And for once…
… so did I.
Epilogue
SCORCH
Frost gives beneath my boots with a brittle, splintering sound that seems too loud for the distance it travels. I don’t remember stepping out here. I don’t remember leaving the warmth of the compound, the low murmur of voices, the steady reassurance of bodies that breathe and burn and belong to the same fragile world I do.
Yet here I am.
The tree line rises around me like a wall grown from shadow, the scent of pine and frozen earth thick enough to taste. Below, the compound rests in its usual arrangement of light and structure, floodlamps casting familiar pools across the yard, the kitchen window glowing with a domestic warmth that feels almost absurdly human against the enormity of the night.
Everything is exactly where it should be.
That is what makes my spine tighten.
My breath leaves my lungs in pale, deliberate clouds that drift sideways rather than up, sliding along the ground like smoke that has forgotten how to rise. I watch it happen with the detached, instinctive assessment of a predator recording anomalies. My dragon stirs beneath my ribs, restless heat pressing against the cold, sensing the fracture before my mind catches up.
Something is wrong.
Not visibly or logically, but wrong in the way a battlefield feels wrong just before the first arrow flies, when the world holds itself in a silence too taut to survive.
The quiet presses in.
It has weight, texture, and intent.
The compound lights flicker once, so subtly I almost convince myself I imagined it, and a memory surges unbidden through me, flame collapsing into ash, bodies twisted into shapes no living thing should make. I force the image down, jaw locking against the surge of protective fury that follows it, the instinct to burn anything that threatens what I have come to think of as mine.
Mine.The word feels dangerous even in thought.
A shift occurs beside me.
It’s not movement, only a correction in the structure of darkness.
The night thickens, condensing into a form that refuses to hold still long enough to be named. It gathers itself in the space at my shoulder, and I feel the temperature drop in precise increments, cold threading through leather, through muscle, until it touches the deep, coiled furnace of my dragon nature and dares it to react.
My fire recoils, not in fear but in recognition.
Ancient.
Older than any enemy I have faced.
Older than the wars that shaped me.
Older, perhaps, than the first time I learned what it meant to burn.
Eyes appear within the dark.
They do not glow. They do not flare. They simply exist, heavy with centuries, patient as erosion. I feel them settle on me with the absolute certainty of something that has already calculated my worth and found it irrelevant. A smile forms in suggestion only, the ghost of warmth stripped down to its most predatory skeleton.
“Valeria was a fool.”
The words bypass my ears entirely, entering instead through the spine, through the marrow, spreading outward like frost fracturing the glass of my thoughts. My dragon surges in response, a pulse of molten instinct that claws for release, but the cold holds it at bay with an authority that makes rage feel suddenly small.
“But her plan had merit.”
The compound below ripples. For one impossible instant, the lights distort, stretching into thin, wavering lines that resemble flames seen through tears. The kitchen window flashes with movement that does not belong to anyone I know, silhouettes twisting against an imagined inferno. I take a step forward, or try to, and the distance elongates, the ground becoming elastic beneath my weight, denying me the simple physics of intervention.
