Chapter 16 The Storm That Remembers Me
The storm swallowed everything.
Wind roared like a living beast, spiraling around us in jagged waves of white fire and fractured sky. Lightning coiled through the clouds like serpents made of bone. Eryndor’s grip around me tightened not crushing, not gentle, just absolute. His wings cut through the hurricane with impossible precision, each beat echoing like thunder inside my ribs.
I couldn’t breathe.
Not because of the altitude.
Because of him.
Because the fire inside me thrashed against its cage, answering him with a hunger that wasn’t mine.
“Let me go!” I shouted over the storm.
My voice vanished ripped away by the screaming wind.
But he heard me anyway.
Eryndor’s head tilted backward, a single molten eye reflecting me like a trapped ember.
“You fall if I release you.”
His voice wasn’t sound.
It tore through my skull like heat lightning splitting thought from instinct.
“I don’t care!” My nails dug into the iron-hard scales at his wrist. “Put me down take me back take me to Mira”
“You burn if I return you.”
Thunder cracked under us, violent enough to rattle my teeth. He tilted his wings, diving deeper into the storm. The world blurred into streaks of silver and flame.
My heart hammered.
My mind raced.
None of this made sense.
“You said you needed me,” I rasped. “You said I wasn’t complete what does that mean? Why take me?”
The dragon’s chest vibrated with a low rumble too close to a laugh.
“To keep you alive.”
Lightning split open the sky ahead of us revealing a massive tear in the storm, a jagged rift glowing with shifting runes I didn’t recognize.
A doorway.
A breach.
A tear in reality itself.
Eryndor flew straight toward it.
I slammed my fist against his arm. “NO stop stop!”
He didn’t.
The rift opened wider as we approached, layers of magic peeling back like lungs inhaling. The pressure around me intensified until my bones felt ready to splinter.
Then we crossed through.
Silence.
Stillness.
A strange, suspended quiet that made the hair on my arms rise.
We emerged into a vast hollow space an endless expanse of burnt sky and floating shards of ruined architecture. Broken towers drifted weightlessly. Bridges led nowhere. Runes burned faintly along the fragments like ghost-lights marking a city that no longer existed.
The air tasted like metal and old storms.
Eryndor finally descended, wings folding as he landed on a suspended platform of obsidian carved into a spiral pattern. He set me on my feet like I was made of thin glass.
I stumbled away from him immediately.
Bad idea.
The platform dipped not much, but enough to warn me that falling meant a drop into eternity.
Eryndor watched me with unsettling stillness. In this form a towering shape of molten scales and bonefire he didn’t move like a creature.
He moved like a memory.
“What is this place?” I demanded, voice hoarse.
“The Aether Fracture.”
He circled me, tail dragging a line of sparks along the stone. “A wound in the world. Your world. Made long before you were born.”
A dozen questions rose.
Only one escaped my lips.
“Why bring me here?”
His eyes gleamed.
“Because this is where you were broken.”
My breath caught. “I’ve never been here.”
A long, hot silence.
Then
“You do not remember.”
I took a step back.
He took a step forward.
“You’re lying,” I whispered.
Eryndor lowered his head until the heat radiating from his throat seared the air. My eyes watered, but I didn’t look away.
“I do not lie, little ember. You came here once. You left without your fire.”
Something inside my chest twisted sharp, wrong, familiar in a way that made my skin crawl.
“I wasn’t born with fire.”
“Yes.” His voice became a rumble of thunder. “You were.”
I shook my head. “Stop. You’re trying to manipulate me control me”
“I do not wish to control what already belongs to me.”
His words hit harder than the storm.
Anger flared through me like a blade heated in a forge.
“I don’t belong to you.”
Eryndor’s wings unfurled, casting the entire platform in shadow and firelight.
“You carry half my heart in your chest, Kaia. You carry fire older than your city, older than your kind. You think that makes you yours?”
He leaned closer.
“You are not complete because a piece of you was taken.”
My blood went cold.
“What piece?”
His gaze sharpened, unflinching.
“The part that remembers what happened here.”
The air vibrated. My pulse fluttered unevenly. Something beneath my sternum thrummed an echo, a second heartbeat that pulsed in time with his.
I wrapped my arms around myself. “What did I forget?”
Eryndor inhaled long, slow, deliberate.
It sucked the air from my lungs.
He turned away, wings folding as he faced the shattered horizon.
“Memory is not what you lost.”
A chill crawled across my spine. “Then what?”
He looked back at me.
And the storm inside him flickered with something I had never seen in him before.
Regret.
“You lost your name.”
My breath froze.
“I have a name.”
“You have the name they gave you.”
A soft, pained exhale. “Not the one you carved in fire.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Nothing about you is impossible.”
My mind reeled.
My memories my childhood my scars
None had ever hinted at this.
“Why don’t I remember?” I finally forced out.
“Because someone tore it from you.”
His voice cracked the air like a whip.
The platform shuddered beneath us.
“Tore… my name?”
“Tore your fire.”
My stomach turned. “Who?”
The dragon went still.
Too still.
His wings flexed once slow, deliberate.
“The one the Guild serves.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. “The Guild doesn’t serve”
“They serve him,” Eryndor said. “The one who broke you. The one who stole half of what you were. The one who fears what you will become when you remember.”
Lightning flickered between the ruined towers.
The air tasted like secrets.
My thoughts spiraled, tangled.
“I’m nobody,” I whispered.
Eryndor’s pupils contracted into slits.
“You are the only one they fear.”
The only one.
My lungs struggled to pull in air.
Before I could respond, the entire Fracture trembled.
A deep, guttural sound rolled through the expanse like a beast waking below the world.
Eryndor’s head snapped toward the far horizon.
He snarled.
“We are not alone.”
A fissure split open in the sky.
Shadows surged from it many shadows winged shapes with burning sigils attached to their spines. They flew in formation.
My heart stuttered.
“Guild hunters?” I whispered.
“No.”
His wings snapped open.
“Worse.”
The sky exploded with fire as the shapes dove toward us.
Eryndor stepped in front of me heat rolling off him in waves hot enough to warp the air.
“Eryndor what are they?”
His tail curled around my waist, pulling me behind him.
“The ones who want your other half.”
Then the first creature struck.
The platform shook violently.
Eryndor roared an earth-splitting sound that shattered a floating tower in the distance.
I covered my ears, screaming.
The sky burned.
The shadows kept coming.
And the fire inside me surged like it recognized them.
Eryndor turned his head just enough for his voice to cut into me like flame.
“Kaia listen well.”
His eyes blazed.
“If they take you, the world ends.”