Young Writers Society

No, Cassia thought as the black drake spoke. No, no, no, we’re so close. This had to be the drake Fyn had told her about, the one that had ordered Fyn to… kill her. He filled the tunnel, his shoulders nearly pressing into the walls on either side. The chamber could only be a few feet away, but she knew she couldn’t get past him if she tried.

She clutched the Treatise to her chest. It was warm to the touch and leaking wisps of magic — she had no idea how much time they had, but it wasn't much. Cassia wanted to shout at Zhiron to leave, tell him Fyn wasn’t his anymore and he should crawl back to the dark hole where he belonged. But instead her tongue was frozen in terror and she couldn’t look away from Fyn, who had gone rigid, hand still outstretched toward Zhiron. Fyn had come to save her, yes, had promised he couldn’t leave her, but now they were trapped in a tunnel with a elder drake towering over them and it was like what had happened to Sasha all over again, except in this case there were no Seekers to smuggle Cassia away.

Zhiron’s lip curled back as he addressed Fyn. “Slow-witted today, are you? I’ve never seen such a pathetic specimen dare call himself a drake. You wear her wings and walk in human form — you probably let her ride you too, in both forms.”

The crass insinuation hit Cassia like a slap to the face. She held the Treatise tighter to her chest, exquisitely aware of how helpless she was without a mote of power. She couldn’t even try to blind them.

“He’s a better drake than you’ll ever be,” she snarled, not daring to look at Fyn. He had come for her, had planned to disobey Selach, but all that would be undone with a word, if he could not stand up to Zhiron.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Fyn drop to all fours and grow to his drake form, the fire that was licking around his fingers replaced by sparks at his jaw. Then he sank to the floor and ground his face in the dirt.

“Forgive me, sir,” he said. “I did what I had to do to get it back. But it worked, didn’t it? I have the Treatise, as you ordered.”

Cassia’s blood turned to ice. Fyn’s voice was wheedling and smug and he sounded just like he had when they first met, when he was an arrogant coward. Cassia knew that wasn’t him, wasn’t her Fyn, but her Fyn also wasn’t any good at acting. She thought he threw her a wink, but she could not read his drake expressions as well as his human ones.

If she was wrong, she would die in this tunnel.

“That is true,” Zhiron hissed, coming closer until his was standing right over Fyn’s exposed neck, his fangs inches from Fyn’s muzzle. “But you have not carried out the other half of my instructions. You have the Treatise. So why is she still alive?”

Fyn didn’t answer. Cassia’s heart pounded a drumbeat in her chest, waiting for him to apologize, then stand up and turn on her. How could she ask him to leave his entire life behind, hateful though it was, for her?

Fyn’s eyes flicked to the side and met Cassia’s. He looked at her not with fear or apology, but as a signal, and in that moment Cassia realized how far she had underestimated her friend, again.

“Because she’s my friend,” Fyn told Zhiron, all the mock humility in his voice gone. “And because she showed me that people who use you and hurt you don’t deserve your loyalty. Not even if they’re a god.”

Whatever answer Zhiron had expected, it was not that. He swung his head to snarl at Cassia, sparks gathering on his tongue.

And Fyn struck. He slammed upward from the floor, lunging at Zhiron’s exposed throat. “Cassia, run!”

Cassia couldn’t move. Zhiron was so much bigger than Fyn. She had to help him, but she didn’t have her mote—

The pebble in her pocket. Cassia seized it with the hand that wasn’t carrying the Treatise, held it overhead, and willed all the light out of it at once.

The flash forced her eyes shut. She heard a pained roar and the scrape of scales against stone, but her vision was still spotty.

The roar swelled, much deeper than any she’d ever heard from Fyn, and then the air around her turned scalding, burning the hair from her outstretched arms. She tried to dive out of the way but the heat wasn’t air anymore, it was pure flame and it didn’t just burn, it scalded her hair and her throat and flayed the skin from her fingertips. She couldn’t feel anything but pain anymore, pain that dug hooks deeper with each second and surely there was no part of her that had not withered away like parchment burned to ash….

Her legs buckled and she fell. Her head slammed against stone and everything went dark. Cassia’s breath hissed from her scorched throat, and she welcomed the relief of oblivion.

------

“NO!”

The scream ripped from Fyn as Zhiron opened his jaws and blasted fire at Cassia. His shriek was so twisted he could hardly register the sound as coming from him instead of some wild animal. He had known this was coming, known it from the moment he felt Selach’s fury after he touched the jugs, that there was no way Cassia would be allowed to leave the Hive alive. But holding her mote was supposed to protect her, to stop Selach from stirring that awful anger inside him so she could get away….

