Page 186 of I Dream of Dragons

But I don’t like that word.Doomed.I don’t believe fate is set in stone. Nobody knows what tomorrow will bring.

Besides… my heart is invested. All in. If fate is involved in that, in this bond we share, well… It’s more than that. It was always more than that. Love is more than a pull. It’s a dive into an ocean, as incomprehensible and final as death and rebirth. And he’s everything I want, everything I’ve ever wished for in my naïve little heart.

Mars. My Mars.

The legendary king Marsyas. The tragic king Phaethon. The first Eosphor. All these beings, merged into one, and yet he managed to become a kind man.

Still fighting. Still by my side.

“A treasure trove for your thoughts,” Jai says.

“They actually aren’t worth much at all.”

“They’re worth more than all of the world’s nightgold. What’s on your mind?”

“How broken we are,” I admit in a whisper.

“You’re right,” he says after a beat, “we are broken. But that’s all right. It’s through those cracks that the light filters and fills us up.”

He kisses me, and I kiss him back hungrily, desperately.

“You’re kissing me as if the world is ending,” he breathes in wonder. “Rae…”

I find my eyes filling with tears, and I look away.

“Itwillbe all right,” he says. “I promise. Youwillbe fine. I’ll find a way to stop him. To cut the thread. After all, it’s what I came into this world to do.”

He doesn’t know I have already made up my mind.

So I nod, hiding my expression from him by laying my cheek on his chest. I don’t know how he’s planning on stopping the king, but I won’t let him put himself in danger.

The music changes.

“Another dance?” he asks and I open my mouth to say yes. Yes to a dance, yes to anything he might ask of me, tonight and always.

“This is where I interrupt you,” a male voice says.

The telchin.

“The dance isn’t finished,” I say, drawing back from Jai.

“It is finished. Another dance is about to begin.”

Outwardly innocent but somehow ominous words.

“What do you want?” Jai asks warily, still holding my hands.

“Did you know that if you tame a water horse, it’s the best horse?”

“What do nokke have to do with me?” I demand.

“The water breeds powerful creatures, and now that the Gods have fled… Wait. That is not true: they have not fled, they have fallen asleep. But it all comes down to the same. We have to fend for ourselves now, we?—”

“Telchin,” I whisper, frustrated.

“He’s reporting what he hears,” Jai says. “Prophecies spoken throughout time.”

“—have to find new strength and magic in us, leftovers of the divine that still live in us,” the telchin says. “In you.”