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Rowan makes a sort of growl. Blue flames rise from both his eye and his empty socket once more, so yeah, I guess I can see why the woman’s freaked out. Alindra takes a step back, her hand pressed over her mouth, and maybe I should have warned her about Rowan’s magic and the flames that come with it. But, voids help me, no one ever saw Rowan’s magic. Ever since he exploded Therian’s barn, the rule was he never, ever used his magic where anyone could see it.
Besides, Rowan’s magic was never like this. His magic had been strange and terrifying enough before our father’s tutelage gave him the ability to literally tear holes in reality. Rowan told me what he was supposed to do tonight, what our father taught him how to do, but even then, I hadn’t believed it.
Nine hells, I just saw it happen, and I’m still not sure I believe it.
The ground trembles under my feet. I glance down to see my father sprawled out below us, trapped in his own sleep magic. And probably fighting it with everything he has. Dark tendrils rise from the trampled grass and pine needles around his body, the first sign of Rowan’s magic. At least, they used to be the first sign of his magic.
But everything has changed, hasn’t it? I turn to my brother, to the ice-blue eye hiding beneath the flames, that pale hue I never told him came from his father. Just like his strange, twisted magic that I never told him came from his father.
And I nod. Whatever Rowan is going to do to the monster who has haunted my memories and nightmares for my entire life, he’ll do it with my blessing.
I saw Rowan’s magic rip open an entire mountainside and swallow a voids-damned army, but still, I’m not prepared for the hole that cracks open beneath our father. There’s a low ripping sound, like cloth being tugged into rags, and then violet light swells up from the tear in reality and washes across Varitan’s shoulders.
It’s the void. I’ve seen that amethyst glow a thousand times, when I led trekkers from the Crystal City to one of the places where they could observe the hostile, shifting void from a somewhat safe distance, or later, searching for Rowan, whispering prayers to whatever stars might be able to hear me that he would come home again.
Rowan’s magic has always been connected to the void. Stars above, he somehow managed to map the damn place. So I shouldn’t be surprised our father was able to teach Rowan how to open a portal from this world to the shifting wastes of the void.
Still, when the ground yawns open beneath Varitan and his shoulder dips, I take a step backward. One of Rowan’s tentacles rises from the hole in the world and wraps almost lazily around Varitan’s arm. Rowan shivers, and his chains chatter.
Varitan falls slowly into the crack between worlds. His neat uniform hisses against the dirt and pine needles as it slides past the sundered ground, almost as though it’s trying to hold on to the mountain. Another tentacle wraps around his leg, and then the strange violet light of the void swells around his body as it vanishes.
Rowan exhales softly in a long, low whisper. The crack in the earth narrows, then stretches forward, reaching like a finger for the feet of the strange woman who just crashed into the pine grove.
The woman stares at us with wide eyes. Long red hair flares out behind her, tangling in the soft gusts of wind that shake the trees above us, there’s a streak of dirt down one of her cheeks, and she doesn’t look like any human I’ve ever met.
No. She’s not a human. The memory rises slowly, traveling through years upon years in the Lands Below. I met them before we fled, before my life in the darkness beneath the world. Dragons. Unmistakable in their human form because of the way air and light bend around them, refracted by the magical energy rising off of their human bodies.
Rowan’s tentacles rise slowly from the grass and twist around the dragon’s human ankles. Deeper, sharper voices snarl and snap from behind us. The dragons are apparently arguing about something. Or, more specifically, they’re arguing with Rensivar. The woman’s mouth opens in a circle.
I’m expecting her to speak, although the stars only know what she could possibly say, but instead, she shakes her head, then raises both of her hands to flash her open palms at us. It’s a gesture that means something in the Lands Below: surrender. A knot of scar tissue twists around the woman’s left wrist. One of the dragons behind me screams something about a Champion, and I glance through the trees, wondering if Rensivar the Wicked can tell what just happened to his old business partner Varitan.
“No,” the woman whispers.
I turn back to her, but she’s not looking at the thick tentacle of Rowan’s magic wrapped around her ankle. She’s not even looking at us.
She’s looking at the massive black dragon whose jaw snarls above the trees. Rensivar. And Rensivar the Wicked’s head swings toward us. His nostrils flare. The pines rustle above me as he sucks in a breath.
“I know you’re here,” Rensivar growls.
Voids below. The rest of Rensivar’s words blur together as fear pulls me under. I’m drowning. Rensviar the Wicked knows we’re here? Does he know what we just did to my father? Panicked images flash through my mind. We could climb down the cliff. Throw ourselves into the void after Varitan. Use Rowan’s magic against the dragons.
“No!” another dragon screams.
The dragon woman goes stiff. Horror ripples across her face. For a moment she looks like she’s going to burst into tears, and then she slaps her hand over her mouth. And she turns toward Rowan.
She meets the slowly evaporating flames still pouring from Rowan’s face, but she doesn’t recoil. Instead, her eyes trace the chains, the bruises, and the stubborn defiance of Rowan’s split lip that still leaks blood down his chin. Tears trickle from her eyes to roll down her dirt-streaked cheeks. The fear is gone. Now, this dragon looks like her heart is breaking.
She’s got someone in chains. The realization comes to me with such certainty that it might as well have been spoken by the stars. Whoever this dragon woman is, wherever she came from, someone she loves is trapped.
“Rowan,” I whisper. “Let her go.”
Rowan sighs, and his chains hiss as he shifts. The tentacles wrapped around the woman’s ankles sink back into the dirt, and then the crack in the world that just swallowed our father closes with a soft little whisper, fading back into nothingness. The woman steps backward. She shakes her head as Rensivar’s laugh booms across the mountains.
“Oh, but she will,” Rensivar declares, his voice as deep and cold as the Lands Below. “Or do you care so little for your king, Rayne?”
The dragon woman flinches like she’s been hit. Her head drops, and her shoulders sag. He’s got her. Whatever Rensivar the Wicked meant byyour king, it was enough to break the defiance that led her into this grove of trees in the first place. My chest pinches as the woman drags herself forward, her entire body signaling defeat.
“Oh, Rayne,” Rensivar calls, with a mocking tone like a freshly sharpened blade. “Don’t keep the dragons waiting, child.”
