Page 138 of A Forgery of Fate

Mama had told me that my grandmother learned to see years beyond her time—she could even glimpse multiple variations of the future. I was beginning to understand her secret: it began with the heart.

“For Baba,” I murmured, picking up my brush and pressing its hairs to the parchment. My voice was thick. “For Elang, and Shani, and the folk of Yonsar. For Ai’long.”

As I spoke, I saw washes of color and textures in my mind, moving and swirling. The future in motion. And so I began.

Stroke by stroke, I painted the Dragon King arching over a murky sea. His claws were brandished, his tail bounding over the water as the waves came crashing and rafts of smoke obscured the sky. Most troubling was the streak of red in his lone eye, bright as a smear of blood. A reflection of the sun, I decided. I didn’t want to think too hard about what else it might be.

I worked all night, burning through my store of candles. The roof shook, thunder and lightning battered the sky—neither could rattle me out of my trance.

Only when I could feel the sleep spirits hovering over me, turning my strokes languid, did I set down my brush. My candle had long since guttered out.

As rain drummed against the roof, I let myself drift into slumber. For the first time, I dreamed of Elang.

I found him in the garden, sitting inside the blue-roofed pavilion. He was leaning against a wooden post, his back to the sun as the morning light washed out the sky. When he heard me approach, his horns receded into his temples.

He turned to face me. In his hands, he clasped a golden pearl. It was the size of a small melon, its surface smooth as fresh snow. Even from across the pavilion, I felt its warmth.

“Your curse is broken,” I breathed. “You have your pearl.”

For someone who’d at last found his prize, Elang didn’t look contented. His dragon jaw was tense, his brow thick with anguish. “Will you help me choose?”

“How?”

“Paint me.”

I found a brush in my pocket, and paper materialized in my hand. I pressed it against the wall, until Elang shook hishead.

“Not a portrait.” He rose, erasing the distance between us. “Paintme.”

He reached for the other end of my brush, pressing its hairs upon his cheek. “Human, and I stay with you. Dragon, and we go our separate ways. Which will I be?”

My fingers shaking, I pried the brush from his grip. I knew my answer.

But in this dream, my brush had a mind of its own. As I swept it across his skin, it blotted out the freckles on his nose like a god erasing the stars, and it covered his cheek with scales that hardened into the real thing. It painted away every semblance of his human self, even the smile I’d come to cherish on his mouth. Soon he was no longer the Elang I had known.

“Wait,” I choked out. “I—I made a mistake.”

Elang pressed my fingertips to his lips. “You made the right choice.”

Still holding my hand, he pressed the pearl against his chest.

The change was immediate. Luster spread across hissilver-blue scales, casting a luminous sheen over his skin. His horns pierced through his temples, and his muscles swelled, black robes ripping as his bones stretched and his body grew. Last was his gray eye. It shone, spangled with gold. Then he blinked, and it was no longer gray, but a pool of sunlight like the other.

A fully formed dragon emerged. When he stood, I no longer came up to his chin. He dwarfed me, his horned head towering above the pines. In his chest glowed his pearl.

The brighter it shone, the more my own heart hurt. The pain had edges like a knife, and as it grew, I feared that it would cut me out of my own dream.

Just before it became too much to bear, the red string around my wrist snapped, the threads spinning away in the wind.

“Wait!” I shouted. “Elang!”

It was no use. His fingers tore away from mine, and a great wave surged forward. It devoured him, claimed him back into its depths. When the water receded, he was gone.

Too late, I realized he had taken my heart with him.

Chapter Forty

“There’s something I need to tell you,” I said to my family the next morning.

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