Chapter 23 What Dragons Remember
Night fell slow. The sky above the ravine burned in strips of orange and red before fading into indigo. One by one, stars blinked through the haze. The airships had moved on for now, their searchlights distant flickers.
We built a small fire—just enough to see by, hidden under the overhang. The flames threw gold light across the stone, catching in the threads of his hair, turning the soot on his hands into something almost ceremonial.
He looked otherworldly in that light. Dangerous, yes—but not monstrous.
The thought unsettled me.
“Stop looking at me like that,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m the puzzle instead of you.”
He tilted his head. “You think you’re not a puzzle?”
“I think you’re deflecting.”
“You think too much,” he said softly.
“Comes with the trauma,” I said.
That earned a laugh—low, quiet, real.
“You joke about it,” he said. “The pain.”
“You brood about yours,” I said. “We all cope differently.”
His gaze dropped to the bond mark glowing faintly on my wrist. “That’s not coping,” he said. “That’s surviving. And survival isn’t the same as living.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again.
The fire crackled between us, filling the silence that followed.
“Do you ever think about it?” he asked after a while.
“About what?”
“What it’ll mean when the bond decides what we are.”
I frowned. “What does that mean?”
“Sometimes a bond like ours doesn’t stay neutral,” he said. “It chooses its own shape. Fire, life, death, love—whatever it was forged from, it reflects.”
“Love?” I echoed, incredulous. “That’s not what this is.”
He didn’t argue. “No,” he said. “Not yet.”
The words landed like sparks.
I turned away, staring into the flames. My pulse thundered in my throat. The bond hummed like it agreed with him—and that terrified me more than the airships, more than the Syndicate, more than whatever prophecy Seris thought we belonged to.
Because part of me didn’t want to fight it.
🔥🔥🔥
The fire burned lower. The night deepened.
“Get some sleep,” Drake said finally. “We move at dawn.”
“Will you?” I asked.
“What?”
“Sleep.”
He hesitated. “I’ll watch.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He looked away. “No,” he said. “Dragons don’t dream. Not anymore.”
He said it so simply, like a fact he’d swallowed and learned not to choke on.
“Why?” I asked, softer than I meant to.
His gaze stayed on the darkness beyond the ledge. “Because when we sleep, we remember what we were. And there’s only so many times you can wake up smaller than your own memory before something breaks.”
“That’s…” I grimaced. “Yeah. Okay. That’s bleak.”
“Dragons are not known for optimism,” he said dryly.
“Funny,” I murmured, folding my arms behind my head as I eased down onto the stone. “You’re the one who keeps telling me to survive.”
“That’s not optimism,” he said. “That’s stubbornness.”
“Then we’re both very dragon,” I mumbled, eyes drifting shut.
He didn’t answer.
The silence pressed close, but not empty. Somewhere above us, wind scraped along the cliff face. Farther away, something howled—a low, warping sound that didn’t belong to any animal I knew.
Shade. Or the echo of it.
I forced my breathing to slow. In. Out. Count the beats. Ignore the ache in my ribs, the throb in my knee, the way the bond hummed like a live wire just under the skin.
Sleep came—not a drop this time, not that terrifying plunge into his mind, but a slow slide down a slanted plane.
I hovered there, caught between waking and dreams.
Then the bond flared.
Not a blast. Not pain. Just a warm pulse, like someone tugged on a thread woven through my chest.
I saw firelight on stone. Not Kaelor, not the cave—somewhere else. A narrow room, lined with shelves carved into rock. Scrolls. Shards of crystal. Little objects wrapped in red cloth and tied with black cord.
This wasn’t my memory.
“Thought you didn’t dream,” I murmured, though my mouth didn’t move.
Drake stood in the center of the room, bare-footed, bare-armed, younger. Less scarred. His eyes were the same molten gold, but the edges were softer. Less exhaustion, more hunger—for knowledge, not battle.
He was reading. A scroll lay open on a pedestal of stone, its writing shimmering faintly. His lips moved as he traced the lines.
The mark on his wrist—different than the one he bore now—glowed in response.
Guardian’s sigil, my mind supplied. The old bond. Before the chains. Before the fall.
He looked up.
For a terrifying second, I thought we’d made eye contact in the memory. Then I realized he wasn’t seeing me—he was seeing whatever was on the other side of that ritual space. Whoever had stood where I now watched from.
