Page 18 of Exquisite Monster (Dragons of Viria #2)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
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KATALENA
T he scratch marks on the wall by my makeshift bed extended by another half-moon before I knew all the formulas in the book Gleym gave me. But now I knew them all.
Save one.
The recipe for scalefire, which was blotted out.
But the clothes I now wore fit me, and I hadn’t realized how much I missed that. No longer swimming in fabric, I could move far more easily.
Which made my training better. Even if it was only in my mind, now that I could move, my aim got better. Not perfect, but pretty damn good. I didn’t have to be perfect. With the concoctions I had, all I needed to do was coat them with something and strike the target.
Mostly.
I finished lacing the boots Gleym had given me and stretched. Fallen knew what the dragon would have in store for me today, but I was as ready as I could be.
Gleym was not in the kitchen, nor was she in the fighting ring. There could be any number of places in the vast network of caves down here, but Varí zoomed ahead of me and found her before coming back to lead me. She was in the room that exposed the s heyten .
Violet light filled the space, magic hovering so thick in the air I could almost taste it. Gleym’s head was bent, eyes closed in concentration, though I couldn’t see what she focused on. An object currently cloaked in lavender-tinted power.
Varí landed on my shoulder and rubbed his head on my cheek before watching. His scales matched the color in the air, like he couldn’t help but reflect it back. I curled my finger around his tail and tugged once.
“Do you have a favorite color of scale?” I asked quietly.
All at once, his body deepened into a rich sapphire I’d never seen him turn before. Deep and glimmering. Much darker than Sirrus’s light, vibrant blue.
“That’s beautiful.”
He preened and chirped softly, letting his scales fade back to the gentle purple.
The light and magic faded to nothing, and Gleym looked up from her trance. “Here. ”
She threw something, and I caught it blindly. A leather bag. The strap was long enough so it could sling over my shoulder and settle at my hip. “What is it?”
Varí climbed down my shoulder, sniffing and poking his head inside out of curiosity. He chirped in alarm and fell into it, disappearing entirely. I gasped. “ Varí ?”
His head poked out of the bag a moment later, and he blinked before disappearing again. “Where are you?—”
I opened the bag further and stopped. That… couldn’t be right. It seemed like I was looking into a bag that was… huge?
“Remember that I control the relationships between things,” Gleym said.
“This close to a sheyten , that power includes the relationship of something and what is inside it. It will hold whatever you need, and you will not feel the weight.” Then she smiled faintly.
“ Varí can fetch things for you from within it. He won’t leave your side. ”
I took a breath as relief swept through my chest. This was for him. It would help me, but it was more for him. If he was with me, helping me the way he loved and protected within the bag, he wouldn’t be as likely to throw himself into danger for my sake. “Thank you.”
“You can take everything you’ve brewed until now, and anything you create before you leave. I will make you enough darts.”
My heart sped up as Varí climbed back out of the bag and shook out his wings. “There’s still one more potion in the book.”
“I told you before.” Gleym’s staff echoed off the floor. “I will not teach it again. If I could wipe the knowledge from the minds of humans and let it die, I would do so.”
“So… I am finished?”
She nodded once. “I have not yet solved how to return you to the surface. But make your preparations. Whatever you think you need, make more of it. You may take whatever you wish.”
“That is kind of you.”
Gleym shrugged and continued on her way. “You’ll likely need it more than I, if you insist on continuing down this path.”
I clenched my teeth and followed her, keeping my pace as slow as hers. “What would you have me do? Stay here forever?” My voice was sharper than I’d intended, but then again, I was now sharper than I’d ever intended, and it was in no small part thanks to her.
“It would be the safer course. But humans rarely choose what is safest for them. Even less if they are as,” she hesitated, “entangled as you are.”
Despite spending nearly three turns of the moon down here with her, we didn’t often speak of things beyond the training. Almost everything was too hard for me to think about without dissolving into grief or anger, and Gleym did not care. Not the way a friend would. We were useful to each other.
I hadn’t figured out what she was using me for, but I didn’t believe she was helping me out of the goodness of her heart.
But if we were going to speak about it, then we were going to speak about it.
“I know you hold little love for your own kind after what they did to you. But do you want them to lose themselves entirely? Because as far as I can tell, my mates are the only dragons who have a chance at standing against what is happening.”
She turned on me, eyes blazing with power. “They have no chance. None. You saw it when they were taken. How do you expect them to fight back when they are not strong enough to resist the commands of the Six?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your lovers are competent,” she said. “I remember them enough to know. But the rules of dragons cannot be bent or broken. Many have tried. All have failed. So when I say you send yourself to your death by leaving, I mean it as a certainty. No matter how prepared you are, they cannot defeat the Elders as they are.”
I swallowed. “You could release them,” I said. “Unbind Endre’s power.”
With a sigh, she kept walking. “No, I cannot.”
“But why? If you are the Elders’ equal, and from what I have seen, you are, then why couldn’t you undo it?”
We entered the kitchen and Gleym poured herself a drink. “Because his binding is not a simple command of power. If it were, it could be lifted. But in the same way that he bound his magic to the sheyten to keep the Elders from undoing it, they bound their command to themselves.”
My stomach dropped to my feet. “What?”
“A vicious little twist.” Gleym smiled grimly. “Binding his power to their own life force, so as long as one of them remains alive, the binding remains. Unless one of them releases it, of course.”
I swallowed. “He said they promised him a hundred years.”
“A promise they never intended on keeping. They lied to you too. And to the King of Craisos. They will say whatever they need to in order to accomplish their goal.”
Fuck .
Closing my eyes, I took a breath. I knew it wouldn’t be easy to restore Endre’s power, but even he didn’t know that.
It was a cruel twist. He could never be whole again unless we found a way to fight back against their power, and they’d already shown us how futile that was.
And they made sure he would stay powerless, even if the sheyten fell and the Elders dragged the world into the exact war he gave everything to avoid .
“Rethinking your choice now?”
I glared at her. “No.”
She just sighed. “Humans have become no less stubborn with time.”
If I wanted to keep myself in check, I needed to leave this room.
She might have given up on everything and everyone, but I hadn’t.
Even if it did lead to my death, it was better than staying beneath the earth.
I didn’t care. I was going to get back to them, no matter what I had to do. No matter what it cost.
“Thank you for the bag. And everything else.”
Varí rubbed his head on my cheek again, sensing my distress. I turned, and her voice stopped me. “You think me cruel.”
Did I? No. Not really.
“I think you have decided what you believe and what is possible,” I said. “And I have not. They are the only thing I’ve ever chosen, and I won’t give them up, even if it kills me. Even if?—”
I couldn’t say the words out loud. The darkness in my thoughts didn’t frighten me. The fact that it didn’t frighten me was what did.
“Even if you become as much a monster as I am?” She asked.
One more breath and I walked out of the room without answering. Because I would go so much further, and I would do so much worse to find them.
I just hoped I wouldn’t have to.