Milada hit the bottom of the fracture hard enough to lose the shape of herself for a few seconds.
There was only impact, mud, the taste of blood, and Salacia swearing somewhere nearby.
The crater they had fallen into was deeper than it had looked from above, a split chamber under the forest floor where broken roots hung from the ceiling and sheets of damp clay sloped down into black stone. Moonlight reached them in pale, narrow pieces through the jagged opening far overhead. Milada rolled onto her side and coughed dirt from her mouth. Her shoulder burned. One knee had hit stone. Her ribs hurt when she breathed, but they held.
Salacia sat in the mud several feet away, hair tangled with roots, one hand pressed to her bleeding thigh, wearing an expression of such exquisite outrage that under any other circumstances Milada might have laughed.
"Land," Salacia said, voice low and venomous.
Milada pushed herself upright. "Are you injured?"
"I am insulted."
Loose earth rained down on Milada's shoulders. Salacia looked up toward the slit of sky.
Her face changed.
Water began to rise from the mud around them.
At first Milada thought the crater was flooding. Then she saw the mud drying where Salacia sat, saw the wet clay cracking into grey plates, saw the roots hanging from the ceiling twist and shrink as the moisture left them. Droplets peeled from every surface and gathered in the air, hundreds of them trembling toward Salacia's outstretched hand. A small stream hidden somewhere inside the stone gave a strangled sound and went quiet.
The air thinned immediately.
Milada's throat tightened.
"Stop."
Salacia did not look at her. "I am making us a ladder."
"You're killing everything around us."
"I am using what is available."
"The forest is alive."
"Not my problem."
One of the roots overhead split with a dry snap. A nest of pale insects tumbled from it, curled in on themselves, and stopped moving. Milada felt dust-dry in her lungs.
She crossed the crater in three strides and caught Salacia's wrist.
"Stop."
Salacia looked down at Milada's hand, then up at her face. "Remove that before I remove you."
Milada did not let go. "Not everyone can function after you suck the water out of everything."
Salacia's smile was bright and cold. "And that is my problem because?"
"Because we are standing inside the everything."
"I will be fine."
"Of course you will." Milada's grip tightened. "Have you ever fucking tried having a human emotion? Imagine it was someone you loved up there who couldn't breathe because some vain, ancient, self-obsessed lunatic decided to kill the air!"
The water beads stilled around her.
For one second, Salacia was only looking at her.
Then something small and ugly moved behind her eyes.
The gathered water dropped at once. It hit the mud in a heavy splash, soaking back into roots, stone, clay, dead insects, living moss. Salacia pulled her wrist free with offended dignity. "Fine."
"Fine?"
"Yes, fine. Congratulations. What is your plan now?"
Milada looked up.
The fracture was too steep to climb directly. The walls were slick near the bottom and crumbly near the top. Roots hung down in long dark ropes, but most were half torn, and she did not trust them to hold Salacia's weight, let alone both of them. Above, shadows moved fast across the moonlit opening. Everyone was converging again.
Malach was still out there.
Zora was still hurting.
Ari was still dying.
Milada lifted both hands toward the crater wall and reached for the magic in it.
All her life, she had thought of her power as absorption. She had taken the Diamond Storm into herself. Taken radiation, poison, volatile heat. She had swallowed the violence of Tripolis's sky and held it in her body until the realm could survive another decade. Now she knew that some of what she had been containing was not merely radiation. It was chaos wearing a mask Theron had given it.
So she reached for the crater's magic the same way she had reached for the storm.
Nothing answered.
Milada frowned.
She tried again.
The roots trembled. The mud shifted. A little moisture moved, but that was Salacia's doing, not hers. The old magic of Kaen sat all around her, dense and living and utterly uninterested in being pulled into her hands.
"What the fuck?" Milada whispered.
Salacia, who had been wringing mud from a strand of her hair, looked up. "Problem?"
"I can't siphon it."
"The mud?"
"The magic."
"Ah."
Milada turned on her. "What does ah mean?"
"It means either there is no chaos on Kaen for you to siphon, which is possible, since my dear husband stuffed it into his pet disaster centuries ago." Salacia flicked wet hair over one shoulder. "Or…"
Milada stared. "Or what?"
"Or you do not have any power to absorb magic."
Salacia leaned back against the wall, wincing as her new legs shifted under her. "Frankly, it sounded too useful. I never believed my control-freak brother-in-law would allow his little celestial … experiments to possess real power. Not independent power. Not power that might one day go out of his control."
She looked Milada over with clinical interest. "It is not his style."
Milada's jaw clenched.