“You’re going to get yourself killed,” a voice said from behind him.
I couldn’t see the speaker. The vantage stayed fixed on him, like whoever he spoke to had been the one watching him, not the other way around.
“If I don’t understand it,” he replied, “someone else will use it first.”
“That’s a terrible reason to touch the Breath Stone’s script,” the unseen speaker said. “And a worse reason to stand that close to the veil.”
His mouth quirked. “You can’t see the shape of a door from the other side of the mountain.”
“You’re not supposed to be the door,” the voice snapped.
He laughed—really laughed, unbroken and bright. “I was forged to be more than a door.”
The memory warped. Flames crawled along the edges, eating the shelves, the scrolls, the red-wrapped objects. The soft gold light turned harsh and white; the room shook.
“Drake!” the unseen voice shouted. “Pull back—”
The vision shattered.
I jerked awake, sucking in a breath that scraped my throat.
Stone. Fire reduced to embers. Cold air. Dark sky.
And Drake, sitting exactly where he had been, back against the rock, head tipped back, eyes closed.
But his hands were clenched into fists. The marks on his wrists glowed faintly. His jaw trembled.
“Liar,” I whispered.
His eyes snapped open.
For a second, they were not dragon-gold—they were the softer hue I’d just seen in the memory. Younger. Rawer. Then the years rushed back into them and hardened the edges.
“What did you see?” he asked.
So he’d felt it too.
“Library,” I said slowly. “In the old temple. Breath Stone script. You, being arrogant and poking the veil.”
A muscle jumped in his cheek. “That’s not arrogance. That’s curiosity.”
“That’s suicidal.”
“That too,” he said.
“You told me dragons don’t dream.”
“We don’t,” he said. “Not on our own.”
“So what, the bond is forcing you to?”
His gaze slid to the embers. “Or you’re dragging me along when you slip.”
I winced. “That’s… not better.”
“It’s not worse,” he said. “It just is.”
I pushed myself up, spine protesting. “Sorry.”
“For what?”
“For… that. For making you remember.”
He shook his head once. “You didn’t make me. The bond did. And it only showed you what it thinks you need to see.”
“That’s even more disturbing.”
“You asked for the truth,” he reminded me. “This is what it looks like.”
I scrubbed my hands over my face. My skin felt tight, stretched by lack of sleep and too much magic.
“How many times did you go into that library?” I asked.
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
His eyes met mine. “Enough that they decided I was more dangerous with knowledge than I was with fire.”
“And then they chained you.”
“And then they chained me,” he agreed.
The embers shifted, collapsing inward. The last of the warmth brushed my fingers.
“You were trying to understand the Stone,” I said slowly. “Even back then. Before the Syndicate. Before any of this.”
“I was trying to understand why the bridge existed at all,” he said. “Why there was a door between worlds. Why something so powerful was kept in the hands of people who lied to themselves about why they wanted it.”
“And now?”
His mouth twisted. “Now I understand. Too well.”
“Explain it to me like I don’t read dead languages,” I said.
He considered that, then said, “The Breath Stone wasn’t built to bring the dead back. Not originally. It was meant to make sure the living didn’t tear holes in the world every time they touched power. A… regulator.”
“Like a dam?”
“More like a heartbeat monitor,” he said. “If power spiked too hard in one place, the Stone bled it off. Kept the fabric between worlds from ripping.”
“And someone decided that if it could bleed power off, it could probably shove it back in,” I finished.
“Yes.” His tone went flat. “And once they used it to push, they couldn’t stop. They turned a safeguard into a weapon. Then into a habit.”
“Sounds familiar,” I said. “That’s basically the Syndicate’s mission statement.”
He huffed a breath that might have been a laugh. “Exactly.”
Silence fell again, but it was different now—less wary, more… stitched-together. Threads of his past knotted with mine.
“So,” I said after a minute. “If the Stone was originally a stabilizer, and we’re supposedly the bond that anchors it…”
“You want to know if we can make it what it was meant to be,” he said.
“Yes.”
He looked at the sky, where a faint glow marked the distant engines of the airships, still sweeping, still hunting.
“Maybe,” he said. “If we get to it first. If we survive long enough. If you’re willing to stand in the center of a storm that’s already broken one world.”
“That’s a lot of ifs.”
“Dragon optimism,” he said dryly.
“You’re terrible at pep talks.”
“You keep surviving anyway.”
He had me there.