Young Writers Society

Haven was dead.

Cassia had known it would be before she even arrived. The night before, as she had clung to Fyn’s neck as he flew away, she had looked down and seen a few last stragglers vanishing into thin air. Haven burning had been no accident. The moment Fyn had taken that little girl, they must have known Haven was compromised. Cassia supposed the small group of… rebels? freedom fighters? could not risk even a single drake knowing where it was.

So they had burned it, and teleported away, and it was that more than anything that left Cassia numb as she flew upstream and rounded an outcropping of rock to look upon the valley where Haven had lain.

Cassia had spent a cold, wet night hiding in a hollow tree. Somewhere in the early hours of the dawn, it had begun to rain great drenching sheets of water that spilled into her tree and left her soaked to the bone. Her only consolation was that it had put out the fires. Haven was a black scorch by the stream now, with only the ashen frame of the mill and a few of the houses still standing. She descended carefully, wary of hot embers, and landed on a rock by the stream.

Something white and limp on a branch sticking out of the stream caught her eye. It was a piece of soggy parchment. Cassia crouched down, eased it off of the branch, and unrolled it. The ink had run, but Cassia was still able to make out the majority of the note. In scrawled, childish handwriting, written using her own ink, it read:

Human thief and traitor

I have your youngest daughter. You have the Treatise. Come to the top of the waterfall. You have until moonrise.

Cassia ineffectively crumpled the soggy and already-crumpled note in her hand. Moonrise isn’t even at night right now. It’s a waxing moon, for Mithrinde’s sake!

She didn’t realize her vision had blurred until the first tear rolled down her cheek. “How dare he ruin everything like this?” she demanded of the tree branch. “I was so close!”

It’s like Iona said. He took her child, and who knows what else he’s done? I should have let him fall.

But even as she thought it, she knew she never could have done it. It hadn’t been conscious thought to save him. She had just… acted.

She looked up at where she knew the waxing moon was hanging in the sky, even though it was hidden behind clouds of gray. “Is there a reason he should live, Mithrinde?” she asked. “Or did I just let a monster back into the world?”

The skies remained cloudy as ever, but Cassia thought she felt a a little pulse of calm originate from her mote and wash through her entire body.

She took a deep breath and strode forward, scanning the wrecks of the buildings, searching for anything useful. She went straight to Iona’s house, where she had almost gotten the Treatise the day before, but when she reached it she saw charred logs piled against the crumbled logs and realized this must have been where they had set the blaze. Even from several feet away, she could feel the heat of the embers. There was nothing left of the wall where safe that held the Treatise had been.

She left the rubble and walked over to the side of the clearing where she thought she had seen the people vanish. The problem with teleportation was that they could have gone anywhere — with one important caveat. Teleportation required magic linked to the destination. Magic that was usually drawn from an item with deep ties to the place. The further the teleportation, the more magic needed, and the deeper the connection needed to be.

If they had accidentally left one of those items behind, then maybe…

Cassia dropped to her knees and began searching in the grass.

----

Fyn was dreaming. He was playing with Vak and Kez as young hatchmates, deep in the bowels of Mt. Onyx, before he had ever even been to the surface. Newly weaned, they were playing with their food while Jarken wasn’t looking, throwing the fresh scraps of food at each other. Vak just tossed his up in the air and caught it, but Kez looked slyly at Fyn and flung half a dead fish as hard as he could, right at Fyn’s snout.

Fyn, thinking Kez wanted him to catch it, bounded forward, but when the fish hit him it broke over his snout like a splash of cold water and vanished. Laughing, Kez threw another, and another, and each one burst into cold nothingness across his flanks. Fyn leapt, growling, at Kez, but Kez too dissolved—

—And as an enormous droplet of rain splattered across his nose, Fyn sneezed so violently that he woke up.

He shivered and shook his head, snorting the droplets out of his snout. The sun had not risen yet, or it was too cloudy to see it. The raindrops were falling thicker and faster now, and in seconds had turned into full-on downpour.

Still half-asleep and grumbling fluently under his breath, Fyn staggered to his feat and felt a sharp pain in his leg. He cried out and lost his balance, falling back to the earth in a slop of mud. He didn’t try to get up again. Instead, he closed his eyes and put his paws over his snout, trying to ignore the stabbing pain in his leg.

He was alive. He shouldn’t be. He had been so utterly outmatched on that cliffside that Iona hadn’t even ordered her people to attack. She had flung him off the side like a trap of ash caught by the wind.