Zhiron’s weight pressed Fyn into the ground. Though Cassia had blinded the older drake momentarily, his instincts were still razor-sharp. Fyn had missed his first lunge at Zhiron’s throat by a scale’s width, and Zhiron had knocked Fyn back off balance before he could get up, pinning him to the ground with a heavy paw.

Now Fyn surged upwards again, with a strength born of desperation shot through with adrenaline. He wriggled sideways and somehow slipped out from under that cruel paw.

He rolled to his feet and launched himself directly in front of Zhiron’s fire, shielding Cassia’s body with his own, spreading her wings to deflect the heat away. Zhiron’s watering eyes narrowed and he redoubled his efforts, bracing his paws against the floor and the wall of the tunnel.

Zhiron’s fire parted around Fyn’s scales, forcing its way into his tightly-closed nostrils and eyes and searing the inside with stabbing pain. He had seconds before his breath ran out, seconds before the worst of the flames reached the less protected parts of his underbelly and burned him beyond recognition. Cassia’s wings were burning, but that pain was distant and not quite real against the pounding of his heart.

His scales were largely fireproof, but they could not stand up to the direct flame of an adult drake for long, and he could not open his eyes to fix Zhiron’s position better. He had to rely on the tremors of the rock beneath him and the direction of the fire.

He had only one chance.

Fyn opened his jaws, but did not draw upon his mote, did not kindle his own flame. He reached for Cassia’s, and a coolness flooded his limbs, giving him strength against the fire.

Let me save her, he begged her goddess, with no idea if she could hear or was even listening.

The coolness rushed through him like a river and poured from his jaws. It swept away the burning orange in front of Fyn’s eyelids, replacing it with a single, overwhelming burst of moonlight.

Zhiron’s fire vanished. He gave a strangled yelp of pain.

Fyn took his chance. He lunged forward, and his aim was true. He sank his fangs directly into Zhiron’s neck and tore. Mithrinde’s light winked out like the moon disappearing behind a cloud.

The lifeblood artery burst. Hot blood sprayed across Fyn’s snout. It smelled ashy and foul. Fyn opened his eyes again and Zhiron’s legs collapsed beneath him, taking Fyn to the floor with him. The elder drake clawed at Fyn’s scales with a horrible snarl on his face, scoring deep cuts along his shoulders and side, but blood gushed out of the wound in his neck and Fyn knew better than to let go before his prey was dead. Awful as the ashy blood tasted, searing though the pain in his shoulders was, he held on, crushing Zhion’s throat and windpipe.

Zhiron strained to speak, coughing as blood gurgled in his mouth. With the pressure on his windpipe, his voice was thin and barely audible, but Fyn heard his final barb.

“You will… always… be… his, apostate.”

Fear and fury in equal measure shot through Fyn. He clamped down harder and a sharp crack echoed through the tunnel. The red light in Zhiron’s eyes went out, and his enormous head slumped to the floor. He would never move again.

Fyn disentangled himself from Zhiron’s neck and took a step back.

“Better godless than slave,” he said, and spat on Zhiron’s body.

But his mote sat uneasy in his stomach. He turned away, pushing down his silent fear that Zhiron had given words to. He could go to Aisen or Mithrinden, run or fly until the end of his life, but he would always be a drake, would always have this piece of Selach inside him, ready to erupt at any moment—

Cassia. She lay crumpled on the floor, not moving, her bright blonde hair horribly blackened and charred, her simple travel dress reduced to rags. Blood trickled from a cut on her head where she had fallen. The Treatise had rolled a few steps away.

Fyn bounded to her side, shrinking into human form so he could lift her gently and turn her over. The fire had caught her at an angle, searing her left arm and her hair and her back. The skin bubbled red all up and down her back and arm and the tips of her fingers were nearly burnt black.

But she was breathing. Thank Selach — not thank Selach, thank Mithrinde — she was breathing.

Water, Fyn thought. She needs water. Drakes, especially young hatchlings before their scales hardened, weren’t completely fireproof, so every drake knew the basic treatment for burns: water and rest, and lots of both. But nowhere in this godsforsaken desert—

The central chamber. It had water. Fyn remembered the cold cool scent and the steady trickling sounds.

He swelled back into his drake form and picked her up as gently as he could, cradling her limp form to his chest. His shoulders and wings stabbed with pain but he ignored them; his injuries were was nothing compared to what Cassia would feel when she awoke, and he had so little time...