She thought of Tripolis. Ari standing beside her under a sky full of diamonds. Theron telling her she was the Anchor, the one who swallowed storms, the one trusted to hold destruction in her chest because she alone had been made for it.
"No," Milada said.
Salacia raised an eyebrow. "No to which part?"
Milada looked back at the crater wall. "Maybe I wasn't absorbing anything."
"Maybe."
"Maybe I was pressurizing it."
"Mm."
"Creating a closed system. Holding the chaos in place until it exhausted its outward force."
Salacia's expression shifted from amusement to interest.
Milada moved toward the slope where the fracture had exposed several layers of root, clay, and black stone. "If I can't pull magic into me, I don't need to. I need to make the wall hold still."
Salacia stared at her. "That is your plan?"
"Yes."
"You are going to argue with dirt?"
"I'm going to make it stop collapsing long enough for us to climb."
"Land people are unwell."
Milada ignored her.
She pressed one hand to the wall, not reaching inward this time, not trying to drain or command. Instead, she listened to the pressure. The crater was still settling. Soil wanted to fall. Roots wanted to snap. Stone wanted to slide along the wet seam beneath it. She could feel the motions as competing forces, each small on its own, dangerous together.
She knew systems.
She knew stress.
She knew how catastrophe built when every little failure fed the next.
So she did what she had always done.
She held the failure in place.
he falling dirt slowed. A root that had been tearing strand by strand went still. Mud stopped sliding beneath her foot.
Milada looked up.
A path emerged, not created, only noticed: a shelf of stone, three exposed roots, a wedge of clay packed hard enough to take weight, then another root, then a slant toward the opening.
Salacia followed her gaze.
"Oh," the queen said. "How irritating. That might work."
Milada started climbing.
The first few body-lengths were brutal. Her shoulder screamed each time she reached upward. Twice, her boot slid and only the pressure field kept the wall from giving way beneath her. Salacia climbed below her with considerably more complaining, using water to brace her ankles and then pretending she was not doing so.
"You know," Salacia said, breathless but unwilling to sound it, "if we survive this, I am going to have a very serious conversation with whoever designed knees."
"Quiet."
"I had a tail. It was elegant."
"Milada!"
The shout came from above.
Kin.
Then Cleo, sharper: "Las!"
Then Zora screamed again, closer than before, and the entire wall convulsed.
Milada flattened herself against the stone and tightened the field around the unstable slope. Dirt poured over her hair and down the back of her neck, but the path held. Salacia cursed below her and caught a root with both hands.
"Milada," Salacia said, voice strained.
"What?"
"If this wall collapses, I will haunt you."
"You're immortal."
She climbed faster.
By the time she dragged herself over the lip of the crater, the forest had become a battlefield without anyone yet fully committing to battle.
Kin's crew and Mags's Aazorians were scattered across the hollow, some still climbing out of smaller fissures, others shouting for missing comrades. Cleo had emerged from another fracture, covered in mud and rage, with Kin not far behind her looking bruised and grimly pleased to be alive. Las was being hauled out of a low tunnel by two Lioness women, pale but conscious. Mags stood near a broken pine, one hand pressed to her bleeding temple, her eyes fixed too intently on Malach.
Malach and Mags were halfway between everyone.
Mags had just been pulled from a fracture by Zora's claws. The giant sea dragon crouched behind him, trembling violently, silver scales lifting and settling in waves. Her wings dragged through the broken undergrowth. Green fire flickered weakly between her teeth. She did not seem to know whether to guard him, flee from him, or devour the earth to reach the thing her body craved.
Everyone was moving toward Malach.
Cleo from one side. Kin from another. Even Salacia, now pulling herself over the crater's edge with murder in her eyes, began gathering water again.
Milada looked at them all.
Then she looked at Zora.
The dragon was shaking so hard that the ground under her claws kept cracking. Her pain was not just pain anymore.
Milada changed direction.
"Zora!"
The dragon's head snapped toward her.
Every weapon in the clearing lifted.
"Milada!" Cleo shouted.
Milada ran anyway.
Not toward Malach. Not toward the bargaining chip everyone else had decided mattered most. She ran straight at the giant silver beast whose claws had just split the forest into pieces.
Zora bared her teeth.
Milada did not slow.
"I know," she called, though she had no idea whether Zora understood words in this shape. "I know it hurts."
Zora's wings flared. Wind slammed into Milada hard enough to stagger her. She caught herself, forced the pressure around her body into a narrow shield, and kept moving.
"I am not him," Milada said. "I am not calling you back. I am not holding a leash."
Zora's jaws opened. Green light gathered at the back of her throat, thin and sickly.
