Chapter 163 Xeris Perspective
The first sign was the screaming.
Delia didn’t recognize it as Xeris at first. It was too raw—too animal. The bellows vibrated every calcium memory from her teeth to her collarbone. The cave stank of scorched crystal and the lingering sweet rot of Maribel’s breath. It shivered as the sound rolled through. Something popped in Delia’s ear. She stumbled, clutching the cold floor, vision doubled.
He should have been dead. He had been dead, or close enough. The golden scales of his chest were tarnished; the gash at his shoulder wept not blood but mucus-yellow oil. Even the chain in his forearm had gone slack, the links visible as shadow beneath the hide. For two days, Delia and Mira had kept the dragon warm. They pushed broth down his ruined throat and whispered to him through the fevers. Every minute, they’d expected it to be the last.
With each hour, Delia wrestled with helplessness, dread coiling inside her like a living thing. Fear seized her throat, tightening until she could barely breathe. She braced for that final, rattling exhale, but every rasp from Xeris shredded what hope she had left. Utter exhaustion pressed her toward despair—if Xeris died, she feared she would be crushed, undone, unable to claw her way free from the cave collapsing around her heart.
Now, Xeris reared up on all fours, claws gouging the basalt. His eyes were backlit with a feral orange, not quite sentient, as if some lizard ancestor had taken over the controls. He tried to say Daisy’s name, but only managed a snarl that sent Maribel into a coughing fit.
Delia braced herself, tried to reach him. “Easy,” she croaked. “You’ll tear it open.”
Xeris didn’t slow. He scraped his body forward, dragging his tail behind him like dead weight. He attempted to beat his wings—only once, feebly—then locked eyes with Delia, making her flinch. Suddenly, he slumped sideways, sending a spray of blood across the packed dirt. When he finally spoke, his voice was a razor across glass.
“She’s walking into his trap.”
Maribel hunched against the far wall, blanket around her, watching through the haze with something that looked like satisfaction. Delia shot her a glare. “You said he’d sleep till dawn.”
Maribel didn’t answer. She was watching Xeris as if seeing him for the first time.
Mira abandoned her post by the entrance, sliding next to Delia. She pressed her fingers to the scales above Xeris’s heart, muttered something in the gutter language of hedge-witches, then drew back with a hiss. “He’s burning through himself. There’s nothing left to patch.”
Xeris tried to move again. The wing closest to Delia spasmed, curling around her like a shield. "He's there," Xeris said. "The Emperor. He's baiting her." The next word came out as a cough of smoke. "The chain wants it. She's the end." For a moment, Delia felt the old chill snake down her spine. The chain was not just the links buried in Xeris's forearm. It was the great binding woven through the city and blood, a spell threaded across generations. It was power, a curse, now seeking its purpose—through Daisy, through all of them.
Delia felt her own hand drift to the stub of her arm, the bandaged wound—a reminder of what magic both gives and takes. The itch beneath the wrappings was not infection, but the restless insistence of magic. It persistently urged renewal where loss remained. She had come to know this sensation: a mix of longing, grief, and faint hope that the impossible could be restored. Yet, even as the magic beckoned, Delia forced herself to resist. She knew the unpredictable costs. She ignored the ache and pressed her palm to Xeris’s snout, grounding herself in the present.
“What can we do?” she asked, hoping the dragon could hear her over the roar in his own skull.
Mira answered instead. “We see what’s true. If he’s calling her, I can show you what he wants.”
She drew a dagger—not for combat, but for the ritual. Her hands, always steady before, shook as she made two quick cuts across her palms. She let the blood fall onto an overturned shield, where it pooled with ancient grooves and the fresh line of red. Mira leaned in, whispered three syllables, and the blood smoked, forming an image.
Delia forced herself to look. Xeris did, too, his pupils contracting to black slits.
In the vision, the city of Brightwater loomed. Every street was a scar, every intersection seeded with a little daisy—ceramic, white, petaled, glued to doorposts, lamp-iron, and even the lips of the dead. The city breathed in flickers of dying lanterns and the distant toll of iron bells. A restless sigh carried on the air tinged with ash and the tang of wet stone. From the alleys came the muffled chatter of survivors huddled close. Somewhere unseen, incense drifted, sweet and bitter in the ruined hush. The vision revealed more than atmosphere. It exposed a hidden pattern visible only from above, forming a ring, a chain, not merely decorative but an anchor for the Emperor’s will. At the city’s heart—on the map and on the earth—a thicker knot of daisies marked the Smithson home. This was the hearthstone Maribel had refused to leave, highlighting the vision’s purpose and its significance for Delia and her companions.
Delia flinched as the map shifted, the daisies lighting up, one by one, until the city burned with them.
Mira spat into the shield, breaking the spell. Her face was ashen. “He doesn’t need to find her. She’s always been the key. The city—her home—was built for this.”
