Chapter 53 It Would Have To Be Enough
Daisy awoke, drowning in the taste of iron and salt. For a second, she thought she was buried under rubble again, the way the old world had always ended for girls like her: trapped in a pocket of air, no way out but to breathe her own fear until something or someone caved. But then she tried to move, and agony lanced up her spine, so bright it eclipsed even the memory of fire.
A ceiling of carved stone loomed overhead, impossibly smooth, shot through with veins of quartz that burned blue and gold. The air was colder than any morgue, but Daisy was hot everywhere, skin blistered and wrong. She tried to scream, but what came out was a sound she’d never made before, a wet, guttural snarl, part dragon, part something older.
Hands pinned her to a table, soft but insistent.
“Don’t fight,” someone rasped. “You’ll tear yourself apart.”
She tried to focus. Samuel. He was above her, face hollowed out by exhaustion and fear, but his grip on her arm never shook. Delia was on the other side, dabbing her brow with a cloth that looked like it had once been a dress, her best, Daisy realized in a flash, the one she wore on festival days. The fabric was ruined now, scored with black-blood stains.
Maribel hovered at Daisy’s feet, her hair straggling loose, eyes rimmed raw. She muttered in a dialect Daisy barely recognized, each syllable clipped and urgent. The words were powerful, Daisy could feel it, the way the spiral on her wrist throbbed, and the scales on her chest shifted in time with her mother’s cadence.
She tried to sit up, but Samuel pushed her back down. “It’s not done yet,” he said, voice gentle but final.
Daisy looked down. Her body was a war zone. The scales had overtaken her, crimson, edged with iridescent gold, so thick they seemed to crawl over one another. What was left of her skin shone through in patches: the arch of her foot, the cut of her hip, a single stubborn freckle on her wrist. The rest was armor, and from the way the scales flexed and pulsed, she knew it wasn’t done growing.
Worse, she could feel something moving inside her, heat, not flame but memory, rushing through her bones like molten lead. Every time she blinked, the world doubled: once as the freezing chamber, and once as a sky so vast it made her dizzy.
It was Xeris. Or what was left of him.
He was everywhere in her head now, pressing against the edges of her consciousness. When she closed her eyes, she saw his memories, not as dreams but as a live broadcast, flashes of flight over ruined kingdoms, the taste of wind and cloud, the shudder of betrayal as her ancestors bled him onto altar stones. She felt the agony of centuries, chained in darkness, the way hope twisted into hunger, then into hatred.
She tried to force him out. He only laughed, a sound that set her teeth on edge.
Samuel wiped blood from the corner of her mouth. “You’re back with us. Good.” He glanced at Delia, whose hands shook so badly she almost dropped the bottle of tincture she was trying to apply. “We need to finish the patching, or she’ll bleed out.”
Delia nodded, bit her lip, and dumped the herbal mess into the wound on Daisy’s side. It sizzled, and Daisy’s back arched off the table, no, not a table, a slab of old stone, cold even through the scales.
The room spun. Through the haze, Daisy recognized where she was: the old sacrificial chamber under Ravensworth Castle. She’d never seen it, but she’d heard enough stories. The place was a perfect circle, every inch of wall covered in runes, some so deep the mortar bled shadows. Light came from crystals wedged into alcoves, once white, now stained pink by the spray of blood.
Medical supplies were everywhere: strips of linen torn from sleeves, glass jars of stuff that belonged in an apothecary, not a battlefield. At her feet, a bucket brimming with water gone murky red. At her head, a pile of bone needles, their tips sticky with her own blood.
Maribel’s voice rose, the chant reaching a knife-edge pitch. The pain in Daisy’s arms peaked, and the scales there cracked, black liquid seeping from the seams. It wasn’t blood. Not anymore. It was something Xeris remembered, something that could burn stone or mend it, depending on who was holding the knife.
She felt herself slipping, the world flattening into lines of color and pain. She tried to grab onto a memory, something to keep her from going under. But all she found was the dragon’s past: a city burning, a promise broken, the sense of being the last of his kind.
She tried to focus on her mother, on Delia, on the faces that mattered. But they were just dots of light in a storm of fire.
She flexed her fingers, trying to remember how hands worked. The scales split at her knuckles, claws erupting in a sudden, liquid arc. They were longer than she expected, razor-sharp and heavy, and the urge to rake them across the stone was so strong she couldn’t resist.
She scraped the wall next to the altar, carving three deep lines. The sound was louder than thunder, and for a second, everyone in the room froze.
Delia was the first to recover. She set the tincture down and took Daisy’s hand, careful to avoid the claws. “You’re still here,” she said, more question than statement.
Daisy tried to answer, but the words were gone. All that came out was a low, guttural growl.
Samuel watched her with something like pity. “Hold on. Just a little longer. It’s almost done.”
Maribel reached for Daisy’s ankle and squeezed, her grip strong as iron. “You listen to me, girl,” she snapped, voice breaking through the fog. “I did not birth you for the city to eat you. You are not a vessel. You are not a beast. You are my daughter.”
The words hit Daisy like a slap. For a second, she remembered being small, remembered hiding in her mother’s arms, remembered the taste of tears that weren’t hers.
She tried to speak. The pain flared, but she managed a single word.
“Mom.”
Maribel smiled, tears cutting tracks through the blood on her cheeks. “That’s right. Hold on, Daisy.”
The scales along Daisy’s chest pulsed, then settled. The heat inside her dropped to a simmer, and for the first time since waking, she felt her own heartbeat, not just the dragon’s.
She lay back, exhaustion heavier than any chain.
Samuel let go of her arm, and Delia wiped the sweat from her brow, her own face pale with relief.
Maribel slumped against the altar, still whispering, but softer now. “You’re not lost,” she said. “Not yet.”
Daisy stared at the ceiling, at the blue and gold veins in the stone. The pain was still there, but she could feel her body again, could feel the world.
She flexed her claws, watching the way the light played off the new scales.
She didn’t know what she was anymore. But for now, she was still herself.
And that was enough.