Cassia should have let him fall. They were enemies, for Selach’s sake. She hated him — hadn’t she been shouting as much, before Iona arrived? She’d said she was leaving, that she refused to work with him anymore. By all logic, she should have left him to fall, swept down and grabbed the Treatise while everyone was distracted, and flown away. She could have returned to her own people and been a hero.

Instead, she had saved him — given him her own wings — and vanished.

“You already knew she had feather down for brains,” muttered Fyn. “And if she’s not going to come back now, well, then you’ll just get to tell Ashwythe you found the Treatise all by yourself. So there.”

He tried to get up again, and found that as long as he didn’t put any weight on his injured leg, he could walk just fine. He couldn’t see anything more than a few shallow scrapes, but the ankle was swollen and puffy.

The rain continued to pour around him, sheeting into his eyes so he could hardly see. He limped his way over to the stream — now a roaring river — they had followed south the night before. If he followed the stream north, he would find Haven again. If he followed it south, he would find his way back to familiar territory and Selachen’s network of tunnels again.

The problem was, all his plans were nothing more than bravado. Fyn was a dead drake walking. If he turned south and arrived back at Mt Onyx without the Treatise in paw, he would have failed. And Selach did not tolerate failure.

But north was Haven, and Iona, and this time Cassia would not be there to give Fyn wings when he fell.

Fyn looked down the river and realized he would probably never walk the halls of Mt. Onyx again. But given the choice between living as a traitor and dying as a failure, Fyn knew what he would choose, every time.

He turned and began walking upstream back toward Haven, blinking rain out of his eyes.

Fyn first knew something was wrong when the path along the river turned to black and ash. His fire couldn’t have spread all the way down here, could it?

To be safe, he splashed across the stream and approached Haven from the far side. When he edged around the last bush to get a clear view of the settlement, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Hours ago, this place had been full of humans.

Now, it was a ruin.

Fyn bared his teeth, suddenly angry. It couldn’t have been his fire. There was no burn path, and in any case the buildings were too carefully, conveniently destroyed without chains of scorched earth leading from one to the next. They had burned the place and run, taking the Treatise with them.

And now Fyn could not even die knowing he had tried.

He sank onto his haunches where he stood, lowering his snout to the ground and tucking his paws under his chin. He had nothing now. No way of finding the Treatise, and no way of taking it from Iona even if he did. It was over.

A flash of white caught Fyn’s eye.

He raised his head and strained forward, and there was Cassia, searching the ground at the edge of the clearing, wings swept up and over her head to keep off the rain.

Fyn felt a powerful stirring in his chest that he didn’t understand. She’s here. She saved me. The thought resounded in his mind.

“Why?” Fyn whispered, even though he knew she couldn’t hear him. He remembered her standing radiant and striking over the defenseless human, defying him even though it could have got her killed. He would have killed her, he told himself, if Iona had not arrived and Cassia didn’t back down. And instead, she had saved him.

At least she had threatened him after they’d landed, demanding he return her wings. He’d never had any intention of doing otherwise, but the threat had at least been normal. That was what was supposed to happen between competing allies.

Except… Fyn was starting to suspect that it wasn’t normal for Cassia. That she… did things and saw things differently, somehow. And whatever the difference was, it worked. She had gotten their supplies in Promise without an argument. She had gotten closer to the Treatise than Fyn ever had.

Maybe she could teach him the difference.

The dull lethargy that had been spreading through Fyn’s body suddenly receded. He was on his feet and pushing through the bushes out into the open riverbank before he quite knew what he was doing.

“Cassia?” he called to her.

She heard him and jumped up, windmilling five feet into the air before turning around and looking at him. She was clutching something small in her hand and looked on the verge of darting away.

“No, wait!” Fyn shouted, splashing through the stream awkwardly. “Wait!”

“Please,” he added.

He’d never seen the word have a real effect before, but the moment he said it, Cassia stopped and looked back at him, then very slowly landed on the ground.

“What do you want?”

Fyn opened his mouth to say ‘your help,’ but very different words came spilling out. “I… messed up. Last night.”

Cassia blinked at him. “Oh?”

Fyn felt heat creep into his face. “Yeah. I mean, the whole thing was kind of my fault. My idea didn’t work that great, and now they’re all gone and we’ve lost the Treatise.”

Cassia covered her mouth with her hand, but not quickly enough to hide an amused smile. “Oh gods, you’re actually being sincere, aren’t you?”

“I can stop if you want,” Fyn snapped.

