Chapter 114: The Dragon King

Liona’s POV

My paws hit the ground hard with every stride.

The earth beneath me was uneven, roots and rocks and dips that came without warning, and I navigated all of it on instinct because looking down was not an option. Looking back was not much of an option either but I did it anyway, one quick glance over my shoulder, and they were still there. All of them. Moving through the trees behind me with the focused persistence of people who had decided this was where their evening was going and were not reconsidering.

Good. That was the point.

I faced forward and ran harder.

My chest burned. The particular burn that came when the body had been pushed past the comfortable range and was now operating in the territory where it started sending messages about how it felt about that. I ignored the messages and kept moving. My legs screamed in that deep, specific way that muscles scream when they have already given everything and are being asked for more anyway.

I gave them more.

The cave had to be far behind me by now. Far enough. That was all that mattered. That Azura was in there in the dark with whatever she had gone in there to find and nobody was going to find the entrance because everyone who had been looking for it was currently following me through these trees.

I ran until the direction I had come from stopped making sense. Until the trees all looked the same and the path behind me had turned into just more forest. Until I genuinely could not have found my way back to the cave if I had tried.

Then I stopped. I turned around.

They came out of the trees in ones and twos, stepping through the undergrowth, weapons already drawn. I watched them emerge and spread out in front of me, moving sideways, closing off the angles, forming the shape of something that intended to leave me no options.

Two of them. Three. The last one stepped out from between two trees on my right.

Five altogether.

They arranged themselves in a half circle with the patience of people who believed the numbers made the outcome inevitable and were simply waiting for me to understand that.

One of them stepped slightly forward from the rest. His voice came out flat and certain.

"Do not make this difficult. Come with us and tell us where the other one is."

I looked at him.

Then I lowered my head.

The growl started deep in my chest and moved outward, and when it reached the air, it was not the polite kind of warning. It was the kind that said I understand the situation perfectly and I have made my decision about it.

Another one spoke from the side. "We do not want to hurt you."

I lifted my head.

And roared.

The first one who moved came from the left and he came fast, which was the right instinct, but fast only mattered if you knew where you were going. I turned into him and my jaws found his shoulder before he had finished deciding what to do with his momentum.

He screamed.

I bit down and held and shook my head the way I had learned from watching wolves who actually knew what they were doing, and the force of it sent him away from me hard. He hit a tree. He did not get back up.

The others hesitated.

That single moment of hesitation told me everything. They were not sure about me. They had expected the first one to be enough to establish something, and it had not established anything, and now they were recalculating.

Then they shifted.

Dark fur and yellow eyes and the particular way a wolf’s body changed the energy in a space just by being in it. They shifted, and they circled, and I was in the middle of the circle.

I fought.

I bit and clawed and moved, and when they hit me, I got back up and hit back. One went down, and another took its place, and I kept turning, kept moving, kept making sure nothing came at me from behind without being answered for.

But there were too many.

I knew it before my body admitted it. That particular knowing that came when the numbers stopped being manageable and started being inevitable. I kept fighting because fighting was what was available, but somewhere underneath the fighting, the knowing was there, and it was not going anywhere.

One of them hit me from the right with full force. Not a bite. A full body impact, its weight and speed combining into something that I had no answer for in the half second I had to find one.

The force of it drove me backward, and my back found the fallen tree behind me, and the impact when I hit it was the kind that registered in places that had nothing to do with where the contact was.

My ribs.

Something was wrong there. Something that had not been wrong before the tree and was wrong now in a way that was going to keep being wrong for a significant amount of time.

I tried to stand.

My leg buckled. The pain from my ribs moved through everything connected to them which was apparently everything.

I shifted back.

Not a decision exactly. More like my body making the call when the wolf part of me had nothing left to give.

My human form landed on the ground with my hand pressed against my side, and the cold of the earth under my palms, and the faces of the men standing around me looking down.

They shifted back too.

They walked toward me slowly. No rush. The unhurried pace of people who had already decided how this ended.

One of them drew his sword.

"Your biggest mistake," he said, "was making this difficult."

Another voice came from behind the group. Colder. More certain.

