The catacombs were a terrible place to train. Every sound bounced—my breathing, Dreadscale's voice, the scuff of my boots on stone that was gritty with bone dust and age.
"Again," Dreadscale said.
My legs were giving out. My arms had stopped belonging to me somewhere around heartbeat fifteen.
But I dove inward anyway.
Light first. Then Shadow, uncoiling from my marrow to meet it tooth for tooth. I made them spiral together. Forced the Light to wrap around the Shadow instead of fighting it. The fusion caught—fragile but holding.
Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen.
My marks bucked against the fusion, Shadow trying to recoil, Light flaring too bright. I gritted my teeth and held on.
Eighteen.
I dropped.
Nineteen.
The fusion shattered.
I hit the ground hard, palms scraping stone, my lungs scouring for air. My marks retreated to their separate corners, exhausted.
Nineteen heartbeats. One short of twenty. Eleven short of what I needed.
I lay there, gasping, and that's when I saw it.
Dreadscale’s hands were trembling—a faint tremor, quickly controlled—but his jaw remained stiff and his breath uneven as the dragon tattoo on his spine spasmed erratically.
He felt it too.
Every time he held his Mirrorheart open—every time he forced me to face my shadows—he wasn't just watching. He was carrying it alongside me. My pain, my shame, my terror. It all flowed through him too.
"Pain is the ink your shadow writes in," he'd told me that first day. I thought he meant mine.
He meant his too.
"Again," Dreadscale said.
I pushed myself up, no complaints this time. Not after what I'd just seen.
"You're closer," he said. "But you're still treating the fusion like a battle to be won. Light conquering Shadow. Shadow submitting to Light." He shook his head slowly. "That's not union. That's domination. And domination always breaks."
I wiped sweat from my eyes. "Then what?"
"Surrender." The word landed heavy in the silence between us. "Not to defeat. Tointegrate. You have to stop believing one half of you is more worthy than the other."
He made it sound simple.
"The scar tissueisthe power," he said quietly. "Not despite the wound. Because of it." His eyes held mine. "Your words, Scar-Bearer. Not mine."
My throat tightened. I'd said it like I meant it—at the Masque, wearing his mask, high on borrowed courage. Easy to be wise when the music's playing and someone else's face is pressed to yours.
Harder now. Kneeling on the cold floor with bone dust in my teeth and nineteen failures carved into my pride.
"Again," he said.
I pushed myself to my feet, spent, my muscles screaming in protest. But a spark of stubbornness had caught—small, but firm. I closed my eyes and delved inward.
