Chapter 576: The One Nobody Was Holding

It came up the cliff face the way a tide comes up a beach. Slowly at first, and then all at once.

The heat arrived first. It rolled over the lip of the ledge ahead of everything else, and the sweat on my face dried before it could run. The stone under my boots started to tick like a pot left on a stove.

Then came the light. The orange glow below us turned yellow, then white at the centre, and I had to squint against it.

Then the head.

One claw hooked over the edge, then another, and the rock under those claws went soft and ran like candle wax. The head that came up after them was longer than Light’s wyvern had been from nose to tail.

It was the same colour as the young ones. Old coals. But on this one, the lines between the scales weren’t cracks. They were rivers. Orange light moved thickly inside them, like something being pumped through a body.

Its eyes opened. Both of them.

’...Well. At least it’s properly awake this time. Very considerate.’

The young ones had called for their mother. Or their father. Or whatever this thing was to them. And it had come up to see who had been killing its children on its cliff.

Death Sense went out, touched that thing once, and came straight back to me empty-handed, like a dog sent to fetch a mountain.

I kept my voice low.

"Back. Everyone. Slowly. Into the rock."

There was a crack in the cliff wall behind us, barely wide enough for a person. Light saw it at the same moment I did, and he already had Bren by the arm.

The dragon watched us move.

It didn’t rush. It didn’t need to. It pulled the rest of itself up onto the ledge, and the ledge sagged, and a whole stretch of the path we had been standing on folded down into the dark with a long, slow groan.

Then it breathed in.

The air rushed past me toward its mouth, hard enough to tug at my robe and drag my hair forward over my eyes, and all the heat on the cliff went with it.

For one second, it was cold.

’Oh no.’

"Down!"

I threw Emperor’s Dominion out in front of us as thick as I could make it. Every drop I could spare went into that wall.

The dragon breathed out.

It wasn’t fire. It was heat with nothing else in it at all. It hit the crimson wall, and the wall didn’t break. It melted. I felt it go the way you would feel your own hand melting, and the crimson ran down the air in red streaks and was gone.

And the heat came through after it.

I had chains around Ilse and Light before I’d even thought about it. Bren was behind me with two fingers hooked into the back of my belt, like she had been walking for days. Like we had all walked since Teller.

Ilse was closest to the edge. The breath caught her down one side, and she went to one knee and didn’t get up. Drakonir blood or not, her skin was smoking.

Bren saw it.

I felt her fingers come out of my belt.

I didn’t understand what it meant. Not in that second. I was busy holding the last of the Dominion together with my teeth, and when the tug at my back went slack, I thought she had lost her grip.

She hadn’t lost it.

She had let go.

She ran past me into the heat, bent low, and got both hands into Ilse’s collar and heaved her back from the edge. Ilse was twice her size. I still don’t know how she did it. She dragged her three steps, then four, and threw her toward the crack in the rock, toward Light.

Then she straightened up.

She was standing on her own at the edge of the path. No hand on her. No rope. No fingers in anybody’s belt.

The one nobody was holding.

"Bren—"

I sent a chain after her.

The heat took it halfway. The chain melted like the Dominion had, and the pain of it went through my ribs like a hot iron and knocked the breath out of me.

Bren looked back.

She didn’t look frightened. She looked annoyed, the same way she had at the stopped prints, and the same way she did whenever Devant said "Yes" and wouldn’t explain anything. Her ruined voice couldn’t carry over the roar, but I saw her mouth move.

I have thought about it a great many times since. I think the word was "Go."

The next moment, the dragon’s second breath came down on the edge of the path. Bren was standing there, and then she wasn’t.

There was nothing left. Not even ash. The rock where she had been standing glowed and ran and dripped off the cliff in long orange threads.

I didn’t move.

Light was shouting something. Ilse was on her hands and knees at the mouth of the crack, smoking, trying to get up and failing. And I stood on the softening ledge with my hand still out where the chain had been.

’...I never asked her anything either.’

Bren. Who taught a crying boy to fold a coat into a pillow. Who held a wyvern’s head while we cut its leg off, and talked to it the whole way through. Who walked with two fingers in my belt for days and never once mentioned it.

Who asked me why I carried Ilse, and filed my answer away as a good reason.

And I had never asked her a single thing about herself except her name.

The dragon turned its head toward me.

Cade. MOVE.

I moved.

Feather Step. I came out beside Light, grabbed him and Ilse both, and Feather Stepped again, into the crack, into the rock. The heat followed us in, and the walls of the crack began to glow.

We went deeper. The crack twisted and narrowed. I dragged Ilse along, and Light dragged himself, one arm hanging, the sleeve burned off it and the skin underneath black and wet.

Behind us, the dragon put its face to the crack and breathed.

The rock around us screamed. Stone ran like water. I pushed a wall of Dominion behind us, and it melted almost at once. I pushed another, and another, and every one of them went the same way, and every one of them cost me.

’Two thousand. Fifteen hundred. One thousand.’

I could feel the well going down like a bath with the plug pulled out.

Then the crack opened into a small hollow, and there was nowhere left to go.

I put Ilse down against the far wall. Light slid down beside her. I turned around to face the way we had come.

The glow was coming down the crack after us. Slowly. Patiently. The dragon was coming through the rock itself, melting it ahead of its body like a man pushing through snow.

I checked my well.

Four hundred.

’...Well.’

I held up my hands anyway, called on Voice of Authority, and put everything I had left behind it.

"STOP."

The word went out into the heat and burned up.

The glow kept coming.

The hem of my robe caught fire. Ethereal Grace came apart thread by thread and fell off me in burning strips. My skin started to blister. Infinite Vitality tried to keep up, and it couldn’t. I could feel it trying. I could feel it losing.

I went down on one knee.

It wasn’t a choice. My knee simply went.

’So this is it, huh.’

Not a Sentinel. Not a god. Not the Eternal Night, not some grand enemy with a name and a speech prepared. Just an angry parent who came up to see who was killing its children.

The glow filled the end of the crack. I could see the shape of the head in it now.

And the thing I thought about, on one knee with my skin coming off and nothing left in the well, wasn’t the Hex. It wasn’t the Heir, or the way out.

It was a woman who held my hand through a fall with no bottom, and took the landing so I wouldn’t have to.

’Kassie.’

I was going to die down here, and I was never going to see her again.

Something at the very bottom of my soul turned over.