Page 54 of Dragon 7

“I will see you on the battlefield, Dragon.” She walked off.

Hooded figures gently lifted Nyomi and carried her away.

No! No!

I tried to call her name, and nothing came. The pain had taken my voice the way it had taken my legs.

TORA!!

I reached for her anyway.

My fingers dug into the dirt. I clawed at the ground and dragged my body a few inches after her, and a few inches was all the world would give me.

Nyomi's head turned. Her eyes found mine over a red shoulder, and then the darkness took her.

And I lay in the sand my ancestors were buried in, clawing after the woman who must have bled herself dry for a war I never wanted her anywhere near.

And then agonizing pain took everything.

The moonlight left.

The cold ground left me too.

My Tiger’s face over the red shoulder disappeared from my mind along with the sound of guns booming and the roar of planes.

This pain was not a wound, sting, or sharp slice.

It was fire, and it blazed hot in my gut and climbed, fast, eating its way up through me.

“AHHH!!” It poured down my arms. It ran up my spine. It filled my mouth and my eyes until there was no scream left that could carry it out, and still it burned hotter, feeding on me, taking everything I was made of for fuel.

And somewhere in the heart of that blaze I understood at last what the rite had always meant.

To rise as something else, a man first had to burn.

DEAR GOD!!!!

So I let it take me. Not to win the war, but because my Tiger had sacrificed for this. I would not take her bloodshed and pain lightly.

Screaming, I let the fire have the Dragon.

GODDAMN IT!!!

Then, beneath the burning, something woke. It had lived in me my whole life, behind a wall I never built, raging at the bars, starving for a freedom I kept it from. Through the hot pain, I felt the flames eat through that wall, and the wall did not hold. It came apart from the inside, and the beast roared.

It rose.

Out of the embers of the man I had been.

Uncurling in the smoke.

Pouring into every space the fire had hollowed out.

Climbing my spine.

Flooding my chest.

Pressing behind my eyes until I could feel it looking out through them.