"Milada!" Salacia shouted, and this time there was real alarm in it.
Milada reached the dragon's front leg and put both hands against the metal scales.
Zora froze.
The scales were hot and cold at once. Milada felt the chaos residue under them.
The craving wanted motion. Direction. Return. Theron. Theron. Theron. Milada did not pull at it. She gave Zora one breath that belonged to herself.
The dragon shuddered.
Her head lowered.
Milada looked into one huge green eye and saw the cat beneath the beast, the puma beneath the cat, and something buried under all of it that no one had named properly in years.
"Will you take me?" Milada whispered.
Zora's pupil narrowed.
Then the dragon bent her foreleg.
Milada climbed.
Behind her, the clearing exploded into shouting. Salacia laughed like she could not decide whether Milada was brilliant or suicidal. Kin barked orders. Cleo cursed. Las shouted something that Milada could not hear over the heavy metallic beat of Zora's wings beginning to unfurl.
Malach looked up.
"No," he said.
Milada reached down as Zora lurched forward. "Yes."
Malach backed away, but not fast enough. Zora's tail swept between Cleo and Kin, forcing them both back. Milada grabbed Malach by the back of his ruined shirt, used every bit of strength she had left, and hauled him upward as Zora dropped her shoulder.
Malach hit the dragon's back behind her with a furious, undignified sound.
"Hold on," Milada snapped.
"To what?"
Zora answered by launching herself into the air.
The takeoff tore the clearing open.
Wind blasted outward. Branches snapped. Loose dirt and smoke spun into a blinding spiral. Salacia threw one hand over her face and shouted something filthy and admiring. Cleo tried to send roots upward, but Zora's claws ripped free before they could catch. Mags lunged forward with one hand outstretched.
For one second, Milada saw her face through the storm of leaves.
Then Zora climbed.
The forest dropped beneath them in a broken black-green map of craters, torches, running bodies, and widening fractures. The air hit Milada's face cold and wet. Malach's arm locked around her waist from behind, his whole body going rigid with shock.
"You just stole me," he shouted over the wind. Below, Salacia stood at the edge of the largest crater, copper hair whipping around her, staring up at them with a grin sharp enough to cut moonlight.
Milada looked ahead.
Zora's wings beat hard, uneven, carrying them over the wounded forest toward the dark gleam of the sea.
"Where is she taking us?" Malach called.
Milada pressed one hand to the dragon's neck and felt the answer in the direction of the pull.
"I have no idea," Milada said.
Malach went very still behind her.
Far ahead, beyond the trees and the cliffs, the sea opened black under the moon.
Zora flew toward Gorgo's cave.
***
The island rose out of the sea as a dark shape under moonlight, no harbor, no welcoming lamps, no soft slope of sand for a wounded creature to choose. It was rock first, then thorn, then the black mouth of a cave cut into the cliffside where the tide dragged itself in and out with a sound like someone breathing through teeth.
Zora circled it once, wings beating unevenly, each stroke less certain than the last. Milada felt the weakness travel through the dragon's body beneath her. She patted Zora on the head.
Behind her, Malach had gone silent.
He had stopped insulting her somewhere over the sea.
His arm remained locked around her waist, not tenderly, not even consciously. Survival had made this prince a practical pauper.
The wind tore at his robes, at her hair, at Zora's ragged fins. The sea below flashed black and silver. Every few breaths, Zora dipped too low, and cold spray struck Milada's face hard enough to sting. She kept one palm pressed to the dragon's neck, holding the edge of that internal pressure as best she could, not curing it, not even soothing it, only giving the creature a few seconds at a time in which her body did not belong entirely to Theron.
Then Zora's foreleg buckled in midair.
Milada's stomach dropped.
"Hold on," she said to Malach.
Zora hit the island's upper shore in a spray of gravel and broken shell. Her claws gouged four long trenches through the stone. One wing slammed into the ground and folded wrong. Milada flew sideways, struck the wet sand shoulder-first, and rolled until her back hit a boulder. For a moment she could not breathe. The sky spun above her, full of moon and sea mist and loose silver scales still falling through the air like coins thrown for the dead.
Malach landed badly, too. He struck hard enough to scrape one side of his face against the rock, but he got up before Milada did, moving with urgency.
"Zora."
His voice broke on the name. Milada forced herself upright.
The dragon had collapsed near the cave mouth. Her massive body shuddered in waves, the silver scales lifting and clattering back down with a sound like armor being dragged across stone. Green light flickered between her teeth. Her eyes rolled toward them, huge and terrified, but there was no recognition in it now. Only need. Need and hurt and humiliation.
