Page 56 of Morgrith
"I felt you," she whispered. "All of you. Every wound-walker who inherited what I gave away. Every healer who didn't understand why they could do what they did. Every woman in my line who carried my blood and my burden without knowing my name."
She lifted one trembling hand toward me.
"And now you've found me."
My throat had closed around words. I couldn't speak. Couldn't do anything except stare at the origin of everything I was, everything I'd ever been, finally made flesh before me.
Then her expression changed.
The wonder drained away, replaced by something sharper. Something afraid. Her grey eyes went wide, staring at something beyond the grotto walls, beyond the physical world, at something only she could see.
Her whole body went rigid.
"He knows," she whispered.
The words fell into the grotto's strange silence like stones into still water.
"He felt me wake."
Her luminous eyes found Morgrith's, then mine, and the terror in them was so vast it made my transformed bones ache.
"He's coming."
Through the bloodline connection, I felt it too.
A presence. Vast and dark and wrong in ways that made the cave's liminal energy feel wholesome by comparison. Something that had been sleeping for ten thousand years, stirring now, attention drawn toward us by the same magic that had called Evara's soul home.
Valdris.
The Unnamed.
The dragon who had loved her so completely that her rejection had broken him into something monstrous.
"He's coming," Evara whispered.
I turned toward the grotto's entrance, toward the passage that led back to the surface, toward the fishing village full of innocents who had no idea what had just awakened.
The sky above the cliffs had begun to darken.
Through the cave mouth, through the fog of impossible colors, I could see it happening—something that wasn't clouds gathering on the horizon. Something vast and black and alive, spreading across the sky like ink bleeding through water. The light changed, shifted, became the sickly color of a bruise that wouldn't heal.
My transformed senses screamed warnings I didn't know how to interpret.
Morgrith was beside me suddenly, his hand finding mine, the bond between us blazing with readiness, with fear, with the determination of a dragon who had waited millennia for this moment.
"We need to move," he said. His voice was steady—the Shadow Master facing what might end them all. "We need to get her somewhere safe. The Sanctuary. The wards there might—"
Evara's hand caught his arm.
She'd risen from the crystallized light, stood now with black water lapping at her shins, naked and shaking but alive. Ten thousand years of exile had ended, and the very first thingher freedom would bring was this: the monster she'd made by running, finally come to finish what had started so long ago.
"He won't be stopped by wards," she said quietly. "He won't be stopped by anything."
Her grey eyes—our grey eyes—found mine.
"This time," she whispered, "I won't run."
Above the village, the darkness continued to spread. Somewhere in its depths, something that had once been the First Dragon was finally awakening.
And the real danger was only beginning.
