When Dragons Burn

Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Miron

Heat runs in waves. Not the kind from fire. The kind from memory when the body can’t tell the difference between now and then.

In the dream I am where I always end up when fever takes me: on the west ridge above the river, smoke sitting low enough to taste. The ground is glassed in patches where previous blasts cooked the dirt. We’d fought for three days there. The Council called it a skirmish. It wasn’t. We lost five. They lost more. The air still carries that tin taste of scorched wardstone.

I know it’s a dream because the details crowd each other. Voss is young and old at the same time, shouting orders that echo across years. The banner at my back is the old Emberflame standard, the one we retired after the treaty on Tower Hill. The Shroud hums the way it used to when it was new and strong, not the thin, tear-prone thing it is now. But the enemy is wrong in one way that is always the same: Seraven is there when he never stood on that ridge in life. He walks through steam from the river like a man out for a night breeze, coat open, pale eyes bright and hard. Shadowflame dragons wheel behind him, black fire leaving afterimages in the air.

We were not ready for the new fire when it came. It ate light. It ate sound. It curled in on itself and then snapped out in lines that found throats and lungs. My squad held. We always held. That is what we were used for.

I tell myself to wake up. I can’t. The body thinks it’s safer to run the drill again.

“Left flank, anchor,” Voss yells. His voice is alive in my ear like the comm bead never failed. “Miron—ground them.”

I ground them. I hear talons hit dirt and keep their bodies down with low heat and pressure pulses that disrupt wingbeats. It’s all scale and timing, almost boring at this distance. My blade takes one in the chest when he stumbles into range. He folds and stops moving. Shadowfire hisses from the cut and eats into the dirt. It smells wrong, like cold metal and rot. The next one is faster. He goes for my eyes in the final rush. I give him my shoulder instead and push the heat through the wound as I pull the blade free. He burns from the inside out and looks surprised about it.

We had names for them then—unit numbers and marks. I knew them later when we cleaned up after. In the dream, they are faceless. Only the boy keeps a face. He was young enough to have soft edges around the mouth. His sword was longer than the regulation issue, a vanity thing. He smiled when he cut. That is not a thing I unsee. I put him down hard and fast. I remember the sound his back made when it hit the stone. I remember that he didn’t stop smiling until I ended him. You do not forget that, not even when time stomps most other details flat.

Seraven’s eyes cut across the field—cold, measuring. He raises a hand, and his dragons shift flight pattern without a word. I counter. That’s my purpose. It works for a while. Then the sky goes wrong. The Shroud thins like breath on glass. Holes form where there were never holes. Wind comes in where wind should not. Visibility dies. Voss is shouting again, the word “retreat” wrapped in something that means the same without saying it. We don’t retreat. We reposition.

“Council is late.” Someone says it on the open channel, which means everyone hears it. I know it’s a dream because the voice is mine, and I never spoke that out loud then. We were not allowed late. We were the ones who waited for no one.

I run. Not away. Across, to where the line is about to break. This is the part that never changes: a gap opens, I hit the ground hard, and I make myself a wall. I can feel the way the heat sinks into my bones and wants to stay there. I don’t let it. I take it back out and spread it into something useful. It costs. It always costs.

This time the cost comes early. A blade slips between scales under my ribs, too fast to avoid. It is cold first, then hot. I grab the wrist attached and snap it. The blade stays in. Third mistake, I think, because counting mistakes kept me sane then. Their second is letting the little one with the long sword stay alive as long as he does. My first is getting close enough to be cut at all. Their third is thinking I can’t function with steel in my side.

After that, the pieces shuffle—river, smoke, the sound of stone cracking under heat. Seraven looks at me like I’m a puzzle that got more interesting. His pupils are wrong. They don’t open or close like they should. He says something I can’t hear over the rush in my ears and turns his back on me like the matter is settled. I run him through from behind in a different memory years later. In this one, I can’t reach him. I never can in the fever.

I fall, or I lie down, or the ground moves up to meet me; it changes depending on the night. Someone calls my name, not my full one, the short one my mother used to use. That part is a lie my brain tells to make a different pain easier to look at. She’s been dust a long time.

Then the smoke shifts. It smells like pine and wool and peppermint. The battlefield goes quiet in a way that is wrong for dreams. Out of the gray comes a pair of hands. Human. Small. Strong fingers, cuts across the knuckles. They don’t shake. That catches me. People always shake their first time they touch a dragon in a field. She doesn’t. The hands press down on my chest. Heat from me tries to run into her skin. It doesn’t burn her. That is new. It should not be possible and yet it is.

“Stay with me,” a voice says. Not a commander’s voice. Not a lover’s voice. A working voice. A voice used to saying the same dozen sentences a hundred ways and meaning them every time.

I want to reach up. I want to tell her to get clear before the next pass. I want to say there are eyes in the ash and they will see any flare of heat that isn’t mine. My mouth works. The wrong language comes out. Old words no one here uses anymore. She answers in human and the field drops away faster than any retreat order I ever took.

