Young Writers Society

The sun was, blessedly, setting.

Cassia squinted west to see how low it was and looked away just as quickly. She groaned and shifted back onto her stomach, looking down at the barren land below. She and Sasha had long since given up sitting upright on Fyn’s back, instead tying themselves to a makeshift rigging around Fyn’s chest and front legs and dragging blankets over them to keep the sun off.

Cassia’s tongue was thick and her whole head ached. Three days of flying from mid-morning to long into the night had left her sunburned all over, her silver skin turning an unhealthy pink. Maybe it would have been better to fly nights and sleep days, but all Fyn seemed to be concerned about was getting there as fast as possible. If the sun bothered him, he hadn’t shown it. He’d hardly spoken since their argument in Lhening. Like a wind current snatching leaves from a pile, he’d carried her and Sasha along in the wake of his fixation.

They had to be close now. Cassia peered over Fyn’s side at the dry gorge winding far below them, straining to catch a glimpse of the beehive-shaped mound she had seen in her scrying.

There, where the gorge bent. A split in the rock, like the river had carved first one way and then another.

“Fly lower!” Cassia shouted to be heard over the wind, whose roar was numb in her ears by now. “I think I see it!”

Fyn lifted his head as if in a dream. He saw Cassia’s pointing finger and angled, diving low into the gorge itself. The sun passed into shadow behind the rock, and with the light gone the bend in the gorge loomed plainly ahead.

It was the Hive, exactly as Cassia had seen it in her vision. Thick and round and riddled with strange tunnels at the bottom, it spiraled up into a long tower ending in a plateau only a dozen feet across. She rubbed her bleary eyes and stared, her heart slowly rousing to believe that after all this time, they truly were here.

“This is it!” she shouted, pushing herself up on her hands and knees and grinning through cracked lips. She even saw some small pools of water deep in the shadows of the gorge and nets and baskets of fishing-gear at its edge.

Gear. People. The Seekers.

“Turn around!” Cassia shouted in a panic. “We have to stay out of sight! It’s not going to work if they know we’re here, Fyn, turn around!”

Fyn started as if snapped out of a daze and tilted his wings, veering them into a steep climb that threw both Sasha and Cassia off balance. Cassia’s chest harness slammed against her ribs and knocked the wind out of her, but it saved her from falling as Fyn made an abrupt one-eighty and flew back up the canyon, skimming low to the ground even after they were out of sight of the Hive.

“Land there,” Sasha said, leaning over and watching the ground skim by. She pointed to a place where the rock had eroded underneath the edge of the canyon, leaving an overhang. “It’s hidden, and it’ll be shady for most of the day.”

As the canyon straightened, it was quickly getting too narrow for Fyn to fly in. His wings were already brushing the sides. He made a tight circle and descended, landing beside the overhang with a jolt that rattled Cassia’s bones. His chest heaved and his wings were shaking as he folded them.

“Get off,” Fyn said between breaths. “Cassia, you’ve got twenty minutes to sneak over to the Hive and get in position. Then I’m starting the distraction.”

He turned his head and got right in Sasha’s face. “You stay out of the way. Be ready to teleport us back to Promise.”

“Wait—” Sasha started, though she had already untied her harness and gotten down.

“Yeah, hold on,” Cassia interrupted. She got her feet underneath her and stood on Fyn’s back, clenching her fists against the wave of dizziness that swept over her. “We can’t do this now. You need to rest.”

“I’m fine,” snarled Fyn. “We don’t have time. The R— it — is tomorrow.”

“Yeah, so we can’t afford to mess this up like at Haven! We have to sleep. If we go just before sunrise when they’re all asleep, we can still teleport back before noon.”

“And if it doesn’t work, then we’ve wasted time. I told you, I’m fine.”

Cassia folded her arms, refusing to cut herself free. “I can hardly think straight and I’ve been laying on your back all day. I’ve seen what it looks like when angels fly too far, Fyn. I don’t think you can even get off the ground again.”

Fyn gave a great huff of breath in her face, and for a second Cassia was terrified that fire would follow. Instead, he cut Cassia’s rope with a slash of his teeth and dragged himself to the center of the canyon.

Cassia tumbled off his back and hit the ground with an awkward roll. Winded again and splayed out on her back, she watched Fyn cut the rest of their supplies off his back and try to take to the sky again. He ran along the bottom of the gorge and jumped once, twice, but both times he only made it a few feet in the air, not high enough to catch an updraft, before he couldn’t sustain his lift and drifted back down to the ground.

