The Water Dragon's Bond

Chapter 7: The Counterfeit Pulse

The rain barrel beside Greta’s garden wall was carved from an old cider cask, its oak staves swollen with stagnant bog water and rimmed with green slime.

Emmalena knelt before it in the raw gray drizzle of early morning, her hands braced on the iron hoop. She leaned down until her face broke the surface mist, staring into the dark circle of water below.

The reflection looking back at her was a stranger’s ghost.

Her cheekbones, once sweeping and sharp beneath iridescent sapphire scales, were now jutting ridges under paper-thin, sallow skin. Her sea-glass eyes—which had once caught the light of deep oceanic trenches and shone with subterranean luminescence—were dull, flat, and hollowed out by dark purple crescents of exhaustion. Her hair was a coarse, tangled mass of dark brown wool, pinned back with a splinter of peeled birch. There was no gleam to her teeth, no silver-blue sheen across her collarbones, no hint of the majestic leviathan that had once carved through the northern clouds.

She looked entirely, pitifully mortal.

Emmalena closed her eyes and reached inward, searching for the vast, rhythmic tide that had defined every second of her existence since she had cracked her eggshell twenty winters ago.

There was only silence.

Not the quiet of a calm sea at sunrise, but the dead, suffocating silence of a dry well. The permafrost seal she had forced over her shattered core remained unyielding, a monolithic slab of black ice lodged directly behind her sternum. When she concentrated, she could not feel the rain falling on her shoulders as an extension of her own nervous system; she felt it only as cold drops of dirty water soaking through a scratchy wool kirtle, chilling her fragile human skin until gooseflesh erupted along her arms.

The loss hit her with the physical force of a blow to the ribs.

My wings, she thought, her fingers digging into the rotted lip of the barrel until the wood splintered beneath her nails. My sky.

For ten years House Eleague had kept her captive, and for five of those years Jonas had kept her tethered with heavy runes and iron chains, but even in their deepest dungeon, she had still known what she was. She had felt the pressure of the upper atmosphere in her marrow; she had known precisely when the tide turned on the western coast four hundred leagues away; she had possessed the sovereign power to turn her blood into steam or drown a charging warhorse in a sphere of pressurized mist.

Now, if she tripped over a garden stone, her mortal flesh simply tore. If she stayed out in the frost too long, her mortal fingers turned blue and died.

"Stop gaping at your own misery, girl," a voice rasped from the cottage doorway. "The cabbage won't weed itself, and the rain isn't going to turn into hot cider just because you're sulking at it."

Greta stood on the threshold, a heavy iron kettle in one hand and a basket of dried peat bricks in the other. She wore her usual faded brown kirtle, her gray hair bundled beneath a soiled linen kerchief, her sharp features set in their permanent expression of practical disdain.

Emmalena stood up quickly, smoothing down the front of her borrowed gray dress. Her knees gave a sickening, brittle c***k as she straightened—a mortal sound that made her stomach turn.

"I was not sulking," Emmalena said, her voice still rough from the lingering fever. "I was... checking the water level."

"The water level is fine. It rains five days out of seven in this cursed hollow," Greta said, setting the kettle on the stone bench outside the door. She tossed a short-handled iron hoe toward Emmalena’s feet. It landed with a dull thud in the wet mud. "The winter leeks in the lower bed are choked with dock-weed. Pull them by the taproot. If you snap them at the collar, they'll grow back twice as thick before the new moon."

Emmalena looked at the iron hoe. The tool was crude, pitted with rust, and weighed perhaps four pounds.

To a water dragon in her prime, an iron plowshare was something to be crushed between two claws for amusement. But as Emmalena bent down and picked up the hoe, the weight pulled sharply on her healing sternum, sending a warning pulse of ache through her ribs.

"Understood," Emmalena murmured, keeping her gaze fixed on the ground.

She walked to the small garden plot behind the cottage. The soil was a dense, heavy clay mixed with river gravel and rotting leaves, saturated by weeks of ceaseless mountain drizzle.

Emmalena swung the hoe.

The iron blade struck the wet clay with a pathetic schluck, penetrating barely two inches into the dirt. The impact jarred her wrists, sending a sharp vibration up her forearms that made her dislocated shoulder throb with sickening heat.

She gritted her teeth and pulled. The heavy clump of clay refused to budge.

She had to drop to her knees in the cold mud, digging her bare fingers into the earth around the dock-weed's thick, yellow taproot. The mud was freezing, caking under her fingernails, grinding against her raw cuticles. Her human back began to burn with an unfamiliar, humiliating ache—the strain of small, weak muscles struggling against simple gravity.

For an hour, she fought the garden.

Every weed was an adversary. Her breath came in short, ragged gasps, misting in the cold air. Sweat mingled with the drizzle on her forehead, stinging her eyes. She was covered in gray sludge from her shins to her waist, her hands trembling so violently she could barely keep her grip on the weed stalks.

It was degrading. It was exhausting. And worst of all, it was petty.

I am a storm-bringer, her mind screamed against the silence in her chest. I am the tide that smashes stone.

She seized a massive clump of thistle, planting her heels in the mud, and hauled backward with everything her mortal frame possessed.

The root snapped beneath the soil.

