Page 80 of A Monsoon Rising

Swallowing, Talasyn unraveled the Lightweave encasing the yacht. It fell away from the strands of its shadowy counterpart, and the smaller sphere winked out of existence.

“You—” Alaric broke off, as though too many choice reprimands had sprung to mind and he couldn’t decide where to start. He stepped between her and Bakun, the outline of his war scythe materializing in his gauntleted fingers.

At the sight of the Shadowforged weapon, Bakun let out a warning snarl and faint plumes of void magic wafted from between its teeth.

Talasyn placed a hand on Alaric’s arm.

“It doesn’t want to fight,” she told him, still locked into a staring match with the World-Eater. “Not really, I don’t think. No beastwantsto fight.” It was all the primal need to protect territory, to perpetuate the species, to defend the self. Even wolves went for the easiest prey when they had a choice.

“You’re asking me to trust this thing with your life,” Alaric growled.

“No.” Talasyn smoothed her fingers over his armguard. As soothing a gesture as she could make, given the circumstances. “I’m asking you to trustme.”

He didn’t banish his weapon, but he stayed where he was as she approached Bakun, her steps cautious over the yacht’s wooden deck. Strands of Lightweave peeled away from the main sphere to gather around her like a cloak. Or a shroud. Her magic protecting her the best it could. Her hair stirred in an unnatural wind.

Talasyn stopped walking when the tips of her boots bumped against the yacht’s interior hull and she could go no further. Bakun leaned in slightly, closing up another few inches of distance. She could see every ring on the ivory horns that curved back from its skull, every ridge of the scales that lined its crocodilian face, every crater in its irises. Every star in its slitted black pupils. Without the veil of eclipse magic to obscure it from her sight, something inside her was dragged headlong into whatever lurked in its amethyst eyes.

Aether and memory. It all came down to aether and memory. It was the same here, under the roof of swirling magic and sevenfold eclipse, as it had been that day on the sun-warmed beach when she felt one soul—or shadow of a soul—move through her and Alaric and the sleeping dragon.

Everything was connected, even if sometimes by the skin of one’s teeth.

Within the circle of sariman blood and Rainspring and Tempestroad, everything was amplified.

Even the bleeding of the past into the present. Even an aethermancer’s tether to the currents of what came before.

You know this, Alunsina,said an inner voice that was Talasyn’s own but also not, that was one voice and yet hundreds upon hundreds of voices, a multitude of images racing together like star lines in the dark, their splinters spiraling backward into the rivers of time, red sun, seven moons, an unbroken line of Nenavarene queens who hung the earth upon the waters, speaking to her, speakingthroughher, from the Sky Above the Sky.

At the dawning of the world, you were there.

You have seen the first dragon’s heart.

Talasyn fell into the same odd vision she’d sporadically been having, but this time the shape of it was solid and clear, the images at last clicking into place in her mind. What she saw wasn’t the future, but the past. The Eversea, darker and deeper, its islands not as defined as they would become by her time. A winged shadow rippling over land and water, white scales undulating through the heavens. A stooped elderly woman, with emeralds woven through her long silver hair, clinging with one gnarled hand for purchase, not to a snow-covered mountain ridge, but to the rough crags of a dragon’s brow. Her other hand rising in the air, fingers stretching shakily, reaching for the crimson orb of a younger sun.

“Not long now,” the old woman murmured, closing her eyes as she soared over the world.

The dragon she was riding let out a harsh cry.

The memory lasted long enough to catch on Talasyn’s heart. Long enough for her to understand.

Then she was back in the present, within the molten sphere,and Bakun was staring at her, its dread jaws moving in a guttural approximation of human speech.

“Iyaram?”

There had been no eighth moon. That was a fairy tale spun by the ancestors to explain the vulana stone as much as the phenomenon of eclipse.

But there had been a woman. The first Zahiya-lachis, whose name the dragon had learned to say. Whose death had caused it to rage.

“No, World-Eater.” Talasyn spoke in Nenavarene, in a voice that rang loud and clear within the shimmering black-and-gold walls. “It’s not time yet. Go back to sleep.”

Bakun screamed again. A sound that was somehow as deep as the caverns of night and yet so high that it made the hairs on the back of Talasyn’s neck stand at attention. She was looking down the length of its forked tongue, set into the lilac membranes of its gaping mouth, each razor-sharp tooth that jutted out the size of a grandfather tree. Hot, sulfurous breath engulfed her.

And then the World-Eaterrose.

More and more of Bakun emerged from within Aktamasok’s crater. One glistening coil slammed against the side of the yacht, and as the shockwaves of the impact jostled them, the amplifiers burst. The cores within them, having strained for so long, dissolved in an explosion of metalglass and destabilized magic.

The dome of Lightweave and Shadowgate over the volcano flickered, then winked out of existence.

Two more shards of moons had returned to the heavens. In the wan glow they shed, Talasyn saw the wild light of freedom in its eyes as Bakun soared upward.

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