"Look at me," he said, low and fierce. "Zora. Sweetheart. Look at me."
The dragon shook. Her claws raked through stone. The cave wall cracked under the pressure.
Milada staggered to her feet, one hand pressed against her ribs. "Malach, get back."
"No."
"She doesn't know what she's doing."
"I know."
"She could kill you."
"I know, Milada!" he shouted, eyes mad with grief.
For one awful second Milada understood him better than she wanted to. He knew exactly what it was to be kept alive by something that could also destroy him. He knew exactly what it was to have devotion and damage threaded through the same vein until no clean separation remained. "Get your hands off the beast," a woman said.
Gorgo stood in the cave mouth with a lantern in one hand and a long, curved bone needle in the other.
"She's not a beast," Mal protested.
"Isn't she?" Milada turned on him.
She looked less like a witch than an old wound that had learned to stand. Her hair, or what remained of it, hung around her face in dead kelp strands, black-green and dry where the sea wind should have made them shine. Her legs were wrong. Grotesque. Surrounded by beauty for most of his life — Mal was startled.
One knee sat slightly too high. One foot turned outward. The skin at her thighs bore stitch marks older than Milada.
But her eyes were very clear. They went first to Zora, then to Malach, then to Milada. In three glances, Gorgo seemed to gather the catastrophe and decide everyone involved had been an idiot.
Malach did not look away from Zora. "She needs help."
Milada took a step forward. "Hi there," she said, awkward. "My name is Milada—"
"I know who you are," Gorgo cut her off. "Theron's daughter." Zora convulsed.
The whole shore seemed to jump beneath them. Malach lost his footing and fell to one knee, but he kept one hand on her snout, fingers spread against the hot metal scales.
Gorgo's irritation vanished.
She crossed the shore faster than her damaged legs should have allowed, lantern swinging, needle tucked into the knot of her belt. She shoved Malach aside with one hip.
"Move."
"I can help."
"You can shut up."
"I know her bond signature."
"And I know bodies." Gorgo placed both hands against the dragon's jaw, then closed her eyes. Her fingers moved lightly over the scales, pressing here, pausing there, tracing the line where metal met flesh.
Gorgo opened her eyes and looked at him. "How much Chaos can I possibly borrow without your body shutting down?"
Malach looked down at Zora.
The dragon's eye had fixed on him. It was huge, green, wet with pain. Milada had not known dragons could look ashamed. Yet Zora did. She looked ashamed to need, ashamed to shake, ashamed to exist.
"What do you want to do?" Milada asked, seemingly the only one out of the loop.
Malach touched the ridge above her eye with two fingers. "He said she always came back because she loved him," he whispered.
Gorgo made a sound in the back of her throat. "She is his kid."
Milada snorted. "I'm sorry, his what?"
The cave waited behind Gorgo, dark and full of tools. Milada could smell brine, herbs, and something antiseptic, sharp enough to sting the throat. Her whole body wanted to go inside, to sit down, to stop holding herself upright on will alone. But Ari was not here. Ari was in the camp, unconscious and full of chaos, and she had flown away with the one bargaining chip she had.
The guilt hit her then, delayed and vicious.
She had left him.
She had not meant to. She had meant to secure Malach, secure Zora, force the next move, make the only possible choice inside a field of bad ones. But intention did not change the fact that Ari was somewhere behind her, vulnerable, sick, with Cleo and Las and Salacia and Kin and half of Aazor circling the cratered woods.
Her hands started shaking.
"You have someone else dying," Gorgo said.
Milada looked at her.
"My brother."
"Blood brother?"
Milada hesitated.
Gorgo's expression shifted by a fraction. "Ah. Theron's house."
"He's sick," Milada said, and the words felt too small. Sick was cough syrup and fever cloths. Sick was a bed and a window and someone saying morning would be better. Ari was not sick. Ari was being hollowed into a future vessel by the man who had raised them. "Chaos touched him during the Diamond Storm. Or … it was directed inside him."
Gorgo's face lost all humor.
"Where is he?"
"In the camp."
"Then why are you here?"
The question hit like a slap because it had no cruelty in it. Milada's throat closed. "Zora brought us."
"Zora is delirious."
"She came here for you."
"Obviously, she feels family ties," Gorgo said.
Malach's head snapped up. "She was trying to stop me from being taken."
Gorgo did not look at him. "I was not speaking to you, beautiful corpse."
His mouth shut.
Milada should have bristled. She should have defended herself. Instead, to her horror, tears burned at the back of her eyes. She pressed them down with everything she had. She was not going to cry right now.
