Dragon Empress

Chapter 18

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she breathed.

Shivnath rolled her wing joints in a negligent shrug. “What would I have said? That I am the oldest creature on Selaras, that I could compress the universe into a singularity and create a new one from its ruin if the fancy struck me? What would that have changed?”

Something hot and acidic built inside Keriya. “It would have changed everything!”

But quickly as her fury flared, it died. She choked on her accusations. For all that she’d unearthed a soul-shattering secret, this was not a new fight.

She’d had this argument with Shivnath last year. The dragon god—Dragon Empress—had known of Keriya’s heritage and powers from the start, and had used Keriya as a pawn to fix all that had been wrong with Selaras for the past ten ages.

Maybe knowing Shivnath’s identity wouldn’t have made a difference. In fact, Keriya conceded, maybe this was the reason Shivnath had been forced to manipulate instead of being forthright.

The Dragon Empress was bound by terrible magic and deadly secrets: a prisoner through and through.

“You’re upset I did not trust you with the truth,” said Shivnath, folding her wings against her sleek sides.

“I’m upset for a lot of reasons.”

Pearly horns, curved like those of a ram, glinted as Shivnath inclined her head. “You have every right to be.”

“How is this possible?” Keriya pressed. “You’re the Allentrian guardian of earthmagic.”

“So I am. But just because you know a thing to be true, that does not mean there are no other true things,” Shivnath replied, as infuriatingly calm and cryptic as ever. “I did warn you. Do you remember the first advice I offered you?”

Keriya clenched her jaw.

You cannot trust anyone.

On her journey, she’d uncovered layer after layer of Shivnath’s treachery. Time and again the dragon had withheld vital information. If Shivnath had been truthful, Thorion might not have died. If Shivnath had helped her, she might not have suffered defeat at Necrovar’s hands. If Shivnath had tried to work with her instead of against her, they might have saved the world.

But again, Keriya reasoned, maybe not. She hadn’t been ready to be a hero when she’d met Shivnath, and Shivnath was bound by magical laws. No matter what power the dragon guarded, those laws prevented her from meddling in mortal affairs.

Mostly.

“You must hate me,” Shivnath observed in a soft voice, a far cry from her usual, powerful rumble.

“I’ve wasted too much time on hatred. I want to end the Shadow War, and I know you do, too. Whatever your reasons, I know you want it over. We have to work together. I’m willing to do that if you are.”

Shivnath’s eyes danced. On Selaras, the pitch-black orbs devoured light rather than reflecting it; here, they sparkled with the echoes of every galaxy. Her overbright gaze narrowed with the faintest tightening of her brow ridges.

Could it be that the Dragon Empress, the guardian of Pure Valemagic, was afraid?

Keriya crossed her arms. “If you can’t trust me by now, then you’re hopeless. I forgave every one of your betrayals. I followed the path you set when I was young, weak, and ignorant—I followed it straight through to the end. I’m here at last.”

A tear spilled past her lashes, forging a cold path down her cheek.

“I’m here begging you to help me, to trust me enough to help you. If you can’t trust, you’ll never know what love is.”

She thought of Fletcher and Roxanne, of Effrax and Seba. She thought of Viran—Viran, whom she’d entrusted with her all-too-fragile heart.

The fine scales of Shivnath’s snout slipped over one another as she bared her fangs. “I’ve trusted and I’ve loved. I am a hundred-thousand years old, Keriya. Forgive me if I think the validity of your advice is worth as much as a speck of dust between my scales.”

“Fine,” Keriya snapped, converting heartbreak to anger as quickly as she could convert potential energy to a physical spell. “Don’t trust me. Let the Shadow destroy Selaras.”

“The Shadow is my other half. It cannot rule or destroy Selaras without my consent.”

“Well, I don’t know if you missed it, Empress I-Know-Everything,” Keriya said rudely, “but the Shadow has ways of accessing your power. When he escapes the Etherworld, he could target the dragons. He could target Sethildras, which houses the soul of Valerion Equilumos.”

Shivnath’s face twitched.

“He could target me,” Keriya added in a soft voice, unsure if this argument would register on the god’s broken moral compass. “If I don’t learn to control valemagic, I will fall when he comes for me next. There’s too much depending on my success to risk failure.”

The dragon’s head tilted at a contemplative angle. “Your quest has made you wiser.”

“It was a long road, but I learned in the end.”

Stillness settled on the two of them. They stared at each other, immobile, as if they were two more stone obelisks in the Broken Vale.

Keriya didn’t understand the ache in her heart. It wasn’t anger. It should have been anger, or hatred, but she stood by what she’d said. She’d wasted too much, lost too much because of her darkness. She did not want to live in darkness anymore.

“I wish you would trust me,” she whispered.

“Why are you so fixated on that?”

“Gee, take a wild guess, Shivnath. You’re the only mother I’ve ever known.”

When Keriya realized what she’d said, she clapped her hands over her mouth. She was stupid for having admitted it, and stupider still for feeling it.

Shivnath’s purple slitted pupils widened, softening into ovals. That simple change made the dragon’s countenance seem brand new. For the first time, Keriya saw warmth beneath the coldness, sorrow behind the power.

“You never knew your parents,” the dragon murmured. “But I did. I watched your ancestral line for five-thousand years. They were descended from Valerion Equilumos.”

