They failed more times than Lain could count. Some attempts ended quickly. A bird that never quite drew breath. A mouse that stiffened the moment Morgan completed the last binding, its small body collapsing inward as if the idea of life had been withdrawn at the last moment.

  Those were almost mercies.

  Others lived.

  One creature survived long enough to scream.

  It had come together wrong. The bones knitted, the blood took, the song held just enough for breath to enter its chest. Its heart beat, eyes opened. And then it began to convulse. Its wings, made up of too many joints and bearing too much tension, spasmed uselessly against the stone. One foreleg bent backward at an angle no living thing should endure. Its mouth opened and closed around a sound that scraped straight down Lain’s throbbing scales.

  Morgan had sworn once as the sigils began to unravel.

  “Lain,” he said, already reaching for his knife. “It won’t stabilize.”

  “I can fix it,” she said, hoarse. She dropped to the ground beside it, hands shaking as she tried to retune her voice, to soften the resonance, to ease the shape of what she had made. “I just need another moment.”

  Another moment was all it took for the thing to begin tearing itself apart, mouth sawing into its own brutalized flesh.

  Morgan didn’t hesitate again. He severed the creature’s throat. It shuddered once and went still.

  Lain stayed on the floor long after it was over, her hands braced on the stone, her breath coming in sharp, uneven pulls.

  She thought of the cliffs. She’d fled outside eventually, to stand in the harsh wind and the salt spray, to listen to the wailing gulls, and wondered idly if the fall would be deadly, or if someone who fell from that height would life long enough to suffer before being dragged out by the tide and drowning.

  After that, the failures blurred together. She sang until her throat burned and her voice frayed, until every note felt like it was scraping itself out of her chest. Morgan’s hands were perpetually stained with ink or blood, his focus sharpening into something narrow in its fierceness, the way it always did when he thought he was close.

  It was always the same fault, though it took Lain time to admit it.

  She could not let go.

  Every time she sang, she clung to the creature’s forming shape, or to the fear of death, or to the desperate hope that if she held tightly enough, carefully enough, she could shepherd it across the threshold without loss. Her voice wrapped around them like a fist instead of a current.

  Life did not come when commanded. It came when invited.

  Morgan saw it before she did.

  “You’re trying to save them,” he said one night, when she was slumped against the worktable, throat raw, stomach roiling unpleasantly. He passed her a cup of water, then again when she gagged and pushed it away. Her breasts were constantly tender, her hips sore, though she couldn’t explain why. It had been days since Morgan touched her.

  She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Isn’t saving them the point?”

  “No,” he said gently. “The point is to make them possible. Not to keep them from ever touching death.”

  She closed her eyes. The room seemed to sway, a low nausea rolling through her. “Every time I let go, something dies.”

  “And every time you don’t, something breaks.”

  They slept less. When they did sleep, it was often on opposite sides of the chamber, the exhaustion dropping them where they stood. Once, Morgan draped a blanket over her shoulders while she sat staring at the shattered vessel, her hands curled uselessly in her lap.

  Another night, when his hands wouldn’t stop shaking after a binding went wrong, she reached out and took them, holding on until the tremor passed. He stared at her like he didn’t quite know what to do with the comfort, then let his forehead rest briefly against her shoulder.

  It was after that night that Morgan brought out the fragment. He laid it on the table between them, wrapped in oilcloth and ward-silk so old the fibers had gone soft.

  Lain felt it before she saw it as a pressure behind her eyes, a humming in her bones that made the Underveins answer faintly, far below. She knew without knowing what it was.

  “It’s a fragment,” he said. “From a wyrm egg. Decades ago. It was… excess. Discarded, before the shell fully set. They grow in scaled layers that shed as they expand.” His mouth twisted. “I kept it. I didn’t know why.”

  She looked at him.

  “You stole it,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And preserved it.”

  “Yes.”

  “For this?”

  He didn’t deny it. “For the possibility of this.”

  They prepared for two days.

  Morgan rebuilt the vessel from the ground up, etching the sigils more slowly this time, deliberately leaving space between them so they looked more like a framework than a cage. Lain resisted when her voice threatened to fail entirely, though even rest came with that strange, persistent nausea curling in her gut, a fatigue that sat deeper than muscle or bone.

  She blamed the stress and the constant proximity to death.

  They came so close once that the creature opened its strange eyes, gazing around at them before laying its head back and giving up its breath to ether. It had been wrong in only subtle ways. A spine that held, then did not. Eyes pale and luminous, reflecting Lain’s face back at her with a terrible clarity, awareness without endurance. When it looked at her, it saw her. And it wasn’t the bird it had been when Morgan had come with it cradled in his hands; it was something new, some horrible other thing with far too much awareness of the loss of what it once was.

