Part Three — What the Sky Brought Down

I woke up before I understood why I'd woken up. 

No sound. No shaking ground. Just a wrongness in the air, the kind of silence that isn't peaceful, the kind where every bird for a mile has already decided to be somewhere else. 

Something's here. 

I was out of bed and at the window before I'd finished the thought, and that's when I saw them — two shapes blotting out the stars over the ridge, wings wide enough to eclipse half the sky, descending toward the house like they already knew exactly where it was. 

Dragons. Actual, full-grown dragons. 

I'd never seen one outside of Mom's human shape. I understood, in the half-second it took my whole body to go cold, that whatever these two were, they weren't here to visit. 

"Kai — up, now!" Dad's voice, already sharp with something I'd never heard in it before. Not anger. Not urgency, even. Certainty. Like a man who'd been waiting years for a knock he always knew was coming. 

Mom was already at my door, and the look on her face told me everything words weren't going to have time to. 

The first dragon didn't bother landing. It hit the house from above, and the roof came apart like it had been made of paper. 

I don't remember all of it in order. I remember Dad standing in what used to be our front yard, sword already drawn, facing the larger of the two — a dragon so massive the ground seemed to bend slightly under where it settled. I remember him saying something to it, low and even, and the dragon's answer wasn't in words at all, just a wave of pressure that flattened the grass for twenty feet in every direction. 

I remember Mom grabbing me before I could take one more step toward him. 

"Kai. Look at me. We're leaving. Now." 

"Mom, Dad's—" 

"He knows what he's doing." Her voice didn't shake. I've thought about that a lot since — how she never let it shake, not once, right up until the end. "Run with me." 

We ran. Or she ran, and I was carried, half-flying, half-dragged through air that felt like it was fighting us the whole way. 

The second dragon caught up before we'd gone a mile. 

I want to tell you distance meant something. It didn't. Not against something that had spent longer alive than every human city put together. It simply arrived, mid-air, directly in our path, wings barely moving, like it had never been in any hurry at all. 

"You're further from home than you should be, little flame," it said — and its voice, I understood with a jolt, was a language, not a roar, precise and almost bored. "Hand over the child. This doesn't need to take long." 

"He's mine," Mom said. "You'll go through me first." 

"That was always the plan." 

She put me down hard, shoved me toward a gap in the treeline before the dragon had even finished speaking. 

"Run, Kai. Don't stop. Don't look back. Whatever you hear — keep running." 

I obeyed. I want that on record, because it's the one thing I've never forgiven myself for and never will — I obeyed. 

I ran until the trees blurred, until my lungs burned, until the sounds behind me — impact, something like thunder, a voice I didn't recognize as my mother's screaming something I couldn't make out — became a single roaring wall of noise I couldn't separate into pieces anymore. 

Dragons have good eyes. I have decent ones myself, now, but that night mine were still a child's. And a child's eyes were exactly enough to see, from three hundred yards and closing, my mother's shape come apart in one motion, clean and fast and final, the way you'd split a piece of firewood. 

I stopped running. I don't remember deciding to. 

I don't have words for what happened next, not really, not ones that do it justice. Grief has a shape when it hits you that hard — it isn't sadness, not at first. It's rage with nowhere to go, and mine had somewhere to go for the first time in my short life: straight down into whatever had been sitting quiet and half-formed at the edges of my aura for three years. 

The purple and the red stopped bleeding into each other and ignited, both at once, a color I'd never had a name for because nobody else's aura had ever needed one. 

It wasn't strength. Not yet. I understood that even through the haze — I was eight years old and however much power had just torn loose out of me, it wasn't anywhere close to enough to close the distance and do a single useful thing to the two beings who'd just ended my parents' lives in under ten minutes combined. 

But something in me marked the moment anyway. Filed it away, permanent, non-negotiable. 

One day. Not today. Not for a long time, maybe. But one day, both of you are going to know exactly what this feeling was for. 

The second dragon's head turned toward me — slow, almost curious, like it had felt the aura flare from that distance and wanted a closer look at what it belonged to. 

It didn't come for me. Not that night. I never learned why — whether it decided a half-feral, aura-spiking child wasn't worth the trouble, or whether something else called it away, or whether it simply didn't consider me a threat worth finishing. 

Whatever the reason, I was alone in the dark within the hour, an orphan on a mountain that no longer had a house on it, with nothing left except a name that wasn't originally mine, a color of aura nobody else in this world seemed to have, and a promise I'd made to no one but myself. 

Get stronger. However long it takes. However far I have to go to do it. 

One day, I'm ending both of you.