and toes, blood that had retreated toward her core now flowing back toward her extremities.
It won’t save her.
Heat can address hypothermia but not the poison eating her from within.
Her heartbeat.
I press my fingers to her throat.
Thump.
Long pause.
Longer pause.
Thump.
Slowing. Each beat further apart than the last. The rhythm irregular and weakening, a muscle that’s forgotten how to contract properly and is running out of strength to try.
The window is closing.
Seconds, not minutes.
I kneelbeside her and force myself to inventory the situation.
My damage: Three broken ribs on the left side. Two on the right. Dislocated shoulder that I still haven’t reset. The deep laceration across my back has torn through muscle enough that movement is compromised. Blood loss that would have killed a human three times over. Healing barely functioning.
Her damage: Lungs paralyzed. Heart giving out. Core temperature dangerously low. Divine poison systematically destroying her bloodline magic, unraveling the power that has defined her existence since before she was born.
The math is simple. Brutal. Final.
She can’t survive without intervention. The poison has progressed too far, done too much damage. Even if I could find a healer—which I can’t, not in time—no mortal magic can counter what the gods built to kill her.
And I’m in no condition to attempt a mating. The process requires strength I don’t have, control I’ve abandoned, reserves I burned through killing the abomination.
I have to do it anyway.
There is no recovery time. No opportunity to heal first. Her heart is slowing with each passing minute. The window during which mating can save her is closing, and it will not reopen.
