Chapter 15 The Sky That Burns
Wind tore the breath from my lungs.
The catwalk shuddered beneath Mira and me as Eryndor descended massive wings beating slow and deliberate, each thunderous stroke sending shockwaves across the floodway. Sparks danced along the metal supports. The air thickened, charged with heat and something older, something deep enough to warp the space between heartbeats.
Mira gripped my wrist hard enough to bruise. “Kaia listen to me don’t answer it. Don’t look at it.”
Too late.
The dragon’s gaze locked on mine ancient, gold, impossibly bright. A pressure pressed against my ribs from the inside, like something was trying to turn my heartbeat into a command.
Mira’s voice cut through in a hoarse whisper. “Please. Don’t let it in.”
But it already was in.
A tremor rippled through the flames buried in my veins. Not pain. Not fear.
Recognition.
Eryndor hovered above the catwalk, its wings stirring smoke into spirals. The heat rolling off it made the air shimmer. Beneath us, the floodway roared dark water surging through the massive channels carved into the city’s bones.
The dragon opened its jaws.
A sound rolled out. Not a roar. A summoning.
A name.
Mine.
My knees almost buckled. Mira yanked my arm, dragging me backward. “Kaia! Stay with me!”
The dragon dipped lower, its claws scraping sparks off the steel walkway. A gust of heat pulsed outward. The metal groaned, sagging under the intensity.
“We have to move,” Mira said. “Now Kaia, look at me, not the giant fire-lizard having an identity crisis!”
But I couldn’t tear my eyes away.
Not because I was entranced.
Because the fire inside me was reaching back stretching like a tide toward its source.
Eryndor tilted its head, massive scales shifting like molten plates. It inhaled, scenting the air the way a predator scents blood.
And then it spoke.
Not with words.
With fire.
A ripple of light pulsed from its chest straight into mine.
I staggered.
The catwalk rail dug into my back. Mira swore and stepped in front of me, despite the absurdity of her size versus the monstrosity overhead.
“Back off!” she shouted at a creature that could swallow her whole. “She’s not yours!”
The dragon’s pupils narrowed into thin slits.
It didn’t roar.
It didn’t attack.
It reached out—one massive claw lowering toward us, slow, deliberate, like offering a hand.
Mira shoved me behind her. “Kaia, run. I’ll distract”
“No.”
The word came from me.
Steady.
Too steady.
I stepped forward, past her.
Mira grabbed my sleeve. “Kaia! What are you doing?”
“I don’t know.”
A truth too small for the weight it carried.
“But I have to.”
The dragon’s claw hovered, heat radiating like a furnace. My skin prickled. The flames inside me pulsed in response eager, wild, shaking the air around us.
I lifted a hand.
Mira hissed, “Kaia, don’t”
My palm brushed the dragon’s talon.
And the world erupted.
Light slammed into my skull.
Not fire.
Memory.
Or something close enough to it that my body couldn’t tell the difference.
A thousand images flashed indistinct, blurred by age and smoke.
Sky split open by wings.
Cities swallowed in light.
A voice calling a name that wasn’t mine.
A figure tall, crowned in flamereaching for a dragon the size of a mountain.
A heart made of fire.
A bond forged in a sky that no longer existed.
My breath caught
and something answered me from inside the blaze.
Not Eryndor.
Something older.
A voice like burning stone whispered:
“Wake.”
My pulse convulsed.
Heat exploded outward. Flames rushed along my arms in a spiral. My vision blurred, swimming in gold.
Mira shouted something, distant and frantic, but everything was drowned out by
A roar.
Not in the world.
Inside me.
Eryndor reared back, wings flaring wide enough to eclipse the fire-orange sky. It wasn’t attacking it was reacting. Shocked. Startled.
Or afraid.
The flames on my skin brightened white-hot at the core—and for a brief impossible moment, the fire shaped itself into something familiar:
Wings.
Not spectral this time.
Real.
Heat surged across my back, flaring outward in twin sweeps of blazing light.
Mira gasped, stumbling backward. “Kaia Kaia, your”
I didn’t hear the rest.
Because the fire-wings beat once, twice
and the catwalk beneath me buckled.
Mira lunged forward to grab me
and the metal gave way.
The catwalk snapped.
I fell.
Wind tore at my face. Smoke blurred the world. My fire-wings flickered, spasming like newborn limbs that didn’t know how to hold me.
The floodway roared up toward me black, churning, endless.
No.
The word wasn’t human.
It wasn’t mine.
It was the fire’s.
The wings snapped open fully, sending a blast of heat that turned steam to white fog. My fall slowed violently like being yanked upward by invisible chains.
Pain shot through my shoulders.
But I wasn’t falling anymore.
I was hovering.
Barely.
Shaking.
Mira screamed my name from the twisted remains of the catwalk. “KAIA!”
Eryndor swooped downward with a roar that swallowed the entire floodway. The force sent water geysering upward in spirals of steam.
The dragon circled me, slow and deliberate, watching with a predator’s curiosity and something like recognition.
I hovered ten meters above the raging water, flames streaming behind me like a comet’s tail.
Then the wings guttered.
Flickered.
Failed.
“Not again,” I whispered
and dropped.
A surge of claws caught me mid-fall.
Eryndor.
The dragon lifted me effortlessly, cradling me in one massive talon like a fragile ember. Heat radiated off its scales, but it didn’t burn me.
It felt like home.
I hated that.
Mira stared across the floodway shaking, furious, terrified. “KAIA!”
Eryndor turned its head toward her, golden eyes narrowing, smoke trailing from its nostrils.
Mira stepped backward, hand on her blade. “Put her down!”
The dragon didn’t.
Instead, it rose huge wings heaving the air, sending shockwaves through the broken catwalk and rattling the floodway walls.
“Kaia!” Mira shouted, voice cracking, raw. “I’m coming for you do you hear me? I’ll find you!”
I twisted in Eryndor’s grip. “Mira”
But my voice broke.
Not from pain.
From something worse.
The fire inside me wasn’t fighting this.
It was welcoming it.
Eryndor beat its wings once
twice
and the city fell away beneath us.
Wind and smoke ripped past as the dragon carried me higher, over the floodway, past the wrecked levels of the outer ring, up toward the red-stained sky.
The city looked small from here burning in scattered patches, smoke drifting like black veins. The Guild’s armored skiffs swarmed the air near the central spire, but none dared approach the massive creature holding me.
Eryndor roared once a sound that echoed across the entire horizon.
Then it spoke.
This time, the voice wasn’t inside me.
It rumbled through the air itself.
“You are not complete.”
My breath hitched.
Because I understood it.
Not through translation.
Through memory.
The dragon’s massive golden eye turned toward me as its wings beat the smoky air.
The voice rumbled again:
“But you will be.”
I stared back, skin blazing with light I couldn’t tame.
“I’m not yours,” I whispered.
The dragon tilted its head.
Not amused.
Not angry.
Knowing.
“You were.”
My pulse stuttered.
“And you will be again.”
The wind burned cold against my face.
Below us, Mira was a vanishing speck on a broken catwalk. The city shrank into a smear of orange and black as Eryndor carried me far beyond the outer sectors toward a wall of storm clouds lit from within by flickers of fire.
Stormfire.
A place dragons were said to nest.
A place no human returned from.
I forced my shaking voice into the air. “Where are you taking me?”
The dragon’s wings flared wide.
“Home.”
The fire inside me answered with a pulse of recognition so strong it almost buckled my spine.
I whispered back not to Eryndor.
To myself.
“No…”
But the flames didn’t listen.
And the storm swallowed us whole.