"Is Zora … Do you mean kid as a …?"
"A kid he sired. A real child."
Zora's wing twitched.
The movement sent a jagged line of green fire along the shore. Malach grabbed Milada's wrist and pulled her back just before it reached her boots. The fire burned out quickly, leaving the stones blackened and glass-smooth.
Gorgo swore under her breath. "Inside. Now. Before she burns through the island."
"How?" Milada asked.
Gorgo gave her a look. "You rode her here, didn't you?"
"She allowed that."
"Hm." Zora shuddered again. The impact moved through the beach, scattering shell fragments against Milada's boots. In her dragon form, she was too large for the cave, too volatile for the shore, and too sick to be asked for anything.
Her wings dragged through the gravel. Her claws dug and released, dug and released, as if her body were trying to run in several directions at once. Toward Theron. Away from him. Toward Malach. Toward the sea. Toward some buried memory none of them had the right to touch.
Gorgo stepped closer, her uneven legs braced against the stones, and set the lantern down. The flame inside it bent toward Zora.
Gorgo's eyes moved to Milada. "Get seawater. Fresh from the tide, not from the pool. The moving water."
Milada did not understand, but she obeyed. She took the shell basin Gorgo thrust at her and ran down the strip of black sand to where the tide foamed around the rocks. Her body protested every step. Her shoulder still burned from the fall. Her palms were scraped raw. The basin filled slowly because her hands were shaking, and that angered her more than the pain did. She had held storms over Tripolis. She had swallowed poison out of the sky. Now she could barely carry seawater without spilling it.
What was this wretched place?
By the time she returned, Gorgo had opened a leather case on the stones. Inside were glass vials, strips of dried kelp, needles, tiny blades, powdered shell, and a spool of thread that glowed faintly blue in the moonlight. Malach knelt at Zora's head, murmuring to her in a voice Milada had never heard from him before.
"I know," he whispered as Zora's jaw trembled under his hands. "I know, sweetheart."
Sweetheart?
Milada looked at the dragon and felt her understanding rearrange itself. Someone had loved her. Badly, maybe. Incompletely. Inside a house of cages and poisons and lies. But loved her enough that a dead man dropped all dignity on a cold shore and called her sweetheart while she shook.
Gorgo took the basin from Milada and sniffed the water. "Good."
"What will it do?"
Malach did not look away from Zora. "Gorgo."
"I am working." She dipped two fingers into the basin and drew wet marks across Zora's brow, along the seam where metal scale met living flesh. The water hissed. Steam rose, carrying a sharp scent.
There was no salt water in any of Theron's realms. What water there was, it was used for bathing, not drinking.
Zora's eye rolled toward her, enormous and frightened. The dragon's teeth hovered inches from Gorgo's arm. Milada felt her heart climb into her throat. Malach's hands tightened once.
She flung the basin of seawater across Zora's face. Then, she grabbed Mal's wrist using her brutish strength and opened a vein with a dull knife. Chaos poured out of him, black as night, dripping into Zora's mouth.
For one second, nothing happened.
Then Zora screamed.
Her scales lifted all at once, thousands of silver plates rising like hackles, and beneath them light moved in frantic green lines. Milada stepped forward without meaning to, but Gorgo caught her by the wrist.
"No."
"She's in pain."
"Yes. So was I when I made myself legs. Pain is not always the enemy."
Malach bowed over Zora's head, his forehead pressed to the burning scales. "Sweetheart. I'm here. I'm here."
The dragon collapsed inward.
It was terrible to watch. Wings folded into nothing. Fins shredded into ribbons of light and vanished under skin. The great silver jaw shortened with a wet crack of bone. Claws split, softened, became hands. Metal scales receded like water drawn under ice, leaving pale skin behind in patches, then shoulders, ribs, knees drawn up against the cold.
When it was over, there was a girl lying on the stones.
Sixteen, perhaps. No older. Naked, shivering, curled on her side where the dragon's head had been. Her hair was silver-white, tangled and wet against her cheeks. Her skin held a faint metallic sheen at the joints, elbows, knees, collarbones, as if the beast shape had not entirely let go. Along her spine, small plates of steel fur trembled and slowly flattened into skin. Her face was narrow, delicate, painfully young.
Milada could not move.
The horror of it was not that Zora had become human. A hellcat could be explained away as Theron's familiar, his companion, his creature. But this was a girl. A child. Someone who should have had clothes, a bed, a favorite food, a mother who knew where she was. Someone who should have been allowed to grow up as a person.
Did this woman make her human or has she always been one?
Malach made a broken sound.