He took the Treatise too, in case there were any more drakes lurking around, and he leapt past Zhiron’s body and down the hallway, not caring what he would find in the central chamber. If Iona was there, he would kill her too.

Moments later, he burst into the chamber and found it mostly dark, the hundreds of candles unlit. He remembered to swerve around the pit where the tunnel he had dug had collapsed. The remaining powers of the gods brushed against his consciousness, but he paid them no mind, triangulating the location of the underground lake from the sound and the coolness under his paws.

He skidded to a halt at the edge of the lapping water. To his relief it was merely cool and not ice-cold, but now came the problem of how to cool Cassia without drowning her. He set her face-down carefully on the bank, right where her arm could trail in the water, and began awkwardly splashing water over her back.

As he worked, something struck him in the midsection with such force he nearly doubled over. He thought in panic of a mage’s green ghostly arrow, but when the burning instead of stabbing pain exploded from his mote and a horrible roar echoed in his ears, Fyn knew that the moment he had feared was already here.

Selach knew. He knew Fyn had killed his elder and forsaken his god.

Fyn closed his eyes and braced himself against the pain. I’m sorry, Mithrinde.

Selach's fury slammed into him like one of Iona’s blasts. His stomach twisted and he retched, though he had nothing inside of him to vomit up.

Wretch. The cruel voice echoed in his head. You will pay a thousand times over for your insult.

Fyn waited for it to spread through the rest of his body, through every limb and muscle until all he was was pain.

But another voice answered the first, cool and firm and strong. He holds my mote. He’s proved his loyalty and so I claim him. Be gone!

And the calmness washed through his body again, pushing back the pain, but no matter how it pushed and how Fyn tried to press it forward, it could not extinguish Selach's mote.

I will hold him as long as I can, Mithrinde’s voice brushed against Fyn’s ear like the caress of spider silk. Get her to Mithrinden.

Fyn’s vision cleared, and all his aches eased, even from his charred wings and clawed shoulders. He splashed more water over Cassia in desperation, but she still had not stirred, and Mithrinden was so far, a week of flying at least if he even knew where to fly from here—

Pebbles clattered across the ground. Fyn spun and squinted in the face of bright candlelight. It flickered over a familiar dark brown face and long black braids.

“What are you doing here?” Fyn demanded of Sasha. He stood over Cassia defensively.

Sasha did not answer. She set the candle she was carrying down and approached Cassia slowly, crouching down to examine her. Her fingers explored the burns across Cassia’s arm and back.

“It doesn’t look good,” Sasha said. “Why did you take her mote? Give it back. It’ll help her heal.”

“I can’t,” Fyn said through clenched teeth as his mote spasmed once again and was forced back by Mithrinde’s power. The balance was already shifting, Selach’s power expanding inch by inch as the two motes inside him warred. He didn’t know how long Mithrinde’s power could last, or who would win. How could he explain that if he removed Cassia’s mote now, he would launch into a fury and kill both of them and then himself?

Sasha stared at him for a moment, but she must have seen his desperation, because she pressed her lips together and went back to tending Cassia, ripping away pieces of her skirt, soaking them in water, and wrapping them around the worst burns.

“Go get one of the shards from Mithrinde’s jug,” she ordered tersely. “Cassia might be able to passively draw out its power.”

Fyn never wanted to go near those jugs again, but he bounded over to the collapsed tunnel and seized upon a shard almost immediately. As he returned, the other powers pressed against him, one reaching deeper than all the others — that strange magma warmth was Selach’s and wasn’t at the same time.

Sasha pressed the shard he’d retrieved into Cassia’s hand and wrapped her fingers around it. Cassia’s silver skin, which had gone ashy grey where it wasn’t red, seemed to lighten a little.

“She needs a healer,” Sasha said. “The lake water helped to cool the wounds and stop the burning, but if infection sets in….”

“I have to get her to Mithrinden,” Fyn said, remembering Mithrinde’s words.

Sasha paused, and Fyn knew she was doing the same deadly calculus as he had. Nearly three days’ flight to Lhening, the nearest hope of civilization and a healer. Mithrinden was twice as far at least, though because it was also at the edge of the Basin, a ways north along the mountains, it was at least far closer than Promise at the center.

Sasha opened a pouch at her waist and drew out a familiar, layered rock. The top layer was an obsidian crust, the kind found in only one place Fyn knew of in the world.