The third time, he didn’t even make it off the ground. His run-up wasn’t straight, and right before he jumped, his front paw smacked into a spur of rock and sent him tumbling forward head over heels. He crashed to a stop twenty paces down the gorge.

He didn’t move. Cassia’s heart skipped several beats.

Then at last Fyn got to his feet, favoring his injured paw. His head hanging and his ears flat, he limped back toward Sasha and Cassia, walking past them without a word. He ducked under the overhang, curled up in a corner, and shut his eyes.

Sasha was smirking. Cassia gave her a warning glance and put her finger to her lips. There was no point in adding to Fyn’s humiliation.

Cassia approached Fyn, put a hand on his flank, and sent her thoughts out wordlessly, seeking her mote and asking for it back. Even though Fyn held her mote for hours every day now, he still preferred to return it to her at night.

Fyn grunted softly and released the mote. Cassia caught her wings in her hands and pressed them to her back. Her weariness lifted and her headache dimmed as Mithrinde’s power washed over her. In that brief moment before Fyn released the mote completely, she caught a thread of his emotions.

Fear. Overwhelming fear.

A fear terribly similar to the kind coursing through her own veins. Cassia clung to her mote, to the return of her power and Mithrinde’s soothing peace, but whatever peace Mithrinde had for her was lost among the tightness in her chest.

She shook her head and attended to the business of setting up camp while Fyn slept. She retrieved the belongings that Fyn had strewn across the gorge, got out their bedrolls, and cleared away the loose pebbles under the overhang, setting her hand aglow for light as the sun slipped fully beneath the gorge and left it awash in shadow. Sasha helped wordlessly, re-tying the harness where Fyn had bitten it and setting out a share of food for her and Cassia.

There was no wood for a fire, so their dinner consisted of thinning, stale bread rations and dried meat. Cassia turned their last loaf of bread over in her hands and considered splitting it with Sasha, under the premise that by this time tomorrow they would be safely in Promise. But her heart was still thudding in her chest and a sick sort of certainty told her that of course she could not be so confident. She folded the cloth wrapping back over it and put it back in her bag.

“We should keep watch,” she said quietly to Sasha, who was sitting beside her on the ridge just outside of the overhang. The human girl was fiddling with one of those rocks she had shifted into layers. At night, when Fyn was sleeping, her face would soften, and she would tell Cassia boastful stories of other jobs she had taken, with just enough of a smirk that Cassia couldn’t be sure if the girl was pulling her leg or not. Cassia in turn would tell her about Mithrinden, and the pranks she and Tilana would pull on their minders as kids. She had not mentioned to Sasha anything of what Fyn had told her about their shared past.

“There are people here who… stole something from us,” Cassia explained, trying to think what she could say while skirting around the issue of the Treatise. So far, Sasha had asked no questions about what Fyn and Cassia were doing, and they had done their best not to offer any clues. “We’ve been tracking them. We’re going to try to get it back. But if they see us, they’ll try to kill us.”

“Yeah, I figured that much from the part where you were shouting to turn around or we’d be seen,” Sasha said dryly.

Cassia laughed to cover another stab of fear. It had been pretty dumb to just fly up to it like that. What if someone had seen them?

Sasha looked over her shoulder at the sleeping lump that was Fyn. “He’s not the sharpest knife on the belt, is he?”

“He’s not stupid,” Cassia defended him. “He’s just… clueless. Honestly, so am I. Everything here is so different from Mithrinden.”

Sasha smirked. “You’re not wrong about being clueless. But you do a better job of hiding it.”

She leaned back on her hands and looked at Cassia keenly. “How did you two wind up working together, anyway? No offense, but I’ve literally never seen an angel out of Mithrinden, much less one working with a drake. You’ve put up with him at least a week longer than I would have.”

“We just… met,” Cassia said vaguely. She didn’t dare say they were on assignment from their Orders. There was a reason a drake and an angel working together was nearly unheard of. “Two heads are better than one, right?”

“Sure,” Sasha said, but Cassia could tell the human girl didn’t believe her. Sasha looked back at Fyn again. “I can see why you don’t dump him. That display with your wings was just about the funniest thing I’ve seen in years.”

“Don’t,” Cassia said, needled. “He was trying—”

“—his best, I’m sure,” Sasha said, but her voice trailed off at the end, wistful instead of cutting. “Damn him,” she muttered under her breath.

