? ? ?

  Grace slipped back into the green shadows and watched the big man go.

  He waded out until the waves kissed his chest, then flung himself onto the raft like it was a toy and paddled away with arms that could have snapped trees in half. Soon he was just a dark speck against the blinding sea.

  She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding and felt her knees wobble.

  Grace pressed her tiny palm flat against her chest, right over the frantic drum of her heart. For one impossible moment she could still feel the warmth of his body through that armor, strong and full of life.

  Two hundred years she’d seen men come and go: sailors, knights, dreamers, fools. Most never made it back. The few who did usually came back broken, or not better.

  But this one… he was different. This one was made of something she had never seen. He looked at her with care, he made her feel present.

  She swallowed hard, eyes stinging with something that wasn’t smoke.

  There was something about him (danger wrapped in kindness, power that didn’t know how to be cruel). It made her want to follow, to protect, to see what happened when a star-fallen man walked into a world that had forgotten stars even existed.

  “Don’t you dare die out there, star-man,” she whispered to the wind. “Not after you finally made me feel again.”

  The breeze carried the words north, toward the dark line on the horizon where sky and sea bruised together.

  Somewhere behind her, wings cracked the air like breaking continents. The hunters were almost here.

  Grace gave her head a shake, wiped her face with the heel of her hand, and let two centuries of mischief settle back into her smile.

  Right. Time to go lie to a dragon.

  She got to work.

  Branches snapped under careful fingers. Grass bent in the shape of heavy boots. She crushed herbs between stones, spat, sweated, mixed until the air carried Mereque’s scent like he was still standing beside her.

  A Fay trick. Humans couldn’t smell the difference. Dragons could.

  She painted the lie across half the island and ran.

  Two hours later the forest caught fire without flame.

  The air turned thick and furnace-hot. Leaves curled brown and fell like dying moths. Bark peeled from trunks in long, steaming strips. The ground itself trembled, terrified.

  Grace’s heart hammered against her ribs.

  A wall of sulfur fog rolled in. Through it, two burning red eyes found her.

  The dragon stepped from the haze like a walking volcano.

  “So,” it rumbled, voice rolling over her like an avalanche of molten stone, “you choose to help him. An interesting choice, leprechaun’s daughter.”

  Heat blistered her tongue. She dropped to her knees, coughing, eyes streaming.

  Grace pressed her forehead to the dirt and tried not to shake herself apart.

  “Please,” she rasped, voice cracking, “I only helped a soul in need. Like you once helped us in the fires long ago. Mercy, Great Ones.”

  The heat was no longer heat; it was judgement. The ground beneath her blackened and cracked, glassing into brittle obsidian. Every blade of grass within ten metres curled into grey ash and drifted away like dead snow. The air itself shimmered, thick as molten molasses.

  Grace couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Could only stare up into one crimson eye the size of a wagon wheel, a furnace door thrown wide. Her own reflection stared back (tiny, trembling, already burning).

  The dragon lowered its head until the tip of one claw rested a finger’s breadth from touching her. A single bead of sweat on her temple hissed into steam before it could fall.

  She waited to die. Expected it. Welcomed it.

  Instead, the dragon inhaled, slow and thoughtful, tasting her fear the way a wine taster swirls a rare vintage.

  Amusement flickered in that furnace eye (ancient, cruel, and worst of all, curious).

  “Yesss… I was generous once,” it purred, smoke curling from nostrils wide enough to swallow cottages. “But generosity grows stale when the world forgets its debts.”

  The claw lifted. The heat eased a fraction (enough for her lungs to remember how to work).

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  Grace stayed on her knees, shaking so hard her teeth chattered, and realized with cold clarity that the dragon wasn’t angry.

  It was entertained.

  And that was infinitely worse.

  Above, a cold wind sliced through the furnace (metal wings, silent and absolute).

  The Sentinel descended, golden eyes dimming to a polite glow. Ozone replaced sulfur. Every hair on Grace’s body stood on end.

  Dragon on one side. Machine on the other.

  She was a mouse between two mountains.

  Grace swallowed ash. “North,” she whispered. “On a raft of timber.”

  The dragon sat back on its haunches and regarded her the way a cat regards a mouse that has suddenly learned to speak.

  “North,” it repeated, tasting the word. “Toward Aught Naur Aught. Curious.”

