Page 16 of Fire to the Stars

After Micah turned, I acted no better than the Immortals. The things I did to his human form weren’t experiments. They were torture. A control grab over Diu’s magic. Now I know better. The side of me that tried to play creator god must stay buried. It doesn’t belong in a moral society.

“Why do you care what I did? I thought you wanted revenge,”I say, deflecting the topic.

Claire leans back in her saddle as the road turns into a slope. It dips under a tangle of sparse tree branches. “I can want dragons gone and feel bad for them at the same time.”

It’s not as if I don’t understand. When Micah found out he killed our parents, it destroyed him. Being slain would’ve been a kindness compared to dreading the next Ignition, knowing he could kill me next.

It didn’t occur to me until he was already dead that he might feel that way.

le 2 mai 1760

Micah turned into a dragon yesterday morning.

During my parents’ attempt to slay him, he sustained wounds to the wings, right eye, and left flank. While not fatal, they slowed his movements enough for me to bind his muzzle and wings with chains. Shoving moondaggers hilt-deep below every third vertebra rendered him immobile. Feeding the hilts through the chain links kept the blades firmly in place, thus preventing his recovery. I safely transported him to a cavern and bolted him to the rock.

I expected Micah to revert to human form at nightfall, like any other dragon would have. Strangely, he remained in dragon form throughout the night. Only after I removed the daggers from his spine did he change back—but not until sunsdown tonight. His dragon form lasted for two days in a row.

Conclusion: Moonmetal weapons can obstruct a dragon’s nervous system. Without a properly functioning nervous system, the subject cannot change form.

Theory: Paralyzing the human form in the same manner could prevent the transformation upon the next Ignition.

I fitted Micah with human-sized shackles for the time being. He’s asking questions about what happened. He remembers a severe fever. Sweating. Itchy skin and aching bones. Talons sprouting from his fingertips. After that, he remembers nothing. I told him he had a nightmare. Predictably, he didn’t believe me. He’s a child, not stupid. He asked if he killed our parents. I didn’t know what to say to that. My silence, though, said everything.

Translated from the research journal of Abel Estellio

A dragon can be killed at any daylight hour, even after the suns finish the eclipse. It will not revert to human form again until nightfall. We use the eclipse as our countdown simply because archive records show that a dragon is exponentially more likely to kill us if we do not slay it within the first few minutes.

—Slayers Guild handbook

Chapter Six

Abel

I hear the fire crackling before I see it.

An orange glow rises behind the canopy of brown-gold leaves, a color too high in the sky to mark the impending sunsdown. When Lucy alerts us to the smoke in the air, one word springs to mind:

“Fire!” I shout. “It could be a dragon.”

“Today?” Claire asks, bewildered. “But the Ignition was yesterday—”

“I’ll explain later.Go!” I order, bringing Lucy tight to my chest.

Claire kicks our horses into a gallop, hair streaming behind her. My knees grip the saddle hard.

My experiments on Micah proved that it’s possible for a dragon to retain its form well after Ignition Day. A few moondaggers lodged in the spinal cord will maintain the transformation. Butwho else aside from me would know how to do that? I never shared the results of my research with another soul.

At the same time,veryfew fires in Florent get this bad without a dragon involved.

In moments, we break through the trees. The view opens wide.

Ravinfort—home to the Metekus, my second family—is unrecognizable.

To the right, the Tordou River rushes with whitecapped rapids. To the left, the stone buildings carved into the cliffside are black and crumbling. The trim shrubbery burns orange and bright, scorching the dusk chill. The du Fay castle towers on the clifftop, as usual, obvious from the moonmetal spear launchers mounted on the turrets. But flames climb up the ivy on the walls like greedy fingers. Half of the eastern turret falls in a landslide of rubble. The exposed interior walls burn, scorched black.

Our horses tense, heads high, ears forward. Anticipating a spook, I snatch the reins, halting my mare short. Momentum unseats me. I twist my body enough to alter my trajectory and land on my feet instead of my head. It keeps Lucy safe in my arms.

“Ho!” Claire commands, sitting back. Her horse skids to a halt. The lead rope to my horse snaps taut. “Don’t do that! You could injure the horseandyourself.”