  Then its breath thinned, unraveled, and slipped out of the world.

  She didn’t recognize the sharp, animal sound that was torn from her as she lunged forward, hands useless, too late to anchor anything. Morgan caught her around the ribs before she could collapse over the body.

  “It looked at me,” she cried. “It looked.”

  “I know,” Morgan said.

  She fled out the door again, flung herself to the railing, and she didn’t even think before she eased her hoof over it.

  But having felt her resolve Morgan chased her, and yanked her back, and bore her to the ground to hold her with such fierce terror she thought he might suffocate her with it.

  “Lain, you can’t – Lain, please, please.”

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  And in an instant he was on his feet, lifting her, carrying her inside as she wept and wept. This time, he didn’t speak of odds or iteration. He only held her.

  That night she shook so badly she couldn’t hold water without spilling it. She saw herself falling, again and again, but she could not picture hitting the rocks below, could not imagine the pain of it, could only feel the wind in her hair, that incredible infinite space between living and dying, that space where all people were while they lived.

  In that space in her mind, where she was only falling, she understood.

  It wasn’t that she was afraid of the creature dying.

  She was afraid of it losing itself to whatever it was they were making. She was afraid the bird would no longer be a bird, free to fly, to hunt for seeds, to grow to feed its young and remain a part of the natural order of things. All along she’d been afraid that what they were making would not belong to the world. It would be suspended in freefall, for all eternity, neither living nor dying.

  For the first time when Morgan came to the cot, he climbed in behind her and held her and let her shudder in his arms and demanded nothing. He stayed until she slept.

  In the morning she vomited and blamed the smell of blood, the strain of singing, the sleeplessness.

  Morgan returned just after dusk with something much larger than normal cradled in his arms.

  It was a fawn.

  It was barely steady on its legs, its coat still dark with the soft sheen of new life. Its antler buds were velvet-nubbed, its ears too large for its head. It made a thin, questioning sound when he set it down, searching for a mother that would never answer.

  Lain went very still.

  “No,” she said.

  Morgan didn’t argue. He crouched, resting his forearms on his knees, making himself smaller. “It’s early spring,” he said quietly. “It wouldn’t last long without her. And…” he hesitated, then added, “Its shape is close enough to yours that I can reach it. Legs. Balance. Hooves. I can feel where it wants to stand.”

  The bond stirred faintly in her chest, an uncomfortable truth. She crouched despite herself, one hand hovering over the fawn’s spine. It trembled, but it did not flee.

  They prepared the chamber again. Morgan cut shallow, precise lines, leaving deliberate silences in the pattern. The fawn lay between them, breathing fast, heart fluttering against Lain’s palm like a trapped bird.

  This time, Morgan took the dragon eggshell, and placed the piece beneath the fawn.

  “When you’re ready,” Morgan said.

  Lain closed her eyes.

  She opened her mouth, but the Veinwright song would not come, the song that would hollow and make a vessel. That piece that would erase the thing that made the fawn itself.

  Instead, she breathed, and sang the Morning Litany.

  “Let the flesh fall quiet. Let the breath be still. Let the shoulders release. Let the throat be open.”

  Unlike the Veinwright songs, this was not a command but an invitation. The fawn’s breathing slowed beneath her hand, its panic easing as if it recognized the cadence.

  “Let the bones remember. Let the blood slow. Let the voice find root. Let the breath shape tone.”

  The Underveins answered. The hum came deep, subterranean, through the stone and into her knees. Morgan sucked in a sharp breath, but did not interrupt.

  “Fold the spine. Sink the weight. Give no name to pain. Give no shape to want.”

  Lain stopped trying to decide what the creature should be.

  She let go.

  “Hold nothing. Cling to nothing. Cast the eyes downward. Cast the tone inward.”

  The sigils brightened, aligning. The fawn cried out, a high sound that scraped Lain’s heart bloody.

  Then it changed. The cry deepened, broadened as its chest expanded, breath anchoring instead of unraveling. Its legs kicked, and held.

  Light threaded through its forming antlers, faint but unmistakable.

  Lain’s breath hitched. “Morgan.”

  “I see it,” he said, voice trembling. “Don’t stop.”

  “Where the wyrm dreams, listen. Where the wyrm coils, breathe. What stirs, let pass. What rises, guide.”

  The chamber settled. When the fawn opened its eyes again, they were no longer empty. They fixed on Lain.

  Something bright and irrevocable snapped into place between them in something like the bond, but it was so one-sided she could not think of it as such; no, this was an imprint, clear and immediate. The creature cried again, smaller this time, questioning, and Lain’s heart broke cleanly in two.