He gathered her into his arms before Gorgo could tell him whether it was safe.
He pulled his black outer robe off with shaking hands and wrapped it around the girl, covering her body, tucking the fabric under her shoulders, holding her against his chest as if she were much smaller than she was.
"Zora," he whispered. "Zora, sweetheart."
The girl's eyelids fluttered.
Her eyes opened.
Still green. Still too bright. But no longer dragon-wide, no longer blind with pain. They found Malach's face slowly, through fever and confusion and whatever wreckage the transformation had left behind.
Her mouth trembled.
"Uncle Mal?" He pressed his mouth to Zora's damp hair and held her so tightly Milada wondered if he was trying to keep her from dissolving back into every shape Theron had ever given her.
"Yes," he said, and his voice was almost unrecognizable. "Your father sends me. I'm here to bring you home."
Zora's fingers curled weakly into his robe. "Where is Theron?"
Malach's eyes opened.
For one suspended second, all the tenderness in him remained, but something under it went black with rage.
"He is not here," he said carefully.
Zora began to shake harder. "Thank all that is holy."
Milada took one involuntary step toward her, then stopped because she had no idea what right she had to comfort anyone.
Gorgo knelt beside them, her bad leg stretched awkwardly to the side. She touched two fingers to Zora's throat, then to the inside of her wrist, then lifted one eyelid.
"She's burning through the last dose," Gorgo said. Malach looked up. "Can you stop it?"
"I can keep her alive."
Zora whimpered and buried her face against Malach's chest. The motion was childlike enough that Milada had to look away. She stared instead at the cave mouth, at the tools, at the dark inner chamber where that covered body lay under kelp-silk. She tried to pull herself back into the larger emergency. Ari. Malach. Theron. The fractured forest. Salacia. But the sound Zora had made when she said Uncle Mal kept echoing in her head.
Theron had not kept a pet.
It was not a companion beast. It was his child. And she was shivering.
"What is happening here?" Milada finally allowed herself to ask.
Zora had not been just Theron's 'companion.' She comforted her when Areilycus couldn't. She was a natural part of every minute of every day Milada had known. Zora was an inseparable part of her life on Tripolis. She brought her here, she opened her eyes — and this whole time — she had been suffering worse than all of them?
Gorgo rose with effort. "This is my niece, Zora."
Milada blinked once. Twice. "Right."
Mal tried to rise with the girl tucked at his side. "Let's go."
For all his deadness, for all the chaos holding him together, he lifted her with a care that made Milada's throat tighten. Zora clung to him, half-conscious, one hand fisted in his collar.
Milada moved to help, following them into the cave with her arms wrapped around herself,
***
By the time the forest settled enough for people to stand again, everyone wanted someone else dead. Mags's little band of Aazorians had mostly lost their appetite for civic intervention. Two of them were dragging a third out of a shallow crack in the earth. One kept insisting his ankle was fine while his foot faced an angle even optimism could not repair. The Lioness women had regrouped around Kin, though they kept glancing toward the sky where Zora had disappeared with Milada and Malach on her back.
Above them, the broken trees leaned and creaked. The forest floor looked as if something enormous had clawed at it from beneath. Craters split the clearing into islands of mud, root, and exposed stone. Wherever Zora's claws had struck, the ground still smoked faintly green. Salacia stood near the center of it all, hair falling over her like a royal cloak.
Her borrowed legs were shaking worse now. The skin at her calves had taken on a faint grey translucence, as if the spell holding them there had begun to remember it was temporary. She did not look down at them. She would have sooner apologized.
"This is what happens," she said, voice bright with fury, "when mortals mingle in the affairs of the gods."
Cleo wiped blood from her mouth and laughed once. "You mean the townsfolk?"
"I mean every single person younger than me, which is every single person present."
Kin lifted his spear from where it had landed in the mud. "You lost her too."
Salacia's head turned slowly.
The Lioness women shifted, weapons ready.
Kin should have stopped. Kin had never enjoyed stopping. "The girl flew away with the Bishop while you were busy being dramatic."
Salacia's head whipped towards him. "Oh, look at that. The Mistress dealing blows to The Wife, how adorable."
"Get over yourself," Kin scoffed, "I'm not interested in him anymore."
Water rose behind Salacia in a thin, glittering arc. Kin braced his spear. Cleo stepped sideways, not toward him, not away from him, but into a position where she could defend Lasicus if the queen struck.
Lasicus saw that movement from the edge of the clearing.
Cleo always knew where to stand for him.
Cleo always knew how to turn her body into a wall.
Cleo always knew, and because she knew, he had never had to learn whether he could stand without one.