“I can get you to Mt. Onyx,” she said, a faint stiffness in her posture as she clutched the rock.

Fyn let out a shuddering breath. All at once the calculus became difficult but not impossible — Mithrinden was only a few peaks away from Mt. Onyx, though the land routes were slow and winding. But by air — an eight-hour flight. Maybe less.

“I can do that,” Fyn said, despite the weariness sinking into his bones.

She looked him up and down, her eyes lingering on his wings, where several feathers were little more than charred stumps. “I hope you’re right.”

She set the rock down and began tracing a circle around Fyn and Cassia, shifting Cassia carefully to move her fully into it.

“I can make you come out in the forest on the mountainside, not underground. Should stop anyone from seeing you right away, but get into the air as fast as possible and stay there. Be careful not to move her arm or let it scrape on anything.”

There was a bite in her voice. “You’re lucky I like her. My dear mother has promised great honors to anyone who brings her the angel’s head.”

Fyn swallowed. “I can’t possibly repay you.”

Sasha didn’t deign to give a response. She was tracing her fingers along the stone now, eyes closed and concentrating as she muttered words under her breath.

Light flashed next to Fyn and with a shock he remembered the Treatise. He reached out a paw to scoop it up. Sasha tracked the movement immediately and pinned him with her gaze. Fyn froze.

“And… the Treatise?” Fyn asked. In that moment he knew he would leave it, if she demanded it. All that stuff with the human gods and the other gods being imprisoned and who should and shouldn’t be released and if Selach really was more powerful than all of them — in that moment, he didn’t care one pebble.

Sasha looked long at the Treatise with its slowly leaking light.

“Take it.”

She returned to her spellwork, and now she was chanting the incantation fully and the circle blazed with an orange light. Fyn flinched — it was almost like fire — but then it steadied and he felt the power gathering around him. Sasha stopped chanting and looked at him as if persuading herself she shouldn’t do it.

“Come with us,” Fyn said instinctively. “You can be free. Really, this time.”

She shook her head, her dark eyes pained. “It’s not that easy, Fyn. You should know. Running away doesn’t make you free. Anyway, you’ll have a hard enough flight without carrying me.”

Fyn opened his mouth to protest, but with a clap of her hands, Sasha completed the spell, and the dark cave around Fyn shrunk to a point and vanished.

------

Fyn had long since lost track of how long he had been flying in the dark of night. The ghostly silhouette of the mountains, lit by the waning moon, was broken by a single bright point of silver light in the distance. That light consumed Fyn’s entire being. He had no strength to think of anything but getting to that point, or to do anything but force Cassia’s wings to beat up and down one more painful time, and then another, and another.

Selach still fought him. Fyn felt his fury as a dull, dragging thing now, sapping his energy and slowing every wingbeat as Mithrinde’s light faded and fell. She was not stronger than Selach after all — of course she wasn’t, if she was still imprisoned by the Treatise, and Fyn knew with a certain inevitability that Selach would take him soon, in hours not days, and all he could do was pray he would reach the city in time.

The light was certainly larger now, or was it that the whole sky was brightening? It streaked oranges and reds and Fyn thought of fire, and when he saw the glittering city towers piercing his heart leapt with terror — Zhiron was already there, he had gotten there before Fyn and now he was burning, burning, but there was no scent of smoke so it could not be burning…

Fyn was already losing height when he passed the city wall. He did not hear the warning bells clanging, or feel the arrows splinter off his hide, or hear the shouts of the angels that flew up to speak with him. All he saw was a long stretch of deep green hedge winding around the palace that crowned the city, and a distant memory of Cassia telling him about the times she used to hide in a great green maze…

Fyn angled his wings for landing but could barely slow himself. He rolled over on instinct so his body would cushion Cassia’s. As the sun crept over the eastern horizon, drake, angel, and Treatise crashed into the Lunasium gardens.

Only now did Fyn register the wings beating his way, but his vision swam and he could not get to his paws. “Help… her,” he strained, opening his paw to present Cassia’s limp body.

Then exhaustion and the pain from every ache and injury he’d ignored crashed down upon him, and Fyn succumbed to blackness.

As Fyn’s paws went limp, the Treatise rolled out of his grasp, unnoticed by the anxious city guards. it bumped against his back leg and laid there, its glow weak and faint. A final wisp of magic issued forth from the hairline crack in its side, leaving the interior utterly grey and lifeless.

Then a crack like thunder split in the air, and the Treatise broke in two.

END OF PART TWO