Page 10 of Ashfall

DAX

The morning sun slices through the haze, burning away the gray in harsh, unforgiving beams that cast jagged shadows across the scorched ridge. The air is sharp with the tang of smoke and ash, still thick despite the fire having moved on. From this height, the terrain spreads like a battlefield below me—blistered earth, blackened trunks, and veins of glowing amber that pulse like a dying heartbeat.

And yet, something deeper hums beneath it all. A dissonance that scrapes against every instinct I own. It vibrates in my bones, like a chord struck out of tune in a song I’ve known for centuries. The burn pattern is too clean. Too deliberate. Lines of devastation curve with unnatural grace, sweeping across ridgelines like brushstrokes with a purpose. The fire didn’t just move through here—it chose a path, or had one chosen for it. Everything in me says it wasn’t nature that made that choice. It was a message. One meant for me.

“Faster than it should’ve been,” Kade mutters beside me, eyes scanning the burn perimeter with cold calculation. "We were only in the air ten minutes. This line should’ve been crawling, not sprinting."

"There’s no way that kind of acceleration came from natural fuel," Rafe adds, flicking his gaze toward me. "Unless trees learned to self-detonate overnight."

Kade huffs, but there’s tension behind the humor. "I don’t like it. It feels off... like it was waiting for us."

Rafe snorts. "Everything feels off lately. And it doesn't help that she's showed up."

"She has nothing to do with this," I say evenly, voice like steel under strain. "The pattern was forming long before Ember stepped into the picture."

Kade shoots me a sidelong glance. "Still... she’s asking the right questions, and I think she sees more than even she knows."

"Too many questions," Rafe mutters.

I don’t bother correcting him. They’re both right—and both underestimating her. That’s the danger. Because her record indicates that Ember isn’t just sharp—she's relentless. She's the kind of person who doesn’t stop once the scent of truth hits her nostrils. If they keep brushing her off, if they treat her like a temporary complication, she’ll find her way straight into the fire we’ve spent lifetimes trying to contain. And I won’t always be fast enough to pull her back.

We circle our home base, wings slicing through the wind, then descend in a slow, spiraling arc. Our claws touch down with barely a sound, talons carving into the ash-soft earth. In a synchronized rhythm honed by centuries, we shift—three bursts of light and fire erupt around us, no fanfare, just truth made visible—dragons vanish and the dust swirls around the space where men return.

The flight was brief—just enough to bleed off the blaze still crackling beneath our skin, to smooth the wild edges of our instincts until thought could lead again. The wind tore past our wings, crisp and sharp, carrying the char-stained scent of burning pine and scorched earth. From the sky, the world belowlooked like a battlefield left to smolder—blackened scars etched into forest and rock.

For a short while, we weren’t leaders, soldiers, or ghosts bound by human rules. We were dragons—watchers from above. And in that stillness, above the chaos, we could finally see the shape of the war no one else realized had already begun.

We stand there for a moment in the aftermath, breathing hard, steam rising off our skin from the fading heat of the shift. Scales retreat into flesh. Wings furl and dissolve into nothing, leaving only silence and the scent of smoke. It’s never clean. Never simple. The shift leaves a rawness in the soul, a reminder that we walk in borrowed skins. Each transformation is a reminder that our human faces are masks—necessary to blend, to hide. It’s a lie we must live to protect the truth of what we are.

Bare feet on soot-covered stone. The wind carries ash to our doorstep now, swirling it into lazy spirals that cling to our skin. The heat from the shift hasn’t completely left us, a lingering warmth that seeps into muscle and bone. We move with the precision of ritual, unhurried but efficient, each of us grabbing our supply packs from the cache tucked behind a jagged basalt outcrop.

We dress in silence. Kade puts on his jacket with practiced ease, his expression unreadable but his movements clipped. I pull on my clothes and step into my boots, the thick soles grounding me back in the human world, even as my mind still buzzes with dragon-sense.

Jackets zip. Velcro hisses. Fabric rustles as we settle into the shape we’ve chosen for the day. Kade rolls his shoulders, the motion stiff from old wounds and older battles. Rafe adjusts his collar with the same quick, clean motion he always uses—habitual, efficient. I pull the zipper of my jacket all the way up, locking myself back into the armor of skin and silence.

But in the quiet that follows, the only sound is the wind, andthe heartbeat of the fire, pulsing low and steady beneath our feet.

Rafe leans over the holographic fire progression display projected on the table in our field command center. Flames dance in real-time across the grid, rendered in searing reds and volatile oranges. He points to the north flank—a stretch of terrain marked with low-fuel density.

“Look at this segment,” he says, his brow furrowed. “North flank. No fuel bed there. Even so, it torched like a blowtorch hit it. Like something fed it from underneath.”

Kade leans in beside him, eyes narrowing. “That’s limestone and scrub. Should’ve smoldered, not surged.”

“It burned clean and hot,” Rafe adds. “Too clean. Like it was lit with intent."

I study the image, jaw tight. The heat signature pulsing in the overlay is too symmetrical, too sharp. It glows like a brand on the grid—clean arcs, intersecting lines, too deliberate to be coincidence. My mind flashes back to the last time I saw a pattern like this: the ruins of a fire-scorched village deep in the Alps, Malek's twisted legacy still steaming in the frosty morning air.

And far too familiar.

Kade and Rafe exchange a glance but say nothing. We kill the projection in sync, the image vanishing with a hiss of static. No words needed. Just the crackling quiet that follows a realization no one wants to name. We step out into the rising heat, the world beyond the tent pressing in around us like smoke before the flame.

Kade zips his jacket. “Feels like the old days. Right before shit went sideways.”

Rafe grunts. “Only this time, the smoke isn’t the only thing trying to choke us.”

“We’ve seen this before,” I say. “Last year in Wyoming. Before that, in Lassen.”

Kade nods. “Same behavior. Triangulated burn paths. Precision flares. Containment curves ignored.”

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