Light in the room is yellow. If I think about the river, the fire will run me. If I think about the hands, it sits down and waits. I think about the hands.

The pain shifts shape. It’s the bad kind. Clean, straight, voice-stealing. I take it in and file it where it belongs. The boy with the long sword is nowhere. Seraven is nowhere. Smoke uncurls into wood stove heat. My own heat wants to escape in every direction, and I tell it no. You hold. You hold if there’s a chance to stabilize. You do not burn the only cover you have.

I hear myself say “Shadowflames” and “Council.” I hear “hold the line,” and I know I sound like a man pretending it’s still his call to make. The body jerks without asking me. Hands catch my wrist and pin it. Not rough. Firm. She says my name the way she said “stay” in the smoke. I try to answer and hit the wall of my own language again.

“Shadowflames,” I repeat, because it is essential.

“I’ve got you,” she says. “Don’t fight me.”

That works. I don’t know why that works, but it does.

She cools my forehead with a cloth. It hisses. I would laugh if laughing didn’t pull at the wound. I tell myself again: this is a cabin, not the ridge. The field is not under my feet. The rules are different here.

Outside, wings move. You can feel the low pressure shift when something big goes by. My body tenses hard. Heat pushes up with it. In the old days, I’d let it out and blow anyone who came through the door off the hinges. In the new days, with the Shroud this thin and a human this close, it would turn the whole mountain into a beacon. I press it down and the restraint tears something in me I can’t name.

“Not safe,” I say, and hate that I sound afraid. It isn’t fear of pain. It is fear of the wrong eyes finding me like a flare on a dark sea.

“Fear can get in line,” she says. I would smile, but again, the wound.

She keeps talking. She tells me stupid things. The lodge owner’s tea. Some gas station boy who asked about four-wheel. An emoji I do not understand. Her words are a rope across moving water. I hold it.

The next part comes like it always does, not as a thought but as a reflex: wake fast or die.

I do not decide to move. My body does it for me. The floor is under me and then not under me at the same time. The room tilts. Heat takes shape in my hands. My nails lengthen in a jerk I can’t stop. The old tendons lock and pull. The skin along my fingers toughens and goes dark. The first rake of my hand across the plank floor leaves four long grooves that splinter and shine where the wood is fresh. That sound—wood separating—is loud enough to draw my own attention through the fog.

I shove back from the cot before I take it with me. The room shrinks. I’m too big for it. I catch the edge of the table and push it hard enough that the legs screech and hop. The stove flares at the draft I cause. The lamp throws a shadow on the wall that isn’t a man’s. For a breath I see what she will see if I don’t pull it in. A weight that breaks small rooms.

“Miron.” Her voice again. Right in front of me now. Hands up, not in fear, just there. “Look at me.”

I look without meaning to. Her face is steady. Her pupils are normal. She smells like rain and peppermint and the thin human soap that never quite does the job. The heat slams around in my chest looking for a way out. The Shroud hums against my skin, thin and irritated. Another movement outside, the kind you feel in your teeth. I don’t look away from her.

“Breathe,” she says. “In. Out. With me.”

I could break the door and the wall in one lunge. I could be out and up before she got a word in. I’d bring anyone within a mile to the cabin with the heat I’d leave behind.

I match her breath instead.

It takes four cycles for my hands to stop trying to choose. The claws drag another inch across old splinters and hang there, half-formed. The ache at the base of my fingers is deep and mean. I shake once, hard, trying to convince a body built for war to stand down because a woman with small hands asked me to.

She steps closer. Not stupid close. Close enough that I can feel the heat hit her and wash back. She doesn’t flinch. I don’t understand that. She sets two fingers on my forearm, the lightest touch, and it’s like someone closed a valve. The pressure drops a fraction. It’s enough to think again.

“Rayna,” I say, to put a name on a thing that works.

“I’m here.” She doesn’t try to take my arm. She doesn’t try to push me down. She just says it.

The claws recede a little. Not gone. Set back just under the skin. It feels like forcing a blade into a sheath someone bent.

I step back, careful. The room grows by an inch. The stove, the table, the cot take shape the way they do when you focus on the edges of things. I can catalog now: two long gouges in the plank near my right foot, two more where my left hand caught the floor. My breath is too fast. I count it down with her.

Outside, the wings pass again, farther. The Shroud’s hum settles to a low line instead of a saw. I stand there and hold myself in, which is a more specific kind of pain than most people ever have to use. The wound under the bandage pulls tight and then eases, the way a seam cools after you set it with heat.

I look at the damage I did to the floor. “Sorry,” I say, because it is what comes to mind.

She exhales like she had been holding her own breath. “We’ll add it to your tab,” she says, and the corner of her mouth lifts.

“I will pay it,” I say, and realize I mean more than boards.

I sit slow on the edge of the cot. The frame complains. She stays close enough to catch me if I slip, far enough that I don’t feel crowded. Her hands are ready without hovering. It is the kind of balance you only learn from too many long nights.

“Better,” she says.

“Better,” I agree. And for the first time in a long time, I let someone else be the wall while I stop fighting ghosts that carry real blades.