He crouched near the roots of a shattered tree, arms wrapped around his knees, breath coming in careful counts that no longer helped. The whole clearing was too loud. Not the shouting, though that was bad enough. The fear underneath it. The anger. The humiliation. Kin's grief had hardened into something so very dark.
Salacia's outrage flashed over pain she refused to feel. Cleo's panic for him kept lashing through the air like a whip with his name cut into it. Mags was a knot of fear and something else, something buried so deep he could not look at it directly without tasting smoke.
And everywhere, the absence of Malach.
That was loud too. A removed object left a shape behind, especially when everyone in the clearing had reached for it at once.
Las pressed his palms harder against his ears. It did nothing. It never did anything.
Cleo's voice cut through the arguing. "Las. Come here."
He tried to stand.
The moment he moved, the clearing moved with him.
Everyone's attention turned his way, even the people pretending it had not. They knew what he could do now, or enough of it to fear him.
Make them quiet, some part of him thought. A room in chaos begged for a single mood. An anxious crowd wanted one command to bind itself around. It would have been so easy. He could calm them. He could press down the anger, dull the fear, make the body choose obedience before the mind recovered enough to object.
Talla had told him not to enter people's feelings without permission. It was such a novel idea — permission matters, no matter who it was you were asking.
Then he heard it. No emotion. No animal fear. No root-anger. No living recoil from pain. A corridor of absence moved toward them through the broken trees, and everything it passed fell silent for a heartbeat before beginning to scream.
Las lowered his hands.
"Stop," he said.
No one did.
Kin and Salacia were still snapping at each other, Cleo was still moving toward him, Mags was still watching the place where Malach had vanished, her face too still. The Aazorians muttered and dragged the injured. The Lioness women tightened formation.
Las stood.
"I said stop."
This time, he did not ask.
His power opened from him in a clean, brutal wave.
The clearing obeyed.
To hell with permissions when death was on the march.
Every voice cut off at once. Kin's mouth stayed open on the next word, but no sound came. Salacia's water froze mid-arc. Cleo stopped mid-step, eyes widening in horror more than surprise. The Lioness women locked in place, not paralyzed exactly, but held inside the sudden overwhelming conviction that stillness was the only possible action. Mags's hand, halfway to her throat, went rigid. Las felt all of them under his hand. His stomach turned.
He had never hated his power more than when it worked perfectly.
"Something is coming," he said.
Cleo's eyes moved to him, the only part of her still free enough to plead.
Las swallowed.
"It's not good."
The forest ahead burst apart.
Salacia was the first to move because the force that struck her did not care that Las had told everyone else to be still. She flew backward so hard the water arc shattered into rain. Her body slammed against the trunk of a black pine with a crack that made several people flinch even under Las's grip. Invisible pressure pinned her there, arms jerked wide, hair blown back from her face, legs dangling several inches above the torn ground.
For the first time since Las had seen her, the sea queen looked afraid.
Not startled. Not offended. Afraid.
The spell unraveled from the feet upward. Skin greyed, then tightened. The elegant calves narrowed and cracked like drying clay. Scales tried to reappear and failed halfway through, forming patches of blackened shine along the shins. Salacia made a sound low in her throat.
Then Areilycus stepped into the clearing.
For a moment, Las did not understand what he was seeing. His brother should have been unconscious in the healer's hut, fevered and bound with a red ribbon, beautiful in the terrible way dying things often were, stripped of all dishonesty.
This creature wore Ari's face, but badly. His hair had silvered at the edges.
One eye remained his familiar warm gold. The other had gone red from iris to pupil, a hard internal beam that lit the side of his face from within. Dark veins moved under his skin.
His mouth opened.
His canines lengthened as everyone watched.
Cleo whispered, "Ari?"
Areilycus did not look at her.
He looked at Salacia.
The invisible force pinning her to the tree tightened. Bark split behind her shoulders. Her withering legs kicked once, uselessly, as if some mortal part of the borrowed shape had not yet understood that it was no longer invited to the party.
Ari crossed the clearing with horrible calm.
No one stopped him. Las could not. The power in Ari did not move through ordinary emotion anymore. There was pain in him, yes, and fear, and some distant trapped consciousness beating its fists against the walls of the body, but around all of it ran chaos. It did not feel like feeling.
It was horrible, overpowering, all-consuming.
Entirely in control.
Salacia bared her teeth. "Do not come closer, boy."
Ari came closer.
She sucked at the air again, harder this time. Leaves crisped. Moss blackened. Aazorians gasped as moisture tugged briefly at their throats.