  She sobbed as she gathered it to her chest.

  Morgan sank to his knees beside her, tears tracking freely down his face, awe and relief crashing through the Tuning so hard she could barely breathe under it.

  “We did it,” he whispered. “Lain… we did it.”

  The Dóthain trembled, then steadied in her arms, hooves flexing weakly against the stone.

  And for the first time since they had begun, nothing died.

  She laughed with relief, and examined the Dóthain as it gazed up at her with its huge black fawn’s eyes. It was mostly a deer still, its coat shiny and black, its chest abloom with crystal white feathers. Its rear legs ended in hooves like her own, with black wool at its legs; its bore black-scaled talons. Its ears, too, were like her own, its tail long with an end tufted in curly white fur. A line of white scales ran from its feathered mane to the tip of its tail, these fading to black down its spine.

  But most beautiful of all were its wings. Black, shiny black, midnight black, the black of a raven. It opened these, stretching, one soft feather brushing Lain’s face before it folded them once more and nuzzled closer to her chest.

  Morgan reached out, gentle, asking to hold it, and in their bond his heart was full of hope and joy. She nearly passed the Dóthain to him.

  But then through the Tuning came the shift in his intent. His focus sharpened from awe to ownership. He was already holding the sigil blade, reopening the shallow cut on his arm.

  “No,” Lain said, breathless. “Morgan –”

  “It needs anchoring,” he said quickly, already kneeling, already pressing his palm to the stone beside her. “Before it panics. Before it wanders.”

  The word struck her like a slap.

  “You don’t bind what’s just been born,” she said. “You don’t –”

  “I won’t cage it,” he snapped, the defensiveness flaring hot and sudden through the bond. “I’m stabilizing it. You felt how thin the margin was. If it slips –”

  He carved.

  The sigil bloomed bright as an open vein, and the Dóthain screamed.

  It was so wrong, that scream, like a hawk with teeth, a raw and keening sound that tore straight through Lain’s chest. It’s wings flared, slick feathers shuddering as the light from Morgan’s binding bit into its forming bones.

  Lain surged away from Morgan, hands closing around the creature. “Stop. You’re hurting her.”

  “I’m saving her,” Morgan said, and the words rang brittle. “Let go, Lain. I need a clear channel.”

  “You already have one,” she said fiercely. “You have me.”

  The Dóthain bucked between them, feeding on the strain, the push and pull snapping tight through their shared bond. Its wings beat again, wild and uncoordinated, stirring the air until the chamber hummed with pressure.

  The floor cracked in a hairline fracture beneath the sigil. Then, another beneath Lain’s legs. The Underveins answered the disturbance like a struck bell, a deep subterranean roar surging up through the stone and through Lain’s marrow and through the harsh cry of the Dóthain.

  “Morgan!” Lain shouted.

  The sigils flared out of sequence, lines colluding and exploding into white-hot fractures across the floors and walls. Ancient carvings long buried beneath soot and time ignited with forgotten light, answering the song still echoing in the chamber.

  The cliff shuddered.

  The Dóthain scared in terror, wings flapping wildly now, feeding on the chaos, pulling power through the open conduit they had become without meaning to. She pulled out of Lain’s arms and stumbled toward the light.

  Lain stood and then lost her footing as the floor pitched. Morgan lunged for her, catching her around the waist and hauling her backward as the roof split overhead, chunks of stone tearing loose in a thunderous cascade.

  “Go!” he shouted, dragging her toward the front chamber, toward the balcony as everything came apart behind them.

  They burst into open air just as the laboratory collapsed inward, dust and fire and light roaring up behind them. Lain twisted in his grip, reaching –

  The Dóthain leapt. Her wings caught a rising gust torn loose by the collapsing cliff, flapping hard, desperate, untrained. For one terrible heartbeat she hovered, crying, eyes locked on Lain.

  Then the air took her.

  She vanished into the storm, pulled toward something in the distance that set Lain’s teeth to chattering – the rupture beneath Ivath, singing its terrible welcome through the Underveins. Silence crashed down after.

  Morgan held Lain upright as more stones fell, and then the ground beneath them tumbled into the sea.

  Morgan held fast under her arms. He strained, let out a horrible cry of distress before rising, flapping hard, as hard as he could, and he carried her up, up above the laboratory, up above the cliff, and for the first time since her arrival she saw grass and trees and the wide open sky.

  And there was the Dóthain, flying west, her pained loneliness pouring through her bond with Lain, her devastating birth giving it all the guilt and confusion of a creature that did not know the meaning of being alive.