Chapter 172 Moment of...

Chapter 172 Moment of...
Nyx’s POV

Eldon arrived before anyone else. No announcement, no guards. He appeared at the base of the volcano, looked up at Drakthar on the rim, at me, at Caelan and then did something I had not expected from a four-hundred-year-old demon king who prided himself on making nothing readable in his face.

He believed it immediately.

I saw it happen. The way his expression settled, not into shock or skepticism or the careful neutrality he usually deployed when receiving information that required processing but into something quieter and older. 

Recognition, almost. The look of someone who had suspected something for a long time and was watching the confirmation arrive with the exhaustion of being right about something you wished you had been wrong about.

He climbed the slope without speaking. When he reached the rim, he looked at Drakthar directly. Drakthar looked back and whatever passed between them in that silence was not nothing. 

Drakthar’s posture shifted a liftle, something in the set of his wings, and I understood that he was surprised. He had expected to have to convince people. Eldon had walked up a volcano and immediately given him the one thing that was harder to receive than argument.

Full belief, without question.

“Eldon,” Caelan called.

“I know.” Eldon moved to stand to his left and crossed his arms and looked at the eastern horizon. That was all.

Rydstrom was already there, had been since before we sent for anyone, standing at the edge of the rim with his silver eyes on Drakthar in the focused way he had of attending to things he considered significant. 

He did not comment on Eldon’s arrival. He did not comment on anything. He was simply there which with Rydstrom was its own form of commitment.

Sylvaine traced in next with her bag over one shoulder and her silver hair loose. She was wearing deep green dress that was clearly not from any market in the Lore. She took in the volcano and Drakthar on the rim and the assembled group with one comprehensive sweep of those silver eyes. Then she looked at me.

“Is this going to be comfortable?” she asked.

“No,” I said with a smile. 

She nodded once, set her bag down against a flat section of rock, and found a place to stand without requiring further information. That was Sylvaine. She did not need the full picture before she committed. She needed to know whether it mattered and she had decided it did.

I know it’s going to hit her the hardest because she was the one that found that letter in fae kingdom. 

Draegan was last to arrive. He traced in at the base of the slope and did not immediately climb. He stood at the bottom with his amber eyes on Drakthar for a long time, long enough that everyone on the rim had registered his presence and was waiting. 

His arms were crossed with tension of someone working through an objection they had not yet decided to voice. When he finally started climbing, it was slowly. He reached the rim and stopped.

“I’m not doing it,” he said to no one in particular which meant he was saying it to everyone.

Drakthar turned his head. His gold eyes settled on Draegan with patience rather than irritation. 

—“It is a willing offering,” he said, his voice carrying that low resonance that settled in the chest before the ears caught up. “Not an intrusion. You are not taking something. I am choosing to show you. There is a meaningful difference.”

“The result is the same,” Draegan said dryly. “Someone else’s memories inside my head.”

“The result is understanding,” Drakthar replied. “Which you could also arrive at through three centuries of wrong assumptions, if you prefer the slower method.”

Draegan’s jaw tightened. He looked at Eldon, who was studying the horizon. At Rydstrom, who was watching him with neutral silver eyes. Then Caelan, who had not spoken since Eldon arrived and whose silence was its own pressure. Then his amber gaze came to me.

I did not argue with him. I did not tell him it would be fine or that he should trust the dragon or that everyone else was doing it and therefore he should too. 

I just looked at him and let him see whatever he needed to see in my face. Which was probably that I was as uncertain about this as he was and was choosing it anyway because Drakthar had asked. Drakthar earned it.

Something in Draegan’s expression shifted. The resistance did not disappear. It simply moved aside for something else, a decision made through a different channel than the one he had been using.

“Fine,” he said. The word came out like he was setting something heavy down.

I exhaled. The group was assembled. All five of the Moravia, Vera at the edge of the rim with her hands clasped and her chin up and me at the center of it. I looked across the space at Caelan.

He was standing apart from everyone else. Arms crossed, jaw set, his dark hair moving in the wind that came across the volcano’s rim. His eyes on Drakthar with the expression he had not let me see very often. 

The one that was not the king face or the composed face or even the open face I had come to know over the tour. This was something older and more private. 

The face of a man who had spent three centuries building a story about his own history and was standing on a volcano about to watch it be taken apart.

He was not afraid of Drakthar. He was not afraid of the memories in any practical sense. He was afraid of what he would have to do with the truth once he had it. 

What it would cost him to know the full version of something he had been carrying a partial version of for so long it had become structural. I walked across the rim toward him.

He watched me come. When I reached him he uncrossed his arms. I took his hand and he held it. We turned to face Drakthar together.

The dragon looked at us for a moment, his gold eyes moving between us with something in them that I chose not to analyze too closely because it felt private. 

Then he lowered his enormous head, bringing it down to a level where the assembled group could reach the base of his neck. The scales there larger and flatter than elsewhere, their surface warm under the cold wind.

—“Touch the scales,” he said. “Stay close to each other. What you see will be my experience, not a third-person account. You will feel what I felt. Try not to fight it.”

—“And try to remember, when it becomes difficult, that I am showing you this because I trust you. Not because I want to.” His gold eyes found mine one final time. “Remember that.”

One by one they approached. Eldon first, his hand flat against the scale with the same unceremonious directness he brought to everything. 

Rydstrom beside him. Sylvaine with her eyes still open, watching her own hand make contact as though keepinb the experience from the outside for as long as she could. 

Draegan last among the Moravia, a beat of hesitation before his palm pressed to the scale. Then Vera, who had not been asked and had not needed to be asked and Drakthar had not turned her away.

Caelan and I went together. His hand was still in mine. We reached out with our free hands and touched the scale at the same moment. 

The warmth of it flooded up through my palm like pressing my hand against something that had been alive since before the world had kingdoms and had never once stopped being alive since.

The rim disappeared. The sky disappeared.Then there was nothing but the past.