Page 9 of Burned Alive to Be His

XVITAR

R age is a clean fire. I understand it. It has a purpose.

It scours, it strengthens, it consumes. But this…

this thing coiling in my gut as I lead the human toward the Serpent’s Maw is a different kind of heat.

It is a thick, foul smoke that chokes me, clouding my thoughts.

It is Vorlag’s treachery, Grakar’s ambition, and the infuriating, undeniable memory of the previous night.

I tell myself the anger is for Vorlag. The old fool plays with the future of our clan as if it is a game of stones.

He sends this fragile creature into the very heart of the mountain’s fire, a trial no dragon would undertake lightly, all to prove a point in his political games.

He endangers my prize, my tool, and in doing so, he insults me.

The rage I feel is righteous. It is the anger of a warrior whose asset is being squandered.

But as I watch her walk, another, fouler smoke rises.

She is limping. It is a small thing, a barely perceptible hitch in her step, but I see it.

My predator’s eyes miss nothing. I see the way she holds her body, a rigid line of pain and exhaustion.

I see the faint, dark bruises on her arms where my fingers gripped her.

The sight does not fill me with the satisfaction of a master who has broken a disobedient thing.

It fills me with this… this churning irritation.

Her weakness is an inconvenience. I took what was mine by right.

I asserted my dominance. That she is sore from it is a consequence of her own frailty, not my action.

Her body is a testament to her pathetic human limits.

And yet, the sight of her struggle grates on me, a constant, low-level abrasion against my will.

“Keep up,” I snarl, my voice harsher than I intend.

She does not look at me. She does not speak. She simply clenches her jaw and quickens her pace, her bare feet stumbling on the sharp, obsidian-laced ground. I see a thin trickle of blood well from a cut on her sole. The sight sends another inexplicable spike of fury through me.

We walk in silence, the only sounds the crunch of my boots on the volcanic grit and the soft, pained whisper of her bare feet.

The path to the Serpent’s Maw winds up the lower slope of Bloodstorm, a treacherous trail of loose scree and jagged rock formations that look like the broken teeth of a dead god.

Steam hisses from fissures in the ground, smelling of sulfur and rot.

The heat intensifies with every step, a physical pressure that beats down from the sun above and radiates up from the living mountain beneath.

I am in my element. The heat soothes the fire in my blood.

But she… she is wilting. Her skin, already burned by the sun, is flushed a painful red.

Sweat plasters her tattered tunic to her thin frame, and her breath comes in shallow, rapid pants.

She is a flower trying to bloom in the heart of a forge. It is a pathetic, infuriating sight.

We reach the entrance to the Serpent’s Maw.

It is not a cave. It is a wound in the mountainside, a dark, jagged fissure from which a visible, shimmering heat pours like a foul breath.

The air itself tastes of metal and poison.

The rock around the entrance is stained with yellow and green mineral deposits from the toxic gases that vent from within.

The groaning sounds that emanate from its depths are not the sounds of wind, but of the mountain itself, shifting in its uneasy sleep.

The human stops, her eyes wide as she stares into the dark, heat-hazed opening.

I can feel the terror rolling off her in waves.

It is a palpable thing, a scent in the air.

For the first time since she washed ashore, she looks truly, utterly broken.

And the sight of it, the sight of that defiant fire in her eyes finally extinguished, brings me no triumph. It brings only a cold, hollow ache.

She takes a deep, shuddering breath, a soldier preparing to walk to her own execution. She turns to face the opening, her small shoulders squared. She is going to do it. She is going to walk into that hell without a word.

And I cannot let her.

Not like this.

“Halt.” The command is a sharp bark, torn from my throat before I can think.

She freezes, her back to me.

“Turn around,” I order.

She turns slowly, her face a pale, sweat-sheened mask. The defiance is gone, replaced by a weary, fatalistic resolve. She thinks I am about to deliver a final cruelty.

I look at her feet. They are a mess. Cut, bruised, and blistered from the hot, sharp ground. They are the feet of a creature not meant for this world. They are the feet of a creature destined to fail. And her failure will be my own. My embarrassment.

“You cannot enter the Maw like that,” I say in a low growl of frustration. “Your feet will be cooked to the bone before you take ten steps. Do not embarrass me by failing over something so pathetic.”

I turn my back to her, a deliberate act to conceal what I am about to do. I cannot let her see this. It is a weakness I cannot afford to show. I reach into the leather pouch at my belt and pull out a strip of cured likar hide and the small, sharp blade I use for skinning.

With a quick, practiced movement, I press the edge of the blade against the thickest part of the obsidian scales on my left forearm.

I grit my teeth and scrape, hard. A sharp, searing pain lances up my arm.

It is the pain of a part of me being stripped away.

A fine, shimmering black powder flakes from my scales onto a piece of leather I’ve laid out.

It is not much, but it will be enough. My scales hold the fire of my blood, the innate resistance to the mountain’s heat that is my birthright.

I quickly mix the powder with a dab of animal fat from my pouch, creating a thick, black paste. The act feels… intimate. Sacrilegious. I am giving a part of myself, of my very essence, to this human. I tell myself it is a calculated investment. Nothing more.

I turn back to her, my face a mask of indifference. “Sit,” I command, gesturing to a flat rock.

She hesitates, her eyes narrowed with suspicion.

“Now, human,” I snarl.

She sits, tucking her ruined feet beneath her. I crouch before her, ignoring the way she flinches as I reach for her. I go to grab her ankle, and she yanks her foot back, scrambling away until her back hits the rock.

“Don’t,” she hisses, the word a shard of glass in the hot air. Her eyes are wide, but they burn with a cornered animal’s ferocity. “Don’t touch me.”