This felt like a sharp left-turn in the conversation, a convenient way for Shivnath to wriggle out of addressing Keriya’s declaration, but she did not interrupt. She wanted to hear this.

“Valerion.” Shivnath’s sculpted features melted into an expression of grief. “My son.”

A short, mirthless laugh escaped Keriya.

“How is that possible? It’s not possible, because . . .”

“Because why?”

Keriya clung to incredulity so she wouldn’t have to confront the tempest brewing within her. “Because Valerion was the son of Ghokarian Equilumos—”

“Who did not spawn an egg on his own,” Shivnath interrupted scornfully.

Only now did it strike Keriya as odd that none of the legends of Valerion had ever mentioned his mother.

“But,” she continued, desperate to find a flaw in this newest secret, “you can’t love. I mean, dragons don’t have emotions.”

She was grasping at straws. Love had nothing to do with it. More to the point, however stoic and standoffish Shivnath seemed, she’d always been laden with emotion.

“Hang on. Why—how do you have emotions?”

“All dragons were forced to give up emotion in exchange for the power of valemagic, myself included; but I’m good at finding the loophole in every rule.”

That wasn’t a proper answer, but it was all the answer Keriya needed. Her knees gave way and she sank to the whispering grass of the Broken Vale, tears blurring her vision.

Shivnath hunkered down on the broken granite slab, lowering her face to stare at Keriya. “It is not the Equilumos bloodline that can defeat Necrovar, or make him invincible if he attains its power—it is my bloodline. The blood of the Dragon Empress. The other half of his whole.”

Tears spilled down Keriya’s cheeks. Last year, Shivnath’s silence had been merely a betrayal—now it was also a rejection. The dragon was capable of emotion, which meant she was capable of love . . . but she had never loved Keriya.

Keriya, unfortunately, had been a wayward child craving for someone to believe in her. Despite every horrible thing, every painful discovery, every damning interaction, she had loved Shivnath.

It had taken til now to realize this; and in the same momentous breath in which her love had unfolded in its entirety, her heart had shattered.

A cool breeze kissed her tear-stained face. She noticed it through her haze only because it was so out of place in the stillness of the Broken Vale. Through waterlogged lashes she looked up to find Shivnath had drawn near. The tip of the dragon’s nose was inches from her own.

“I’ve made mistakes.” Shivnath’s breath, scented like snowy mountains, calmed Keriya. “And those mistakes cost me everything.”

“Was it worth it? Losing everything and everyone you loved? What were you fighting for, if not them?”

“A good question,” Shivnath admitted. “I was fighting for the future. Once upon a time, I believed it was worth fighting for.”

Something about that phrasing sent a frisson of unease through Keriya. “You no longer believe that?”

“Valemagic has exacted a terrible toll on me. It desires destruction as much as it seeks preservation; thus, I wage a constant war with myself. And for the first time in a hundred-thousand years, I hurt. Because I am imbalanced. Because I have chosen a side.”

“I sure hope it’s the preservation side,” said Keriya, straining for a scrap of levity.

Shivnath closed her fathomless black eyes and said nothing.

“It is, isn’t it?”

No response from the god.

“Shivnath, if you’re planning to destroy the world, I would like to know.”

A rumble, nearly imperceptible, echoed along the length of Shivnath’s throat—a faint dragon laugh. “I am not planning to destroy Selaras. Therein lies the problem: I’ve chosen the losing side.”

“How can you say that?”

“I have fed the wrong half of myself. The side of me that thrives on hatred and conflict and destruction has grown strong, and the side that desires preservation is weak,” Shivnath explained, cracking open her eyes. “As a result, the world has weakened with it. Everything we do now to preserve it, every fight we undertake, will be ten times as difficult.”

“Only ten times?” Keriya forced a smile. “I like those odds.”

Shivnath’s face crinkled in consternation. The expression, so simple and human, drew a shaky laugh from Keriya. “I’m used to working ten times as hard as I ought to.”

A single tear wormed from the corner of Shivnath’s eye. It rolled down her muzzle, snagging on scales, until it fell from her lip. The moment it left her hide, it crystallized into a gemstone. It thudded to the grass and cooled, darkening to a purple-tinged pebble.

Keriya laid a hand on Shivnath’s nose. She’d only touched Shivnath once, long ago, and that had been in a dream. Her fingers drifted across soft, cold scales to brush away the tear’s residue. Then she rested her head in the space between Shivnath’s nostrils, snaking her arms around the great snout.

“I’m sorry,” Keriya and Shivnath said at the same time.

Shivnath’s scales warmed. “You have nothing to apologize for.”

Vibrations pulsed through Keriya as the god thrummed a tuneless lullaby, a sound of draconic contentment. She hadn’t heard such a noise in years, not since Thorion had died. Her chest heaved with the aftershock of sobs—she was too spent to cry again, nor did she want to relinquish the quiet vindication of this moment.

The moment couldn’t last; there was a wide world outside the Broken Vale, and it needed saving. Keriya drew away and looked up. Shivnath’s face, shining with affection for the first time in her memory, hardened.

“What is your plan for ending the Shadow War?”

Keriya shrugged. “You know the plan. If I master valemagic, I can do anything.”

“Indeed,” Shivnath said in an unreadable tone. Keriya feared that answer might have landed her in trouble until the Dragon Empress added, “I will teach you how to properly wield my power.”