Page 9 of Davoren
He didn't finish. Didn't need to. The implication hung clear as dragon-flame between us.
I thought of Mira, probably dead in the caravan's wreckage. Of my father, who'd sold me for trade routes. Of Solmar, waiting for a bride who would never arrive.
The mark pulsed again, and this time I felt an echo from his. Not just heat but emotion—his desperate need to protect warring with respect for my choice. The female drake writhed in his grip, and I saw the moment his strength would fail. Saw the moment those jaws would close on his throat, and then turn to me.
"Show me," I whispered.
He went absolutely still. Even the drakes seemed to pause, sensing the shift in the cave's atmosphere.
"Say it again." His voice carried notes I'd never heard before—hope and hunger and terrible resignation all woven together. "So there can be no mistaking."
I straightened as much as my injuries allowed, meeting the female drake's golden gaze with something approaching dignity. "Show me what you are."
Davoren released the drake with a fluid motion that sent her scrambling back to join the others. When he turned to face me, his ember eyes held sorrow and hunger in equal measure. The mark on his shoulder blazed like a small sun, and mine answered with fire that felt like coming home.
"Remember," he said softly, each word chosen with infinite care, "you asked for this revelation. Step back against the wall and do not move, no matter what you see. Do not run. Do not scream. Do not close your eyes." His expression hardened into something ancient and implacable. "Your life depends on stillness. The drakes will attack anything that moves once the transformation begins. Even breathing too quickly could trigger their instincts."
I pressed myself against the stone until I could feel every ridge and edge through my torn dress. My hands found holds in the rock, fingers digging in until my knuckles went white. "I understand."
"No," he said, and for the first time I heard genuine gentleness in his voice. "You don't. But you will."
The air around him began to shimmer like heat waves rising from molten glass. The temperature in the cave spiked ten degrees in as many seconds. And deep in my shoulder, the mark began to sing a song that predated human language, human memory, human understanding of what was possible in this world.
The eldest drake backed away first, some ancient instinct overriding her rage. The others followed, their aggressivepostures melting into something that looked almost like reverence.
Or terror.
My eyes flicked back to Davoren, and when I saw the change, I couldn’t tear them away.
Light erupted from his center like a star being born. Despite his warning, I had to squeeze my eyes to slits or be blinded completely. Even through barely parted lashes, the radiance seared itself into my retinas—not ordinary light but something that bypassed the physical and burned straight into memory.
Then came the sound.
I'd broken my arm when I was twelve, falling from the Archbishop's pear tree while stealing fruit with the kitchen boys. I remembered the wet snap of bone, how it had echoed through my whole body. This was that sound multiplied by hundreds, thousands—an entire symphony of skeleton breaking and reforming. Each crack and pop reverberated through the cave walls and into my bones, making my teeth ache with sympathetic vibration.
His human form didn't so much change as explode outward. Mass appeared from nowhere, violating every law of physics my tutors had drummed into my head. Matter could neither be created nor destroyed, they'd said, but Davoren's transformation laughed at such mortal limitations. Flesh expanded like dough rising in fast motion, muscle and sinew weaving themselves into new configurations that my mind rejected as impossible.
I watched his spine elongate first, each vertebra separating with audible pops before new ones generated between them. His neck stretched like molten glass being drawn by a master craftsman, elegant and terrible. The skin split along his back—not bleeding but revealing something beneath that caught light and threw it back transformed. Scales rippled across theexpanding flesh like oil spreading over water, each one emerging fully formed and perfect.
Black at first glance, but that was like calling the ocean blue. As they caught the light of his transformation, they revealed themselves as every color and none—deep purple in one angle, molten gold in another, the green-black of forests at midnight when I shifted my gaze. An oil-slick rainbow that hurt to look at and impossible to look away from.
His wings emerged like dark flowers blooming in poisoned soil. The membrane between the bones was thin enough that I could see his inner light through it, creating patterns like stained glass windows in some demon's cathedral. They unfurled with wet sounds that made my stomach clench, span increasing until they scraped both walls of the cave that had seemed so spacious moments before.
The adult drakes pressed themselves flat against the ground, bellies to stone and necks stretched in submission.
When the light finally dimmed enough for me to fully open my eyes, I faced something that made every nightmare I'd ever had seem like pleasant dreams.
A dragon the size of a small house filled the cave.
No—filled was wrong. He commanded the space, made it his, made everything else seem temporary and insignificant by comparison. His head alone was larger than my entire body, crowned with horns that looked like they'd been carved from midnight. They swept back from his skull in elegant curves that somehow managed to be both beautiful and terrifying.
His eyes remained ember-bright, but now they were each the size of dinner plates, with pupils that contracted to vertical slits as they focused on me. The intelligence there was worse than the size, worse than the teeth I could see when his lips pulled back slightly. This wasn't some mindless beast. This was ancient wisdom wrapped in scales and power, divinity that had chosento walk among mortals and could choose to stop pretending at any moment.
Steam rose from his nostrils with each breath. I could feel my sweat evaporating before it formed, my throat going dry as desert sand. When he shifted slightly, scales sliding against each other with a sound like sword blades being drawn, I saw the way muscle moved beneath them. Controlled. Precise. Holding back power that could level mountains if unleashed.
"This is what you are bound to, Kara Lyris."
His voice in dragon form bypassed my ears entirely. It resonated in my bones, in the empty spaces between my thoughts, in parts of me I didn't know could hear. Each word was a physical sensation—pressure and heat and something that might have been the echo of creation itself.
