Chapter 12 Ash and Embers
The night didn’t end so much as fray at the edges.
At some point between one heartbeat and the next, the sky stopped being black and started leaking a thin gray light that turned everything to ghosts. The air grew colder, biting through my ruined armor. My fingers had gone stiff. My breath puffed white.
What little warmth I had left came from the bond and the furnace sitting annoyingly close beside me.
Drake stirred first. Of course he did. Dragons probably woke up if a leaf decided to fall wrong three valleys over.
“Don’t move,” he said quietly.
I groaned. “Every time you say that, something awful happens.”
“Every time I say that,” he corrected, “you’re about to make something worse.”
My eyes cracked open. At some point, I’d ended up with my head tipped sideways against his shoulder, the chain slack between our wrists. Heat radiated from him like a banked fire.
I pushed myself upright, ignoring the way my joints protested. “Please tell me the shade didn’t find us.”
“No,” he said. “Not yet.”
“Comforting.”
He nodded toward the horizon. “But we’re not staying here long enough to see how good its nose is.”
The slope around us was a mess of loose rock and scrub. The burned-out glow of the outpost was little more than a smear of darkness behind us now, smudging the edge of the world. A weak wind prowled the canyon, sharp with the scent of ash and something older.
I flexed my fingers. Pain lanced through my arm—white-hot, then dull. The mark on my wrist pulsed dully in response. Across from it, Drake’s sigil gave a faint answering glow.
“On your feet, Knight,” he said. “We need cover. Shade doesn’t like tight spaces.”
“Why?” I asked, hauling myself up.
“It prefers to spread,” he replied. “Fill. Empty places are easier to own.”
“That’s… allegorical.” I winced as my left knee twinged. “And deeply unhelpful.”
“I’m not a field manual.”
“Shame. Would’ve made training more interesting.”
He huffed something that might’ve been a laugh. The sound came out rough and low, like he hadn’t had much practice with it in the last couple of centuries.
We started down the slope, picking our way over loose stone. Every step sent a rumble of complaint up my leg. The bond dutifully transmitted the pain; I saw Drake’s jaw clench once, twice.
“You’re limping,” he said.
“You’re observant,” I shot back.
“It’s getting worse.”
“So is everything else, Drake. Get in line.”
He stopped so abruptly the chain jerked tight. I stumbled a step, caught myself, and glared up at him.
“What now?”
He looked at my leg, then at the terrain—the broken ridge, the shadowed dips in the rock, the far-off dark mouth of what might have been a cave or just another cruel trick of the light.
“You’re not going to make it far like this,” he said.
“Oh, now you care about efficiency.”
“I have since you nearly let yourself get eaten,” he said flatly. “The bond is pulling at that injury. You push too hard, and it’s going to tear.”
“It’s just a strain.”
“It’s not,” he said. “I could feel it go when you took that last fall.”
The memory flashed: the shade-touched soldier slamming me into the ground, the wrenching twist as I drove my knife in. The way my leg had refused to hold my weight afterward.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Back when dragons were world-saving guardians, you also dabbled in battlefield medicine.”
“No,” he said. “Back when dragons were world-saving guardians, we knew better than to drag someone on a broken limb across hostile ground.”
He scanned the rock face, eyes narrowing. “There.”
I followed his gaze. A dark notch in the cliffside, half-hidden by scrub and a jut of stone, like the mountain had taken a bite of itself and never finished chewing.
“A cave,” I said.
“A hollow, at least,” he replied. “We rest there. Properly. You let me see to that leg.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Christine.”
The way he said my name—steady, low, threaded with a warning I felt in my bones—made the bond thrum.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I said, crossing my arms. “Me helpless, you playing hero.”
“I don’t need you helpless,” he said calmly. “The bond already ties you to me. You’re not a hostage. You’re an echo.”
“That is somehow worse.”
He sighed, long-suffering, like I was the unreasonable one here. “We can argue, or we can pretend you’re still a soldier and do what keeps us alive.”
“Soldiers don’t let enemy combatants touch them,” I said.
His eyes flicked briefly to my wrist, then up. “You bound your soul to one. That policy is already outdated.”
I hated that he had a point. I hated even more that my leg throbbed in agreement.
“Fine,” I muttered. “Shelter first. We’ll… revisit the touching part.”
“Progress,” he said mildly.
“Don’t sound so pleased.”
“I’m not pleased,” he said. “I’m invested in not collapsing in the open while a shade strolls through your corpse.”
“Romantic,” I said.
He gave me a look. “I thought you witches liked dramatic imagery.”
“Not about my corpse, thanks.”
We made our way toward the cave, my pace shorter and more cautious now. Drake unconsciously adjusted his stride to match mine. The tether between us stayed just slack enough, like a leash held by someone who knew exactly how far they could let you roam.
Up close, the hollow turned out to be deeper than it looked from a distance—a narrow opening that widened once we ducked inside, blooming into a compact chamber carved by water and time. The ceiling hung low in places, studded with mineral teeth that glimmered faintly in the thin light that managed to seep in.
It was cold.
But it was still.
No wind. No flicker of unnatural shadows. The stone smelled of damp earth and old minerals, not smoke or blood or that wrong, hollow chill that clung to places the shade had touched.
“This will do,” Drake said, voice echoing softly.
“You sure?” I asked. “Old childhood lair? Secret dragon den?”
“If this were one of ours,” he said, “you’d know. There’d be bones on the floor.”
“Comforting,” I said.