45
CODY
The night is quiet. Distantly, men are shouting, Fire Scale wings are beating, Yurkites are cheering. The violent, victorious world carries on as ever it did, and doesn’t know that in a crescent gorge above the clouds, a girl is sitting cross-legged with a Fire Scale’s head in her lap.
The Fire Scale sleeps, and Cody almost sleeps. All the sounds of the Summer Alps, of Yurka, exist outside of the lair, muffled, as if behind a curtain.
Indeed, the sky is so glittering thick with stars that the entry itself seems stacked with shards of broken crystal and quite impassable.
Death is coming, as sure as the dawn. As sure as a new day and a new dusk; as sure as the old stars that have sat in the same constellations forever.
Not yet, Cody says. Her blade is not on her back – it