Nothing left Ari.
No water answered her from his body. No blood-humidity. No sweat. No living reservoir she could seize.
There was only chaos.
Salacia's eyes widened.
"Oh," she breathed.
Ari reached her.
He caught her by the jaw with one hand, almost gently, and tilted her head aside.
Then he sank his teeth into her neck.
Her whole body jerked against the tree, and the invisible force held her there while Ari fed on whatever his altered body thought it needed. Some rage aimed at the woman who had struck Kaen down, some command Theron had planted and Ari's sickened body had mistaken for hunger. Kin finally broke Las's stillness by sheer violence of will. "Get him off her!"
The shout cracked the clearing open.
Everyone moved at once.
Cleo lunged toward Ari. The Lioness women surged forward, then stopped because none of them knew how to attack a celestial biting a sea queen without making the situation worse. Salacia's fingers clawed at Ari's shoulders, her nails cutting through his shirt, but where she opened skin, the wounds glowed red-black instead of bleeding. Mags stood near the edge of the clearing, one hand braced against a broken trunk.
Las saw it now, because his power had touched her stillness and found two currents inside it. Mags's fear, human and frantic. And something else looking through it with terrible attention.
"I can't believe it worked," Mags whispered.
No one heard her except Las.
Maybe Salacia, though she was somewhat occupied.
Mags took a step forward. Her body moved badly, as if the person inside it was unused to its weight. She lifted a hand, then lowered it when nothing answered. No lightning. No fire. No chaos. Nothing but a mortal woman's fingers shaking in the forest air.
"Areilycus," she said.
Ari's red eye shifted, but his teeth stayed buried in Salacia's neck.
The queen's legs were almost gone now. Not returned to tail. Gone. The spell had withered into useless strips of grey flesh and black scale, and beneath her, where a tail should have been, nothing had yet chosen a replacement. Panic moved through her body so violently Las felt it like heat consuming her entirely.
Ari drank deeper.
Salacia's face drained of color.
Mags moved closer, one hand out. "Look at me."
Cleo turned on her. "Stay back."
Mags ignored her.
"Mags," Kin said sharply, but he was staring at Areilycus.
Las understood then that if this continued, Ari would kill Salacia. Or Salacia would tear herself apart trying to survive him. Or the chaos in Ari would learn that devouring old magic felt good and begin looking for more.
He stepped forward.
Cleo saw him move. "Las, no."
He did not stop.
Every part of him wanted to obey her. Every frightened habit, every old love, every place inside him where Cleo had become synonymous with safety. But Ari was his brother too.
The one who had sat beside him during banquets and made insulting drawings on prayer cards to make him laugh. The one who never touched him without warning. The one who said, when rooms grew too loud, Tell me which emotion is mine and I'll hold it up like a lantern.
Las stepped close enough to feel the chaos burning off Ari's skin.
It was not emotion.
But buried under it, nearly smothered, was Ari.
Exhausted. Terrified. Sick with longing. Reaching for one person through the dark.
Las put both hands on Ari's shoulders.
The pain almost dropped him.
Cleo cried out behind him. Salacia choked. Ari's red eye snapped to Las's face, and for one second Las saw nothing of his brother there.
"I know," Las whispered.
Ari snarled.
He did not force obedience into the torn places of his brother's mind. He searched instead for what was already there and still belonged to Ari: love, fear, the desperate wish not to become something that would make Mila look at him with horror.
There.
Small, buried, still alive.
Las touched it as gently as he knew how.
He made it louder.
Ari's whole body convulsed.
His teeth tore free from Salacia's neck, and Salacia fell, or would have fallen if the invisible force had not still pinned her upright. Dark fluid ran down her throat, not blood exactly, but some mingling of sea-magic and failing spellwork. She gasped, one hand flying to the wound.
Ari stumbled backward into Las.
For one heartbeat, the red eye dimmed.
The gold returned around the edges.
"Ari," Las said, and this time his voice broke. "Come back."
Mags stood frozen several feet away, her borrowed face emptied of everything but fascination.
Areilycus looked at Las as if seeing him from underwater.
Then he looked around the clearing.
At Salacia pinned to the tree, neck torn.
At Kin, spear raised and useless.
The invisible force dropped.
Salacia collapsed to the ground with a strangled breath, her ruined legs folding beneath her. Cleo rushed forward, not to the queen but to Las, catching him as Ari's weight started to drag them both down.
Ari's knees hit the mud.
The red light in his eye flickered once, then faded to a dull ember.
"Mila," he said.
It was barely a word. Barely sound.
Then Areilycus collapsed into his brother's arms.