Above the marble floor, a massive black and gold dragon’s claw split the architecture open.
Its total shimmering scaled arm reached roughly thirty feet from the ceiling breach to the tips of its talons. Even across the room, I could see these large individual diamond-shaped scales. The color of obsidian, yet mirror-bright.
Each gold talon looked like fire trapped in glass and was curved in a lethal arc, eight or nine feet long. They tapered into razor points that touched the polished marble floor. And the five talons spanned nearly eighteen feet, wide enough to walk between, but also to cage the entire length of the long table beneath.
The base of it, where the claw tore through the ceiling, held the violence.
Cracked plaster framed the entry point in jagged edges, reinforced with sculpted metal that mimicked destruction mid-impact. Gold bled outward into the fractures, frozen in time, as if heat had surged through the structure at the exact moment of penetration.
The ceiling around it bowed inward, pulled toward the claw's grip because the building itself had yielded.
It felt alive.
It felt anchored above me.
It felt so real that for one breath, I believed that a dragon crouched on the roof and had driven its claw straight through the structure to seize what belonged to it. And now the limb remained lodged there, embedded deep, caught between the act of taking and the refusal to release.
I almost told everyone to grab their guns so the beast wouldn’t get us.
Speechless.
I was absolutely fucking speechless.
She’s put Korin on my roof. What sort of. . .imagination does my Tiger have?
I stopped walking and just. . .stood there with my mouth open.
Nyomi grinned. “Don’t worry. I’ll return your ballroom to its original look. I just wanted—”
“No.”
She blinked. “What?”
“We’re keeping it.”
Reo snickered on the side.
I took in the claw some more and could almost feel the otherworldliness of it pressing down from above. The imagined body coiled over the roofline. The heat of breath that never reached the ballroom. The tension in tendons that held the claw in place, ready to tighten.
If it closed, it would take everything beneath it.
And beneath it, she had placed that table.
A lacquered black runway for at least twenty people to sit, stretched directly under the cage of talons. Every chair aligned with intention. Every seat placed within the reach of those curved points.
Sitting at that table meant sitting beneath the predator, and I couldn’t wait to experience it.
Gold-rimmed charger plates and crystal glasses waited at each setting.
A huge chandelier hung from the dragon claw’s palm, gold-veined and trembling gently as if the dragon above were breathing.
Fuck. . .
This sudden and unwelcome pressure built behind my eyes. I blinked hard twice and willed whatever emotion was trying to creep up back down into the dark place where my beast kept what it couldn't afford to feel.
Toma screamed, "This is insane! That’s us! The Claws!!"
The rest of the Claws had been frozen just like me, but now they were thawing and slowly reacting.