Cassia watched Fyn too. His flank rose and fell in great heaves and she could hear his rattling snore from here. Curled up asleep was the only time he looked vulnerable in his drake form. Like a person and not a monster.

“Has he been like that since you were kids?” Cassia asked idly. “Always throwing himself into—”

Too late, she realized what she had said.

Sasha sat very still in the gathering dusk. Her hand went to her hip where one of her knives hung.

“I’m sorry,” Cassia babbled. “He told me you knew each other—”

Sasha stood up with a violence, the heel of her cloak whipping Cassia’s arm. “I’m going for a walk.”

Cassia got up too, reaching out to the girl. “Wait, Sasha, I’m—”

“Don’t follow me,” Sasha snapped. “I won’t go far. Get some sleep.”

She stalked along the gorge wall and vanished among the shadows.

Cassia dropped back to the ground and flung herself backwards with a loud sigh. “Mithrinde’s robes, I’m stupid.”

She looked up at the few unveiled stars in the early night sky. Down here in the gorge, she couldn’t see the moon, but she could feel it, full and bright and beautiful, rising just above the horizon. She had left Mithrinden just after the new moon. It felt like an eternity ago, but now she prayed that the timing was fortuitous, that the light of the full moon would bless her while she did… whatever it was she was going to do tomorrow to get the Treatise back.

Her father’s warning echoed in her head. It’s not safe. Don’t touch it.

How had she gotten so far, and was still so unsure about what she was about to do?

“This is your last chance, Mithrinde,” she told the goddess, staring at the rock wall of the gorge as if she could see through it to the moon. “If I’m doing the wrong thing, stop me. But the Treatise is about to break, and at this point we might be the only ones who can stop it. So please… help me get this right.”

It felt good to pray aloud. She rarely did, even on this journey, where she’d never had so much reason to call on Mithrinde. But her father did. He had prayed with her since she was small, his palms up on his knees, his head tilted back to the sky, sometimes whispering his words, sometimes almost shouting them in joy. He never told her what to say, but just told her to talk, and Mithrinde would hear, like it was as simple as talking to a sister sitting in bed with you. Or a mother.

She closed her eyes and drew into her mote, letting waves of Mithrinde’s power lap gently at her soul. She breathed deep, and some of her fear withdrew. Sometimes she thought she felt words in the waves, though they could have been products of her own mind.

Tell him, the words breathed.

Cassia sat bolt upright. She opened her pack and found the pouch where she kept her components. There it was: her last message quill. She’d considered messaging Tilana, telling her she should be home soon, that they were so close, but she’d decided against it in case of an emergency.

But now it wasn’t Tilana’s face coming to mind, but her father’s.

She could send him a message. He couldn’t trace quill messages, so it was safe. What could she say in a handful of words? That she was sorry she’d escaped the guards he’d sent? She wasn’t. That she was doing fine out here on her own? She was a nervous wreck.

She could tell him she was close. And she could ask him why he’d broken his promise.

It was exactly what she had refused to do for nearly a week. What could he possibly say to fix it in a handful of sentences? Quill message was the worst way to have an argument.

But now she had only one quill left. And under the eye of the full moon, with Mithrinde’s magic prickling through her veins and the prospect of either complete victory and vindication or utter defeat and death in the next twenty-four hours looming over her… what did she really have to lose?

Cassia clutched the quill with sunburnt fingers and traced in the air, careful to fit the word limit.

Dad, I’m close. Tomorrow, or not at all. This is my last quill. I just want to know: why? Love you. Love Tilana. Tell her.

She traced the period, pulled the magic from the quill in one quick burst, and the message flared orange and vanished before her eyes.

Cassia waited, blood and magic pounding in her veins. He could reply with a sentence or two as part of her original spell.

The moments stretched out until Cassia was sure no response would come.

Until it did. A blue ribbon of magic blossomed before her eyes and twisted itself into nine short words.

Well done. Love you, too. Come home quickly, moonbeam.

Cassia stared at the words long after they had faded from existence, as if to draw them into her soul. She didn’t notice the tears streaming down her cheeks until one splashed onto her hand. Then she stood up, unrolled her bedroll close enough to Fyn to feel the warmth radiating off his hide, and pushed aside her utter confusion to sleep.

------

“You can’t catch me!”

“We’ll see about that!” Fyn swished his tail and pawed at the stony floor of the Hub in Mt. Onyx. Then he launched himself up one of the spiraling pathways that ringed the edges.