Maribel laughed, brittle. “Nothing’s ever an accident, child. Blood runs in spirals. He’s just the first one to draw them straight.”
Delia stiffened, caught by the phrase. There was an old superstition, half-remembered from her grandmother—the idea that all true power spirals, never walks the line. For a heartbeat, she wondered just how much Maribel knew, and whether the pattern marking the city was older than any Emperor.
Xeris tried to stand. His forelimbs shook, blood and sap oozing down, but his determination, fueled by an urgent need to prevent what he foresaw in the vision, was unwavering. "We go," he grunted, each syllable costing him, his insistence pressing Delia and the others to act without delay. "Now."
Delia tried to protest—knowing Xeris would collapse before reaching their destination—but before she could finish, his tail curled around her and firmly lifted her onto his back. Mira rushed to the opening, knelt quickly in the slush, and drew a sigil in the mud with the index finger of one wounded hand.
“Don’t let him burn out before you reach her,” Mira called, her voice already echoing with the cave’s emptiness.
Maribel did not rise. She cradled a locket in her palm—a twin to the one Daisy wore—and watched, eyes empty, as Xeris staggered for the mouth of the cave, Delia clinging to the battered gold of his scales.
Outside, the wind howled, full of grit and the distant perfume of burning wood.
Xeris beat his wings once, twice, hard enough to lift them from the ground. The pain must have been unthinkable, but he didn’t falter, not even when the left wing faltered and nearly collapsed. Delia held on, arms wrapped around the bone-spined ridge of his neck, as the world blurred below.
They arced north, low to the ground, cutting through the dead grasslands, each beat of the dragon’s wings spattering blood on the ground beneath.
Delia looked back once. Mira was a black silhouette against the cave, hands raised in either blessing or defense.
Maribel, hunched in the dark, did not wave. She only closed her fist around the locket, as if daring the world to take it from her.
They flew until the pain caught up.
Delia lost track of time; the wind stripped tears from her eyes, the cold ate through her borrowed jacket, and still Xeris pushed on. His body trembled with each mile. The gold of his scales was now flecked with black, the infection visible and growing.
She tried to talk, but the wind stole her words. Instead, she dug her heels into the hollows behind his ears and hoped the pain would keep him from passing out.
On the horizon, the city glimmered—every lamp and fire a point in the chain, each daisy a tiny mirror for the Emperor’s watching eye. Xeris dropped altitude, gliding into the shell of an abandoned orchard. He crashed through two trees and landed hard, sending up a cloud of dust and shredded blossom.
Delia rolled off, hit the ground hard, and was up again before she could register the bruises. She looked back at Xeris. He was slumped, ribs heaving, smoke curling from his nostrils.
“You have to rest,” she said, kneeling by his head.
He snapped at the air. “No time. He’ll see us.”
Delia grabbed the horns at his crown, forced his eyes to hers. “Daisy’s tough. She’s lasted this long. But you’re not helping her die.”
He closed his eyes. “I’ll heal as I fly. Just… tell her. Tell her I tried.”
For a moment, Delia only stared at him, grief raging inside her chest. Fear knotted her insides. The memory of their first flight together—her hands gripping the trembling gold scales, the steady, thunderous beat of Xeris's heart—stabbed with painful longing. The safety she had once known was gone. Lost words battled in her throat, regret piling atop regret, the ache inside almost unbearable.
Delia’s throat ached, but she nodded.
Delia spotted a patch of bramble nearby. She pulled off several leaves, walked to Xeris, and pressed them to his wounds. It was a child’s trick she’d learned years before, but she hoped the comfort would help. Xeris bared his teeth, warning her off, but he did not snap.
When he could stand, he motioned for her to get on. Delia hesitated—she wanted to find a way to help, to slow the chain, to do anything but ride to what felt like certain death—but Xeris’s tail swept her up, planted her on his back, and the wings beat, slow and relentless, carrying them the last stretch to Brightwater.
Below, the world was a smear of motion: Ironclaw squads lighting torches, patrols herding survivors, children in the alleys painting the daisy symbol with old chalk. They passed above it all, the chain in Delia’s own blood—a magical conduit binding her life force to the spellwork embedded throughout the city—humming in resonance with the networks of enchantment below.
As they crossed into the city proper, Delia saw the daisies and understood: they weren’t decoration, or even a warning. They were the root system of the Emperor’s spell. And at the center, waiting, was Daisy.
She clung tighter, steeling herself.
One way or another, they would see this through, though Delia sensed that the resolution would demand a choice—and a sacrifice—that could not be undone.
At the edge of the orchard, Maribel sat in the grass, locket in her fist, watching the last streak of gold vanish into the dusk. Her face was unreadable, but her lips moved, repeating a prayer that was not quite a curse.
In the city, every chain waited for its root.
And every root, for the knife.