"It is not her. Whatever power they are looking for is not coming from her. She is not the one." A pause. "Get rid of her. We find the real one."

I lifted my head.

My voice came out raw and shaking and I did not care.

"You idiots," I said. "I am the one you are looking for. I am exactly who you want."

The man with the sword looked at me.

He did not believe me.

He kept walking. The others kept walking. The shadows they cast moved across the ground toward me as they came closer. And the swords in their hands caught what little light was coming through the trees above, and I watched it, and I thought about everything and nothing at the same time, the way people thought when time had stopped being something they had a lot of.

I thought about Azura. About the look on her face when she understood what I was doing at the cave entrance. About the way she had pressed her hands against the rocks and screamed my name. About the fact that she was inside that cave right now, doing whatever she had gone there to do, and nobody was going to interrupt that.

I thought about Torin. About sitting against a tree in the afternoon light with his hand in mine and the birds singing somewhere above us.

I thought about my mother’s kitchen and the smell of it. About the way mornings used to feel before any of this started. About small simple things that I had not known to be grateful enough for when I had them.

I closed my eyes.

A tear moved down my cheek. One. I had not planned it and I did not wipe it away because my hands were pressed against my ribs and I was not moving them for anything.

I hope, I thought, in whatever comes next, that I live long enough to grow old. That I get to see all of it. That I get enough time to see how it all turns out.

I waited for the blade.

Metal struck something.

The sound of it was sharp and immediate and close. But I felt nothing.

I opened my eyes slowly.

The sword had stopped.

It was right there. Close enough that I could see the edge of it. But it had stopped. Something was holding the blade. A hand had come from somewhere and closed around it and the man holding the sword was frozen with his arm still extended and his eyes very wide and looking at something that was not me.

I looked up.

White mask.

Black horns rising from his forehead and curving back into long white hair that fell around the edges of the mask.

Grey eyes.

He was not looking at the men. He was not looking at the sword; he had stopped it with his bare hand. He was looking at me. Directly and completely at me, like I was the only thing in this clearing that existed and everything else was just backdrop.

He pulled the sword from the man’s grip. Not forcefully. Just easily, the way you took something from someone’s hand when they had forgotten they were holding it. He tossed it aside and it landed somewhere in the undergrowth without a sound.

The men stepped back.

Not one or two of them. All of them. At the same moment. A single collective step backward that had nothing practiced about it. Pure instinct. The instinct of people who had just understood something about the situation changed all of their calculations at once.

One of them whispered it. Barely enough sound to be a word.

"It’s the Dragon King."

I heard it.

My mind caught the two words and turned them over and I looked at the figure crouching down in front of me now, lowering himself to my level, grey eyes coming down to where I was sitting on the ground with my hand against my ribs and the cold earth under me.

Did he just say King? The thought arrived quietly. Like it was still trying to understand its own implications.

He was close now. Close enough that I could see the texture of the white mask. Close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him, something far beyond a normal body’s heat, sitting in the air around him like something that had always been there and did not need to announce itself.

His eyes had not left my face.

He reached out.

Slowly. Not fast. Not like he was reaching for something he was going to take. Like he was reaching for something fragile that he was not sure he was allowed to touch.

His fingers found my cheek.

One finger. The side of it. And he wiped the tear away. Gentle in a way that had no right to exist in the same moment as everything else that was happening in this clearing. Careful in a way that made no sense from someone who had just stopped a sword with his bare hand and made nine armed men step backward without saying a single word.

He pulled his hand back slightly and looked at what was on his fingertip.

The tear.

He looked at it like it was something he had not expected to find. Like it was something he had been looking for without knowing that was what he was looking for. Like it meant something that he did not have words for yet and was not going to rush into finding.

His grey eyes moved from his fingertip back to my face.

And then they changed.

I watched it happen. The grey of them shifting, something coming up from underneath it, gold bleeding in from the very edges and spreading inward slowly, moving like light moved when it came over a horizon, patient and inevitable and changing everything it touched.

The gold kept spreading.

His eyes were on mine.

His hand was still raised, frozen in the air between us, close enough to my face that I could feel the warmth of it without it touching.

I could not move. I could not speak.

I was not entirely certain I was still breathing.