Dragon Empress

Chapter 29

Bile rose in her throat as she raised a hand and wrenched it sideways. Thorion burst into a million sparkling molecules, erased with her violent gesture. She felt nothing in her soul, but nausea roiled in her gut and visions whirled in her brain.

She was in the Fironem, on a range of jagged hills. Thorion, the real Thorion, the one she’d really destroyed all those years ago, battled a pitch-black drachvold and its shadowman rider. A plume of obsidian shadowfire engulfed her drackling, and he fell from the sky.

He crashed against the rocks. Twitched twice.

Then he was still.

Keriya clawed at the sides of her head, as if hoping to tear the accursed memory from her mind. The hollow simulacrum she’d destroyed was nothing to her, yet she felt as if she’d lost her bondmate all over again.

His destruction wrenched something loose inside her. A thin thread connecting her heart to her head snapped. Sense and reason fled. She let out a terrible sound: not a laugh, not a scream, but some rough, awful combination of the two.

More.

She wanted to wield more, if only to obliterate the horror rising in her throat, cutting off her air flow. Crumpling, she slammed her fists into the floor of the balcony. The ground compressed outward from her impact, marble cresting like whitecaps in a sea storm. The gruesome circle of entrails evaporated. So did the balcony itself.

Noryk fractured, cracks racing across every pristine surface as Keriya tore her creation apart. Walls and roads and trees and butterflies became dust at the touch of her reeling mind, separated into their smallest elemental particles. A sparkling rainbow of threads drifted around her, making her eyes water with their subtle beauty, their accusatory brightness.

Lashing out one last time, she banished the matrix of shining molecules.

Then everything was nothing.

It was gone.

Keriya floated on thin air. Steering herself toward the semblance of calm, she sank, hair and peasant dress fluttering around her in soft waves. She touched down on a cliff overlooking the valley of her ordeals and gazed across the empty expanse with wide, unseeing eyes.

She doubled over and heaved. Only bile came up from her empty stomach. Throat burning, she coughed and gagged until her queasiness subsided.

Eerie silence enshrouded her. Something Necrovar had said in the Final Battle emerged from her memory:

She can’t break the cycle; she’s destined to destroy.

When finally she had composed herself, she turned. Shivnath loomed behind her atop a pointed boulder. The Dragon Empress wore the same blank expression that Keriya assumed was on her own face.

“Why did you do that?” whispered Shivnath.

Keriya blinked.

“What—? I . . . you told me to.” She spoke haltingly, trying to remember how to articulate, to use her words. “I had to.”

Shivnath didn’t respond.

“I had to, Shivnath. You wanted to know if I could. I . . . I was going to—rrgh!” Keriya put her head in her bloodstained hands and thudded to her knees, dangerously close to the cliff’s edge. She quivered with confusion, or possibly fury. Heat coursed through her, flooding her with flames more fearsome than the firemagic ordeal.

“I don’t know—I had to. I HAD TO!”

She clenched her jaw and sucked a deep breath through her teeth. In, out, again and again, she breathed and struggled to find her way back to sanity.

She counted to ten in her head and concentrated on dousing the anger in her chest. When at last her rage seeped away, her hands fell to her lap. “You said you needed to test my abilities.”

“And you said you were going to rise above your darkness.”

Keriya hunched her shoulders. A new burning sensation corroded her innards, but it was not anger this time. It was shame.

I was supposed to learn to control myself. I was supposed to win. It wasn’t supposed to end like this.

In her quest for power, she’d proven herself unworthy of a happy ending.

“The greatest lie the humans ever told,” whispered Shivnath, “was that there could be such a thing as a happily-ever after.”

Tears leaked from the corners of Keriya’s eyes. Those words were cruel and pointed, designed to slice at her most vulnerable spots. She’d known it all along, but she’d deluded herself into thinking she had a chance at happiness. In one disastrous misstep, she’d destroyed what little chance she’d had—but what choice had there been?

“There is always a choice,” the dragon continued. “You chose wrong.”

“You told me to do it. I listened to you.”

“Why?”

Why, indeed? Keriya bit her lip until it bled. She wanted to wring the answers from herself like water from a cloth, but her mind was oddly blank.

“You came to my home and spouted words of heroism and love,” said Shivnath. “You wanted to save the world.”

Yes, and that was true. But Thorion had set her off-kilter, and when Shivnath had begun shouting, everything that made her who she was had slipped away. Somehow, it had all gone wrong.

Keriya’s body ached. It was as if her sternum were splitting in half.

Heartbreak.

No. She’d experienced heartbreak before, and it had been different. More pure sorrow, less acidic sickness. This was more like . . .

Betrayal.

“I trusted you,” Keriya whispered.

“That was your mistake,” was the dragon’s soft reply. “Perhaps it was also mine. I watched you grow, learn hard truths, suffer hard lessons. You changed—and slowly, you changed me. I thought you would be strong enough not to follow in my footsteps . . . but we are too similar, you and I.”

Keriya squeezed her eyes shut, willing herself not to cry. Shivnath said she’d changed, but evidently she hadn’t. It was as if years of experience had been stripped away during her ordeals, rendering her the foolish, impressionable child she’d once been.

A child full of darkness.