“Don’t,” Cassia said quickly. “It’s nice to feel like I’m talking to another human being instead of—”

“—A monster?” Fyn suggested, her shouting from the night before echoing in his head.

The smile fell from Cassia’s face. “Well, maybe I shouldn’t have said it like that. But you kidnapped a four-year-old, Fyn.”

“Look, I saw an opportunity, that’s all. It’s not like I was going to hurt her.”

“And the boy in Ashbourne?”

Fyn bared his teeth. “He was disrespecting me.”

Cassia shook her head. “He was scared, and he was probably trying to protect his friends. Haven’t you noticed they hate you, Fyn? Have you thought about why that is?”

That prodded an uncomfortable memory. Fyn shook his head to dislodge it, but the unsettled feeling lingered.

“It’s just how things are here,” he told her. “You wouldn’t know.”

Cassia folded her arms and met his eyes with her piercing blue ones. “I know they could be different.”

Fyn meant to snap at her again, but he suddenly couldn’t think of anything to say.

“What’s that in your hand?” he asked to change the subject. “Did you find something we can track them with?”

Cassia balled her fist around it. “If by ‘we’ you mean me, maybe.”

“But—” Fyn began, and faltered as Cassia shook her head.

“I told you last night, I’m not helping you anymore. I don’t need you; I’m going to get it back myself. You can go back to your people, or wait around here, or try to find it on your own, I don’t care.”

Fyn didn’t know how she’d gotten so far back on the defensive like this. For a second she had seemed almost at ease. But that had been before the reminder of last night. “But—”

“Give me one good reason I should let you come,” Cassia said.

Fyn opened his mouth, racking his brains to think of a good reason Cassia would need him to help find the Treatise.

He couldn’t. The knowledge stabbed at him like ice.

Fyn shrank into his human form and stepped forward, offering his palms face up to Cassia. “Because… if I don’t come back with the Treatise, they’ll kill me. And Selach will forever dishonor my soul.”

He had shocked her. She let out a small gasp that she quickly stifled. “They told you that?”

Fyn’s heart was pounding in his chest. He didn’t know why he was telling Cassia the truth — she was an angel, after all, and he’d been taught never to reveal weakness to an enemy — but he couldn’t bring himself to believe she was plotting against him. He could sense a hesitancy in her, like she was waiting to see if he really was a human being, or just another monster by her standards. That should have been an unforgivable insult, but instead of anger Fyn just felt… a strange yearning. What kind of life made someone normal, a not-monster, in Cassia’s eyes?

“Dishonoring the soul is what happens when you die and haven’t served Selach well enough,” he said with an attempt at a shrug. “If you fail a mission like this, they send you to Selach early.”

“That’s horrific,” Cassia whispered.

“Better to die in atonement than live in shame,” Fyn said by rote. There had only been one public execution in Fyn’s lifetime, and they had recited that line word for word. It had been one of the most effective lessons he’d learned as a hatchling. He doubted he would ever forget a moment of that ceremony.

Cassia looked like she was going to say something to that, but she changed her mind. Her feathers were standing all on end, though, so Fyn had a pretty good idea of how she felt about that teaching. He didn’t understand — didn’t she owe her allegiance to Mithrinde, or whoever the angels’ deity was? Wouldn’t Mithrinde claim retribution if she failed her duties?

She was still standing there, not answering.

“I’m sure I’ll think of something to help us,” Fyn said quickly. “I was right about Iona getting her family, you see, and I bet now that their hideout has been blown they’ll lay low and keep moving for a while—

“I believe you,” Cassia cut him off.

She paused. “I saved your life once, I guess I can do it again. All of this… I’d never even been out of Mithrinden before now. Truthfully, there’s a lot of things you know that I don’t.”

Fyn broke into a hopeful smile, but Cassia held up her hand. “But this doesn’t work. No more stupid arguing and one-upping. We have to be a team, a real team. On the same side, even after we get the Treatise. All the way until it’s back safely in the Temple. Deal?”

She extended her hand to shake.

Fyn knew an opportunity when he saw one. He could keep his mouth shut and his opinions to himself if it meant returning to Mt. Onyx with honor. And in truth, he didn’t mind the idea of deferring to Cassia anymore. He had underestimated her from the beginning.

But she’s an angel, part of him said.

So? another, new part of him responded.

“Deal,” Fyn said, taking her hand. His red, scaled fingers grasped her silver, smooth wrist, and drake and angel shook in front of Haven’s ashen ruins.

END OF PART ONE