Cassia squealed and ran, her short legs sending scree down the slope behind her. She laughed as she ran, and her laugh was like the crackle of lava, and her golden hair gleamed like embers.

She was fast. Fyn lengthened his stride, trying not to trip over his large, gangly paws. They tapped a drumbeat on the stone. He stretched out his neck and laughed in tireless joy.

He was faster. He gained inch by inch on her until he could almost catch the edge of her dress in his teeth. She glanced back and yelped in surprise, putting on a burst of speed.

In that half second, a dark shadow rose between them. Fyn skidded to a halt and looked up a monstrously long, black, scaled neck.

Zhiron looked back at him, and his eyes were like fire. Fyn’s heart seized. His breath stuck in his throat and it felt like his blood had congealed in his veins. He wanted to crawl away and hide, but there was nowhere that gaze could not find him.

Cassia appeared beside him. Her cheeks were flushed and she was still grinning from their run. She put a hand on his shoulder.

At her touch, the terror burned away. Fyn breathed.

Zhiron’s gaze moved from Fyn to Cassia. “I see,” he murmured.

With a casual paw, Zhiron slapped her off the path into the shaft that led to the heart of the volcano. Wingless, she fell out of sight without a sound.

Fyn watched her fall. Then he looked back at Zhiron without any real memory of why he had looked away. Why had he been so afraid? What had he been doing before?

“You’ve been playing long enough.” Zhiron looked down at Fyn, his now-black eyes boring into Fyn’s heart. “Come.”

He turned and swept away down the slope. Fyn ran to follow, but his legs moved like thick magma, and the air was hot and choking. He couldn’t keep up. Zhiron’s black tail had nearly vanished and the edges of his vision were bleeding to grey.

He gasped one last breath and sprang—

Fyn’s eyes flew open to see a wall of sandy rock. His heart pounded in his chest and fire burned through his veins.

He rolled over, dislodging a shower of grit, and got to his paws. He crept up the ridge past a sleeping Cassia and padded down the gorge under the light of the fully risen moon.

He did not notice that it was as red as blood.

He didn’t know how far he walked. At some point, the gorge kinked and then straightened. Around the corner in the shadow of a tall boulder loomed Zhiron in the flesh.

Fyn felt no surprise. Selach’s fire still burned through his veins, giving him purpose and a sense of the inevitable. This was meant to be.

Zhiron spoke. His voice was rich, carrying warmth and power. “Welcome, Apprentice Fyn.”

At his words, Fyn’s mote calmed, Selach’s fire dying away. Fyn blinked and shook his head. He felt like he’d awoken from a second dream.

“How… how did I know to come here?”

“Selach willed it, and it was so.”

“I was dreaming…”

Zhiron shook his head, dismissive. “A crude method of suggestion, but some of us are not so receptive to his finer calls.”

With a shock that washed over him like cold water, Fyn remembered who he was talking to. He sank to his belly. “High Priest, sir, I’m sorry—”

“Stand, Apprentice,” Zhiron said calmly. “You are very nearly there.”

Apprentice? Something exploded in Fyn’s chest. “Are you— am I—?”

Zhiron smiled, his lips pulling back over his fangs. “Not quite. You have done well. Better than myself or our Archpriestess ever dreamed. It was… quite a surprise.”

Fyn swelled at the praise. Was he still dreaming? Now all of it — fighting the mages, working with Cassia, their impossibly long flight across the desert — seemed inconsequential. Zhiron was pleased. He had nearly earned his place to serve Selach. No one could call him weak or faithless now.

Zhiron stepped up to Fyn, his face emerging out of shadow and into the red moonlight. It sharpened his jaw and bled his scales crimson. His tail traced Fyn’s shoulder.

“You are close. So close. But there are two final things I must ask before you take your place at my side.”

“Anything.” Fyn’s legs shook, jittery with joy.

Zhiron dropped his head so that it was level with Fyn’s, his nostrils almost touching Fyn’s snout. “First, when you get the Treatise — and I trust that it will not be if, but when — you must bring it to me. We will bring it to Mt. Onyx. Do not go to Promise. This is vital, Fyn. The future of the Order depends on it.”

Fyn nodded eagerly. “I can do that.”

Zhiron’s black eyes remained steady. “Second, a more personal task. That wretched angel must never leave this desert.

“Tonight, you will kill her and burn her body.”