Lain lunged, fingers catching nothing. The motion tore her from Morgan’s grip. She hit the walkway hard, pain flaring up her side. Lain calculated – how far? Twenty feet? More? Would it have flooded below? If he hit water, could he survive?
Blood ran hot down her arm where the spear’s edge had sliced her in passing. It pattered to the ground in bright drops, rolling onto the scales of the Underserpent.
The wyrm surged out of the bowl, a vast and pale shape shattering its own bindings. The chains of light snapped one after another in bursts of radiance. Water exploded over the lip of the bowl, drenching Lain and Morgan in a cold that cut to bone. The Underserpent’s head turned toward her.
It filled Lain’s sky. The theatre gallery, the priests, the Brighthand, the bloodwyrms were suddenly all so small, scattered around the rim of a world that had belonged to this creature long before they named themselves its worshippers.
Its tongue flicked out, fully the size of Lain, and enveloped her.
The effect was like being embraced by warm hands. The serpent’s song poured through her, layered with harmonics that made her teeth ache, her breastbone flutter, her Heat flare and then steady. The starbloom inside her answered. It burned white, then softened, its killing edge honed into something else.
Her wound closed. The torn skin knit, blood dried.
The serpent retracted its tongue, leaving her panting and soaked and healed, just as it had the day the Dagorlind meant for her to die. But there was something else here, something moving through her, some force of change that felt as if it were only just making itself clear.
The chamber answered with the sound of crumbling mountains. Cracks spiderwebbed out from the bowl. The viewing gallery split. One of the support arches sheared clean through, raining rock and screaming Brighthand into the water. Bells fell from the ceiling, some smashing onto the stone, some swallowed whole by cracks opening in the rocky floor.
Seli shrieked orders no one could hear over the roar. The other elders huddled together, some praying, some simply staring in horror. One man fell under the crush of rock; another slipped into a gap in the earth with a scream.
Morgan threw his hands over his head at this onslaught of new feeling. The hyper-empathy that had begun as a flood became an ocean. The wyrm’s brief touch on Lain’s blood echoed through the bond, and Morgan felt it too, the gentleness in it, the deliberate restraint, the choice to heal instead of harm. He felt Mallow fall in the dark below, the mix of terror and ferocious, stubborn relief – better him than her – that had flared and then winked out. He felt Rhalir’s fear and awe and conviction, Hellen’s wild shock as she ran out from below the collapsing central cavern, even Seli’s brittle, breaking faith.
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He felt every death he’d caused that day, suddenly present and refusing to be swallowed.
He wept.
It came without his consent, tears cutting clean tracks through the soot on his face. His wings trembled, feathers shivering as if they, too, carried too much.
Lain crawled toward the bowl’s edge. The Underserpent looked at her one last time with those ancient sightless eyes, and saw her.
Thank you, it said, though there were no words.
The pool split, a crack yawning open along the chamber wall. Water poured into some deep, unseen tunnel. The Underserpent threw itself toward that narrow freedom with all the desperation of a creature that had waited lifetimes for it.
Hands caught Lain around the waist and yanked her back just before the section of the walkway she’d been reaching over sheared away and tumbled into the torrent below.
Morgan held her in a bruising grip, wings again shielding them as debris rained down. A slab of rock crashed across his back. He grunted, staggered, but the wings took the blow, feathers exploding, smoke hissing where stone met shadow and then reformed.
“Let me go,” she choked, struggling. “Mallow –”
“He’s gone,” Morgan said.
“You wanted me dead! Just leave me!”
“It was a mistake.” His sincerity flooded her senses until she was as certain of it as he was. “I will not lose you. Not now. Not when the wyrm has saved you. Not when the world has finally shown itself ready to be remade.”
“Ready to be free,” she snarled.
“Both,” he said, but she could not tell which answer he believed more.
The chamber came down all around them. The great bowl cracked clean in half. Water thundered through the new breach where the Dagorlind had carved a canal from the river, carrying shattered bells, broken bodies, splintered granite. The Underserpent’s retreating coil whipped past. Above, the roof of the Spire groaned.
Hellen’s voice rose somewhere in the chaos, calling Lain’s name. Rhalir shouted something to his men. Lain saw flashes of them through the dust and spray, and thought, for just a moment, that she saw Elder Tanel.
Then the ceiling gave.
Light rained down upon them, shards of the Spire’s upper windows, the cold, sharp dawn wind knifing in through the widening crack.
Morgan gathered her against him.
“Hold on,” he said.
She thought of refusing, sinking her claws into the ground. But the bloodbond was a living thing between them, and it would drag her after him even if she managed to break his grasp. And somewhere out there, above the ruin, the city still burned. The war was not done.
She was so tired.
Her fingers knotted in his cloak. He launched himself upward.
The new wings caught the fresh wind. They rose through the hollow tower, its stones laid one by one for perfect resonance now falling in its final symphony. Smoke and feathers and broken light swirled around them as they shot upward. They breached into the world outside just near the top, and Lain glimpsed the great bell of Ivath at the moment it fell into the silo, to return its metals to the earth from whence they were drawn.
For an instant they were framed against a bruised and paling sky, a Veinwright with the wings of a raven, a Kelthi Bellborn blazing with Starbloom poison in his arms.
The Dawn Spire collapsed.
The Underserpent vanished into the deep.
And Lain, cold and burning and full of a god’s grief, went with the man who had meant to own them both, into the dawn.