The defiance, even now, even after last night, sends a jolt of something hot and infuriating through me. “I will touch what is mine,” I snarl, losing patience. “And your pathetic feet are about to get you killed, which inconveniences me. Now, sit still.”

I don’t give her a choice. I lunge and grab her ankle, my grip firm, ignoring her sharp intake of breath and the way her entire body goes rigid. Her foot is so small, so fragile in my large hand.

I work quickly, my movements rough and impersonal. I smear the black paste onto the two pieces of likar hide, the mixture still warm from my body heat. I press the hides to the soles of her feet, then use thin leather thongs to bind them in place, creating crude but functional shoes.

Throughout the process, she is utterly still, her breath held. I can feel the tremor in her leg, but she does not pull away. When I am finished, I release her and stand up, putting distance between us once more.

“They will offer some protection,” I say, my voice clipped. “Now go. And do not fail.”

She looks down at the makeshift shoes, then up at me, her eyes filled with a confusion so profound it is almost painful to witness. She does not understand the act, and I will not explain it.

She stands, testing her weight on the protected soles. She gives me one last, searching look, then turns and walks toward the mouth of the Serpent’s Maw. She does not look back. She simply disappears into the shimmering heat and the oppressive darkness.

And I am left alone.

The silence she leaves behind is a heavy, suffocating thing.

I am forbidden from helping. I am commanded to wait.

Waiting is not something I do well. I begin to pace, a caged predator, my boots crunching on the black grit.

The rage I felt earlier has been replaced by a different kind of fire.

A hot, coiling anxiety that tightens my chest and shortens my breath.

I stare at the dark fissure, my senses stretched thin, trying to pierce the veil of heat and shadow.

I can smell the poison in the air, the scent of a thousand years of the mountain’s foul breath.

I can hear the deep, groaning shifts of the rock, the world groaning in its sleep. She is in there. Alone.

Minutes stretch into an eternity. Every groan of the mountain is her being crushed.

Every hiss of a steam vent is the sound of her skin cooking.

The logical part of my mind tells me she is already dead.

No human could survive in there for this long.

But another, more primal part of me refuses to accept it.

A tremor shakes the ground beneath my feet, sharp and violent. Loose rocks clatter down the mountainside, and a section of the rock face just above the entrance to the Maw cracks and falls, sending a shower of stone and dust across the opening.

“Judith!”

Her name is a roar, torn from my throat, a sound of pure, instinctual panic. I take a step forward, my hand going to the hilt of the blade at my back, every instinct screaming at me to go in, to tear the mountain apart to find her.

I freeze, my own voice echoing in my ears.

I have never said her name aloud before.

The sound of it on my tongue is a foreign, dangerous thing.

I force myself to take a step back, my hands clenching into fists, my claws digging into my palms. I will not break Vorlag’s command. I will not show this weakness.

Another eternity passes. The sun beats down on me, but I do not feel its heat. The only heat I feel is the cold, sick fire of dread in my gut.

A plume of yellow-green gas, thick and oily, billows from the mouth of the fissure. It is a poison cloud, a death breath. I have seen it kill a full-grown batlaz in seconds, its lungs dissolving into a bloody froth. If she was in its path…

I cannot finish the thought. I turn away from the entrance, a savage roar of fury and frustration building in my chest. She is dead. My prize is broken. My investment is lost. Vorlag has won. And I… I have failed.

I am about to unleash my rage on the unfeeling rock of the mountain when a small sound reaches my ears. A scrape. A cough.

My head snaps back toward the Maw.

A figure emerges from the shimmering heat, a ghost covered in grime and soot. She stumbles out into the sunlight, her body swaying, and collapses to her knees, coughing, her breath coming in ragged, desperate gasps.

It is her.

She is alive.

I am stunned into absolute stillness. It is impossible.

I stare at her, my mind refusing to process what my eyes are seeing.

She is filthy, her clothes are singed, her face is smudged with black, but she is alive.

And clutched in her hands, held tight against her chest, is a cluster of crystals.

They glow with a soft, inner fire, a cool, blue-white light that pulses like a living heart.

She pushes herself to her feet, her legs trembling. She takes a few unsteady steps toward me and holds out the crystals, her offering.

I do not take them. I am too busy watching her, trying to understand. How? How did she survive?

And then I see it. I see the way her eyes dart around, not in fear, but in observation.

I see the way she instinctively tests the air before she breathes too deeply.

I see the small, heat-resistant lizards, the ignis , that scurry over the rocks, their scaled bodies immune to the worst of the mountain’s heat.

They are a common sight, creatures we barely notice.

But she noticed them.

The realization hits me with the force of a physical blow.

She did not survive through strength. She did not survive through magic.

She survived by being clever. By being observant.

She watched the creatures that lived in that hell, the creatures that knew its secrets.

She followed their paths. She avoided the places they avoided.

She used their instincts to guide her own.

She survived by being a survivor.

It is a form of strength I have never encountered, a power I cannot measure in muscle or fire.

It is the strength of the weed that grows in the crack of the stone, the strength of the rat that thrives in the filth of the city.

It is a strength born of desperation, of resilience, of an unyielding will to simply… endure.

And in this moment, as I look at this small, filthy, impossible human, my grudging respect ignites into something else. Something that feels dangerously close to awe.

I finally move, closing the distance between us. I snatch the crystals from her hand, my touch rough, my expression a mask of frigid indifference.

“You took long enough,” I say, growling’

I turn and begin the walk back to the settlement, not waiting to see if she follows. I know she will. She is a survivor. And she is, against all logic, against all reason, still mine.