Page 28 of Waking Her Dragon

Turn left.

Thump-thump

Step down into a shallow ravine.

Thump-thump

Navigate through a narrow, jagged passage where the stone walls threatened to scrape her shoulders.

As they moved deeper, the oppressive environment began to shift. The dead black stone beneath Sydney’s shoes didn't just sit there anymore… it reacted. With every step she took, thin, fracture-like veins of brilliant white and gold light spiderwebbed through the rock under her soles, pulsing in tandem with her stride.

Carrick’s heavy boots ground to a halt behind her. "Syd."

"I see it," she whispered, her chest tightening.

“It’s recognizing us, my girl,” Kara warned, her mental voice laced with a cold, sharp dread.

The realization hit Sydney like a physical blow. She was the key, and the primeval Magic of his prison was waking up simply because she had arrived. The trap was springing itself.

"We need to move. Faster," Sydney urged.

They broke into a jog, winding through the glowing stone labyrinth until the stagnant air suddenly changed. The heavy mist vanished, replaced by an overwhelming, metallic stench that made Sydney's stomach abruptly cramp.

Acrid burning blood. Corrosive silver. The suffocating choked scent of Chimera ash and scorched Dragon scales.

Sydney stopped dead in her tracks, the breath completely abandoning her lungs as the horrific reality of the scent registered in her mind.

"Garrett," she choked out.

Sydney rounded the final jagged column of black stone and stopped.

Her brain simply refused to process the image. For a long, disjointed second, her mind fragmented the scene, processing it in jagged pieces because looking at the whole truth was too much to bear.

First, her eyes locked onto the floor. It wasn’t black rock anymore. It had been painted in dark, sticky pools of crimson that had soaked into the stone. Next, her gaze traced upward to the thick, spiked iron links hanging from the cavern ceiling.

Then her eyes found… him.

The man she had spent agonizing weeks searching for. The man whose soul had reached across Realms to call out to hers. The fierce, unbreakable Dragon Guardsman she was meant to awaken.

Leviathan had completely systematically broken his body. He had brutalized Garrett in ways she hadn’t known were possible.

Garrett hung from the chains, his wrists raw, shredded, and black with necrotic bruising where the heavy iron laced with silver bit into his flesh. His left shoulder was horribly dislocated, jutting out at a sickening, unnatural angle with a hole large enough to put both her fists through right in the center.

Deep, jagged lacerations scored his chest, oozing a mixture of dark blood and silver residue that hissed against his skin. Every breath he took was a rattling, wet wheeze, his ribs lifting in a shallow, agonizing rhythm that told her even a single inhalation was a battle against his own collapsing lungs.

Sydney stopped breathing. She couldn’t move.

“Sydney,” Carrick called out behind her, his voice sounding as though it were underwater, miles away.

She didn’t hear him, just knew he was talking.

Inside her head, Kara went frighteningly, utterly silent, the boisterous Dragon Queen retreating into the furthest shadows of their shared psyche.

The rage didn't come. There was no fiery explosion of Magic, no desperate scream. There was only a vast, hollow, suffocating grief that threatened to swallow Sydney whole.

“This can’t be him,” she shakily whispered into the stagnant air, her voice cracking like dry glass. “This can't be Garrett.”

Even as her mind denied it, her soul ripped itself wide open, screaming a single, primal word that shook her very bones, “MINE.”