The impact shook the plateau. They hit the ground together in a tangle of wings and claws and tails, three hundred yards from the ruined wall, and the earth cracked beneath them. Varek was faster. Varek was undamaged. Varek had two functional wings and a full lifetime of shifting and the cold, methodical violence of something that had never once questioned its right to destroy.
Rhaezon had none of that.
He had only his fury.
Rhaezon burned with it. The fury of everything underneath him had taken — sold him as a child, broken and burned and made him into something useful, taken Saevra. The fury of every scar and every year of rebuilding himself from the wreckage with his own scarred hands. And then — against every expectation — finding something worth more than revenge. Someone who sat on floors because chairs felt formal. Someone who learned every name. Someone who touched his broken wing without flinching and saidyou're not brokenand meant it.
The fight was brutal and short.
Varek rolled, pinning Rhaezon beneath him, jaws snapping for his throat. Rhaezon caught the bite on his right forearm — the scales held, barely — and drove his hind claws into Varek's belly where the armor was thinner. Varek screamed and reared back. Rhaezon surged upward. His jaws found Varek's neck again, higher this time, closer to the skull, and he locked down with everything his body could produce.
Varek thrashed. His tail whipped across the ground and carved a trench in the stone. His claws opened Rhaezon's shoulder to the bone. His wings beat against the plateau, trying to lift, trying to get airborne, trying to create the distance that would give him the advantage.
Rhaezon did not let him have it.
He shifted his grip and wrenched his body sideways, using his weight and the broken-wing asymmetry that had defined him his entire life as a fulcrum. Varek went off balance. The thrashing intensified. Rhaezon planted his hind legs, flexed every muscle in his neck, and tore.
Varek's right wing came away from his body with a sound like a sail ripping in a gale. Blood — black and smoking — fountained across the plateau stone. Varek's shriek shattered something in the frequency range that Rhaezon could hear but November, two hundred yards away, could not. He did not stop. He released theneck grip, caught the left wing before Varek could recover, and tore that one free as well.
Varek, wingless, bleeding from wounds that would have killed anything that was not Drakonblooded, tried to turn. Tried to bring his fire to bear one final time. His jaws opened. The shimmer gathered.
Rhaezon drove his head forward and closed his teeth around Varek's throat from the front. The fire died in Varek's mouth. His eyes — green-gold, the Varek family coloring, the same shade that had looked down at a child and saw opportunity rather than responsibility — went wide. Then dim. Then dark.
Lord Aldric Varek of House Varek died in his shifted form, sprawled across the high plateau of Aelthar with the dawn light on his ruined wings and his blood turning the pale stone black.
Rhaezon stood over the body. Shifted. Damaged. The victory already turning to something else in his blood — something urgent and failing, because the shift was slipping. He could feel it going. His body had done the impossible thing and the impossible thing had a cost and the cost was coming due immediately.
His left wing seized. The scar tissue that had torn during the shift contracted, and the pain that had been manageable when he was moving became something else entirely when he was still. His scales receded in patches, his body confused about what shape it was supposed to hold. The Drakon form flickered. His hindquarters shifted back first, then his forelimbs, then his torso, and each transition was a separate agony because the shift that should never have been possible was already unraveling and his body was paying for every second it had held.
He went to his knees. His human knees, on the stone plateau, naked and bleeding from wounds that were rearranging themselves across a body that was no longer large enough to contain them. The gash along his flank became a gash along hisribs. The shoulder wound became a deep laceration from his collarbone to his bicep. His left side was a ruin — the wing half-retracted, stuck somewhere between forms, the membrane torn fresh over old scars.
His vision was going. The amber was fading. The world was getting smaller and darker and colder and he was losing the shape of things.
Then hands on his face.
Small hands. Warm. Rough-palmed. Her hands.
"Rhaezon."
Her voice. Not commanding. Not desperate. Not pitched with the panic he could smell on everyone else within a quarter mile. Just present. Just there, the way she was always there — steady, warm, calm. Her fingers found his jaw. She cradled it in her palm.
"Come back."
Her thumb traced the scar that ran from his jaw to his temple. The scales under her fingers were receding unevenly, some already gone, others still raised and warm. She did not pull her hand away. She held on.
"Come back to me."
The shift was fighting him. Half his body wanted to stay in the shifted Drakon form and half wanted to collapse into the humanoid one, and the tearing between the two was worse than either state alone. His bones were grinding against each other in configurations that did not exist in any anatomy. His vision fractured — one eye seeing in the expanded spectrum of the Drakon, the other in the limited range of his humanoid form.
November moved closer. She put both hands on his face. She leaned her forehead against his.
"I've got you."
Her breath on his skin. The scent of her — tea and stone dust and the warmth underneath her skin that he had memorized inthe dark of her bedroom, on the plateau under the ancient tree, in front of the fire while the book lay forgotten between them. The scent that meanthere. The scent that meanthome.
"I've got you. Come back."
The shift released him.
