Page 52 of Dragon Gods

“Is this what they thought dragons looked like?” Ocon said, acknowledging Sofia’s presence for the first time.

“The people that painted these didn’tthink,” she said, the words softer than she expected, but it felt wrong to curse and yell in a room like this. “They knew.”

She lowered her candle and placed it on the small altar that stretched across the front wall in front of the cenote dragon. It was as dirty as the other one, but she began to brush leaves and debris aside, uncovering the stone below.

At one point, there would have been food and trinkets of gold and silver left, but these likely had been stolen by the tribe—the king’s men—that had invaded this cenote. Still, there were remnants of weavings, carvings, and small children’s toys left to honor the cenote dragons.

A bright flash of blue beneath a thick layer of soil caught her eye. She pushed Ocon aside without a word and began cleaning away the dirt there. Her fingers brushed against something hot and she carefully pulled out an iridescent blue feather. It was soft as clouds and hot to the touch, as if it had been sitting in the sun, and as she set it back against the altar, it stretched up to nearly her head.

Her mind was spinning. She was touching something that proved the dragons were real—something that had belonged to the gods.

“What is that?” Ocon asked, looking over her shoulder with something between awe and fear.

“A dragon feather,” she said, continuing to clean the altar until only the few offerings that had withstood the test of time remained—two small, but intricately carved stone figurines, a tiny wooden doll, and a stained bowl.

She placed her candle at the center and kneeled, eyes gazing up at the painting. Her ancestors had kneeled in this very spot hundreds of cycles ago, praying to the gods, not as childish myths, but known truths. She remembered her thoughts back in the city when Sari was being executed.

It would take the gods to take down the false god that the king believed himself to be. If she could bring them back, prove that they hadn’t been killed off by the great king, perhaps her people stood a chance against the Dereyans.

“What are you doing?”

“Praying.”

“Even if you think they existed at some point, the dragons are long gone,” he said with the slightest bit of sneer to his tone.

“The dragons were murdered by thegreatking,” she said, not looking over her shoulder at him. “But plenty of historical accounts note that not all the dragons died and plenty escaped, chased out of Wueco to protect themselves. There are books?—”

She stopped. She’d almost told him the truth. There were books in his chief commander’s own office that debated if the dragons were truly gone—books that discussed the possibility that they survived somewhere far from Wueco and Suvi. Things he didn’t need to know.

He let out a snort, telling her exactly what he thought of these historical accounts and a few moments later, she heard his footfalls fading behind her. A sigh escaped her lips at finally being alone.

Yet now that she was, she felt frozen, looking up into the bright knowing eyes of the mural, as if it knew she didn’t belong here. She’d said prayers to the dragons before, from the first night she read about them and kneeled at her window, praying to the sky as if they might return then and there because she asked. But now she was here, in front of a true altar to the gods with a dragon feather gleaming in the candlelight, and she felt so insignificant.

Brushing off her insecurities, if only for the moment, Sofia took her dagger and dug the tip into the pad of her finger until she drew blood. She wasn’t squeamish about such things, but getting an infection while lost in the rainforest wasn’t going to be a good move, so she was careful as she dripped her blood into the small wooden bowl in the center of the altar. And then she spoke words she’d never actually heard out loud, in a tongue she barely knew, reciting the traditional invocation she’d seen in a book when she was eleven and had memorized that same day.

She held her breath, as if something might shift, as if the dragon in front of her might pull itself from the wall and fly away, answering her call for help. But all that followed was silence and she felt the hope she didn’t know she was holding on to drift away with her next breath.

* * *

When she walkedout a few minutes later, she tried not to let the hopelessness overwhelm her. If she could get Ocon to help her break into the military quarter and into the chief commander’s house once more, she could get the books she needed. There was a way to bring back the dragons and she would find it.

She was still thinking about how to convince Ocon to help her as she turned the corner to the sight of him standing in the shallows of the lake, wet and completely naked. He hadn’t noticed her, his back on full display. He was dabbing at the three long gashes along his side where the wolfshifter had managed to catch him with his claws and she grimaced in empathy, knowing all too well the pain of cleaning one’s own wounds out. He was just deep enough to cover his lower half, but the water lapping at his waist showed a hint of the curve of his ass disappearing beneath the lake surface and she bit her lip. He had the body of a soldier, chiseled from cycles of training.

Against her better judgment, she let her eyes wander over the rest of his back. It truly wasn’t fair for such a vile man to possess such a perfect body, and she hated that she noticed. She’d barely glanced at another boy or man since Gabriel.

She bit her mind off, focusing instead on the ink that painted his body. She’d seen the dagger on his forearm and gotten glimpses of the viper that twisted around his neck and shoulder. Now she saw that a large tattoo of a feline-like beast stretched across nearly his entire back, a thick halo of hair wrapped around his head as it roared. The creature rippled with the movement of Ocon’s muscles, as if it might jump from his skin and attack at the first provocation.

Beneath the ink were remnants of scars, ridges of lighter skin that she was plenty familiar with on her own back. She couldn’t stop the hiss of something feral escaping her throat at the thought of her scars and Ocon jerked, turning to notice her at last.

She wasn’t sure what he saw in her expression, but his initial smirk dropped quickly from his face.

“You can wash off, too,” he said, face serious. “I can go somewhere else while you?—”

She didn’t let him finish, knowing she wouldn’t feel comfortable bathing with him here, in a separate room or not. “I’m fine.”

“I promise, I won’t?—”

“I said, I’m fine. We should prepare for staying here tonight. I’ll go hunt.”

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