“I never wanted you to be like me,” Shivnath murmured. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s valemagic’s fault,” said Keriya—one last, desperate excuse. “I hear its voice in my head, telling me it wants more. I wield, and it’s intoxicating. It made me—”

“It did nothing.” Shivnath’s voice was not harsh; it hadn’t been harsh since Keriya’s act of destruction, but that made everything worse. “Valemagic desires preservation as much as it yearns for destruction. It cannot choose one or the other of these things, for it is perfectly balanced between them. Where, then, do its perceived choices come from?”

Keriya suspected she didn’t want to hear the answer.

“You,” Shivnath breathed. “Magic is energy, and wielders choose what to do with it. The so-called voice of valemagic that you hear is not my power tempting you; it is your voice, amplified a thousandfold.”

Every time Keriya had wielded valemagic, she’d thought she was resisting its bloodthirsty call. How awful, how poetic that she’d been fighting herself all this time.

When had she fallen so far, become such a monster?

“Power corrupts,” she murmured, hugging her arms to her stomach.

Shivnath shook her noble head. “You could have done anything with your power. You chose destruction.”

Keriya hunched over, huddling in misery. Why had she listened to Shivnath? She’d known it had been wrong, she’d felt it in her bones.

Yet what answer could there be, if not destruction? Keriya’s pitiful plans to end the Shadow War all hinged on Necrovar’s death. The world expected his death. He was too powerful, too cruel to keep alive, even if the balance dictated it.

“What would you do?” she asked. “How would you end the war if you were the one fighting Necrovar?”

Shivnath’s unforgiving eyes softened. No longer the darkness of necromagic and death, they were now the darkness of grief at midnight. “If you’d asked me two decades ago, I’d have said I wouldn’t fight at all. Now . . . now it does not matter what I do. Because I am a prisoner, because I have been feeding the wrong half of myself—but mostly because I am also unworthy of this power.”

Keriya winced, looking away. “This was a test, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And I . . . ?”

“You will return to Selaras,” said Shivnath. “But you will not be able to wield.”

The words rang in Keriya’s ears. They collided against her, as if she were a clocktower bell and they were the mallet striking her insides.

Adrenaline forced her to her feet. “You can’t! How will I win without valemagic? Without any magic?!”

Shivnath ignored her. A bright flash seared Keriya’s eyes. She staggered sideways, buffeted by a sudden, fierce gust. Her left foot came down on nothing but air, and she fell from the cliff.

She tumbled not toward the valley, but into a different world. She screamed as she collided with icy stone and rolled down the side of a mountain, dragging debris with her. Aurelas bounced painfully at her hip.

When she came to a stop she was battered and bruised, unable to breathe. Groaning, she assessed the damage to her body. To her dismay, the magical changes she’d wrought upon herself had been reversed. She was n***d, and her body bore new scrapes in addition to all her old scars. She laid a hand on her chest and felt the familiar dark blemish crouching atop her heart, like a wicked predator huddled over its kill.

Keriya squinted up the slope. From the look and feel of her surroundings, she was back on Selaras. This world breathed in a way the Broken Vale had not. An undercurrent of life hummed around her. Wind whisked clouds across the evening sky—a sky the color of rusty blood.

Shivnath loomed above, looking down from a rocky ridge.

“You failed,” said the Dragon Empress.

Keriya scrambled to her feet. She would beg Shivnath’s forgiveness. She would demand a second chance.

But she blinked, and Shivnath was gone.

“No,” Keriya wheezed, collapsing against the slope. Hesitantly, terrified of what she would discover, she reached inside herself and sought her source.

She was empty.

“NO!” she screamed, slamming her fist on the ground.

What was the point in crippling her like this? Punishment? This wasn’t punishing her, this was punishing the world. Selaras was now in the same position it had been in five years ago when Keriya had ventured forth on her quest. Everything had come full circle.

Truly it had—because as her senses returned, she realized where she was.

Aeria.

CHAPTER NINETEEN“From a barren battlefield, yet can love still grow.”

~ Myosi Proverb

Flies had arrived on the battlefield. They circled bodies and landed wherever the scent of death was sweetest—on seeping wounds, on festering flesh—to feast and lay their eggs. Maggots swarmed on sun-swollen corpses, writhing gleefully.

Wind brushed the dry, yellow-brown grass. Bloodblossom sprouted in clumps, soaking up the nutritious c*****e of war. Tiny crimson flowers wreathed the gore like strands of ornamental rubies.

Roxanne had never experienced battle like this. After taking Threl, the shadowtroops had pushed on and on, carving a b****y swath across the continent. The World Alliance had been fighting nonstop for a week.

“This is a battle of attrition,” thundered Caelburn, trotting along the front lines astride his arion mount. “The enemy hopes to wear us down, to seize on Allentria’s perceived weakness, but we are not weak. Our alliance is larger and stronger than ever, growing each day. We have Jidaeln!” He pointed to a unit of Jidaelni riflemen who brought their right fists to their hearts and bowed.

“We have the Ghoren Islands!” Here Caelburn pointed to Enwha’s unit at the back of the formation. Astride her odhonata, Enwha raised her fist skyward in a salute. The mounted Ghoori warriors, arrayed in a line and awaiting takeoff, emulated her.

“And we have the dragons!” Caelburn faced Khyvette, who stood at the head of the division. She spread her massive wings, allowing the first light of dawn to filter through their dark green membranes.