The sudden loss of resistance sent Emmalena sprawling backward into the wet dirt. She landed hard on her elbows, the shock knocking the thin mortal breath straight out of her lungs. Beside her, a half-full wooden bucket of garden refuse tipped over, splashing freezing, muddy water across her chest and lap.

A blind, instinctive surge of fury overtook her.

Without thinking, without remembering the permafrost seal, Emmalena thrust her right hand toward the spilled water, her fingers spreading in the ancient, commanding gesture of draconic sovereignty.

Rise, her will commanded. Heave.

She reached for the water element that had answered her since the day she took form in the mountain lake.

Nothing happened.

The muddy water merely soaked into her woolen skirt, cold and dead.

Inside her chest, however, the response was instantaneous.

The black ice of the Deep Submersion seal gave a terrifying, crystalline c***k.

A razor-sharp bolt of white agony shot through her core, as if an iron spike had been driven through her heart and hammered out between her shoulder blades. The dormant Shatter-Wasting stirred beneath the ice, releasing a single, caustic drop of spiritual acid into her bloodstream.

Emmalena curled into a tight ball in the mud, clutching her chest, unable to draw air.

Her vision flashed white, then black. In the darkness behind her eyelids, she was no longer in Greta’s garden. She was back in the subterranean kennel of House Eleague, pinned against the freezing limestone floor by three iron-tipped staves. She could hear the rhythmic c***k-snap of Jonas’s leather riding crop against his polished riding boot.

"Look at it," Jonas’s voice whispered in her ear, smooth, cultured, and dripping with venomous amusement. "A grand dragon of the western shoals, reduced to a worm in a puddle. You cannot even summon enough mist to clean my floors, Emmalena. You are an elemental defect. A waste of meat and scales."

"No," she gasped into the dirt, her fingers clawing at the frozen clay. "No, please..."

"Give me the core," the memory hissed, accompanied by the phantom smell of scorched sulfur and Jonas’s cloying lilac pomade. "If you cannot serve my ascendancy, you have no right to the spark."

A rough hand clamped down hard on her shoulder.

Emmalena lashed out with a feral snarl, her mortal fingernails raking across skin.

"Cease your thrashing, you foolish creature!" Greta’s voice cut through the nightmare like an iron bell.

The old woman did not strike her. She did not draw an extraction needle. She simply clamped her sturdy, work-hardened fingers around Emmalena’s wrists, pinning them firmly against Emmalena’s own chest, using her body weight to anchor the shaking girl to the earth.

"Breathe, damn you," Greta commanded, her voice low and steady. "Draw the air in through your nose. Look at the mud. Look at my boots. You're in Easona. There are no highborn bastards here."

Emmalena forced her eyes open.

Her gaze locked onto the worn, cracked leather of Greta’s work clogs, encrusted with dried sheep dung and garden soil. Slowly, the phantom scent of lilac pomade faded, replaced by the pungent aroma of wet earth, rotting leaves, and the woodsmoke curling from the cottage chimney.

The agony in her chest subsided back into a dull, throbbing ache as the Deep Submersion seal held fast once more, freezing the wasting back into dormancy.

She lay there for several minutes, her chest heaving against Greta’s grip, her skin burning with shame.

"I tried..." Emmalena choked out, her voice cracking. "I tried to... command it."

"Then you're twice as stupid as you look," Greta said, releasing Emmalena’s wrists and sitting back on her heels in the mud, completely indifferent to the ruin of her own apron. "I told you on the first day: whatever deviltry you broke inside yourself, it's held together with spit and cobwebs. You try to play the great lady with magic again, and you'll drop dead in my leek bed, and then I'll have to dig a hole six feet deep in this frozen clay. I'm too old for grave-digging."

Emmalena looked away, pressing her forehead against her mud-caked knees. "It is not magic. It was... what I was."

"What you were doesn't feed the pot," Greta said bluntly. She stood up, her knees popping, and retrieved the iron hoe from the dirt. She held it out handle-first. "What you are is a girl who needs to pull twenty more docks before the soup goes on the fire."

Emmalena looked up at the old woman. There was no pity in Greta’s weathered, gray eyes. No disgust, no cruelty, and no awe. She looked at Emmalena the same way she would look at a half-starved, broken-legged donkey that needed to be coaxed back into the traces.

It was not kindness. It was something far rarer: complete, unvarnished indifference to her broken status.

Emmalena reached out with a trembling hand and took the wooden handle.

"Get up," Greta said, turning her back and walking toward the cottage. "The mud will wash out of the wool if you get to the creek before it dries."

Emmalena pushed herself to her feet. Every joint in her body screamed in protest; her palms were blistered, her dress was soaked, and her dignity was in tatters.

She pressed her left hand against the center of her ribcage.

Beneath the linen shift, beneath the scarred skin, she felt a small, rapid thumping.

It was not the slow, oceanic resonance of a dragon’s heart—a rhythm that beat once for every ten mortal breaths, sending waves of pure elemental heat coursing through giant arteries. It was the frantic, fragile, counterfeit pulse of a common human being, ticking away like a cheap brass clock.

It was weak. It was pathetic.

But it is beating, she realized, watching her own white breath drift into the cold mountain air.

She raised the iron hoe, set the blade against the base of the next weed, and drove it into the earth.

It was not hope. Hope was a luxury for creatures with wings and patrons.

It was merely survival. And for today, that would have to be enough.