Page 64 of The First Scar
The wounded rebels flickered through my mind. The female on the stretcher, gray-faced and slack. The blood blooming through the bandage on the male's thigh. They'd come back from a raid already half-dead. They didn't need me cracking reality on top of it.
Kaelen read it on my face. He always did.
"Dreadscale has agreed to train you. Starting tonight." He held my gaze. "This isn't optional. The Codex vault requires thirty heartbeats of sustained fusion to breach. You can barely hold three." His tone didn't change. It didn't need to. The math was damning enough.
I couldn’t look at him any longer. I stared at the floor, shame heating my neck. The worst part wasn't the order. It was that I couldn't argue with it. I'd felt what my marks did to Eryndor. Felt the Veil shudder like I'd kicked a wound open. And every rebel in stitches was proof of what happened when the people around me paid for things I couldn't control.
Kaelen read my silence. His mouth thinned.
"The next time your marks surge—and they will—you won't just crack the stones beneath your feet. You'll crack the people standing on them." He straightened, already turning away.Already done with me. "One hour. The eastern passage. Don't be late."
Chapter 14
AMARIA
I found him in a corner of the cavern where the passage narrowed to bare rock—no torch brackets, no tool marks on the walls. The kind of place people went to either meditate or bury bodies. With Dreadscale, it could go either way.
Dreadscale sat cross-legged on the bare stone. His eyes were open but fixed on nothing, and the tattoos on his body undulated with a slow, living rhythm. The dragon inked across his back seemed to breathe.
I stopped three paces away—near enough to speak, far enough to run.
He didn't acknowledge me. Just sat there, a statue with a pulse, while I stood in the cold and tried to remember why I'd come.
Because my Marks nearly split the ring in half. Because the Nullatheon is still swallowing villages. Because the alternative is hurting everyone sleeping in these walls.
None of it felt like enough.
"You're late," Dreadscale said. His voice scraped like gravel over stone. He still hadn't looked at me.
"I'm here now."
"Your body is." His gaze lifted then—slow, deliberate—and found mine. "The rest of you is still running."
He rose in a single fluid motion, crossing the distance until he stood inches away. The individual dragon scales shifted on his tattoo.
"You're still flinching from what was meant to free you," he said. The same words he'd spoken that first day, but quieter now. Almost gentle, if gentle was something he knew how to be.
"My Shadowmark is the Mirrorheart," he said. "I don't choose what it shows you. I only reflect what you've buried. The wounds you've refused to let heal."
I clenched my fists. "And I'm supposed to just—let you dig around in my head?"
"I don't dig." His dark eyes held mine, patient and pitiless. "I hold up the glass. You're the one who's been running from what's in it."
"So what do I do?"
"You bring it to light." The corner of his mouth twitched at one corner. "Appropriate, no? The only way to unite your marks is to stop hiding from what lives in the dark. Face it. Name it. And then—only then—will the Shadow stop clawing at its cage."
He stepped closer, and that pressure returned—a restless heave on my skin.
"This will not be comfortable," he warned. "The mirror shows what you've buried deepest. But you cannot master what you refuse to see."
His Mark flared and the dragon blazed silver-white. And in its brilliance, my pain and fear reflected back to me in blinding clarity.
The priests called it a cleansing.
I was small again, eight years old, crouched beneath the roots of the old prayer tree. The roots were thick as my arm and I'd shoved myself between them, bark digging into my back, dirt packed so far under my nails it burned. The ground smelled like sap and the rain that had come through the night before.
Above me, the world ended. The Enforcers had come at dawn. Punishment for living in the wilds, they said. Punishment for existing outside the King's neat, ordered boxes.