  A pause. A decision.

  “You will come with us.”

  Grace’s heart stopped.

  Before she could squeak a protest, the Sentinel’s belly opened with a hiss of cold, clean air. A ramp slid down like a steel tongue and settled at her feet.

  A voice (genderless, calm, crackling with distant static) drifted out.

  “Bzzz… Please step aboard, Lady Grace. No harm will come to you, or to your foreign friend.”

  The dragon’s eye glittered with dark amusement.

  Grace looked at the ramp. Looked at the dragon. Looked at the sky that suddenly felt very, very small.

  Two hundred years, and she had never once been afraid of heights.

  She took one tiny, trembling step forward.

  ? ? ?

  Two hours out to sea, something the size of a continent hit Mereque’s raft like a freight train.

  He flew.

  Training kicked in before panic could.

  He double-checked the straps at chest and waist, curled tight around the center log, and let the world spin.

  He hit the water hard enough to rattle teeth.

  When the churning stopped, he was still lashed to the biggest piece of timber. Good enough.

  Then the “wave” kept moving under him.

  He rolled with it, eyes wide behind the visor.

  A living mountain range undulated beneath the surface, skin like weathered granite, barnacled with forests of kelp. It rose and fell with the lazy grace of something that had never once considered that anything smaller than itself might exist.

  Mereque laughed once, a cracked sound lost in his helmet.

  Of course. Why not a continent-sized sea beast? The planet was clearly trying for a perfect score.

  The creature submerged again. His log rolled. Water closed over his head.

  He sank like the anvil he was.

  But the log held. Twelve hours of oxygen left. He shut every non-essential system down, went dark, and drifted.

  Night fell.

  High above, two silhouettes hunted in widening circles: crimson wings and black steel.

  They passed overhead again and again.

  He watched through warped water, perfectly still, perfectly cold, perfectly invisible.

  Eventually they banked north and vanished.

  Mereque floated in the dark and tried not to think about Grace.

  He failed.

  Tiny arms wrapped around his thigh, squeezing like she could hug the armor right off him. The warmth had bled straight through alloy and insulation, pooling somewhere behind his ribs where nothing had been warm since the Cazues burned.

  He remembered the exact pitch of her laugh when he apologized about a tree. Remembered the way her red curls caught the sunlight like living fire. Remembered looking down at scuffed footprints already washing away and feeling something inside him sag at the loss.

  For the first time since planetfall, he was afraid.

  Not of drowning. Not of dragons or murder-machines or bleeding landscapes.

  He was afraid he’d never hear that laugh again.

  The thought hurt worse than the stitched shoulder, worse than finding Antoinette after the crash.

  His fist slammed into the log (hard enough that wood fibers screamed and the whole raft shuddered). A hairline fracture spider-webbed across the center trunk.

  He stared at the damage, chest heaving, then forced his hand open.

  “Get it together, Ventrullis,” he growled into the helmet. “She’s two hundred years old. She’ll be fine.”

  But the ocean didn’t answer, and the lie tasted like salt and panic.

  He shut his eyes, saw her waving from the beach one last time, and paddled harder.

  Sleep came in pieces, half trance, half nightmare.

  He thought about five hundred escape pods instead. About Antoinette’s body in his dirt. About a captain who still didn’t know his wife was dead.

  He shut the thoughts down the same way he shut down power systems: hard, fast, merciless.

  His implants woke him hours later with polite oxygen warnings.

  Dawn bled across the water.

  A new landmass rose ahead; bigger than any island he’d seen from orbit.

  His HUD threw errors. Continental outlines didn’t match. At all.

  He paddled the last mile, cut himself free in the shallows, and stood.

  Seawater sheeted off his armor. The morning sun felt like mercy.

  He stretched cramped muscles, checked stitches (still good), and took one step inland.

  The world smeared.

  Green bled into grey into black into bruise-purple. A boulder flickered the color of the bush beside it. A tree dripped molten red like fresh blood.

  Mereque staggered, dizzy.

  The colors didn’t just shift; they screamed, high, thin, wrong, like metal dragged across glass inside his skull. His own shadow twisted on the sand, stretched into impossible angles, then vanished entirely, leaving a hole where darkness should have been.

  For one heartbeat he honestly considered turning back.

  Back to the raft. Back to the sea. Back to the continent-sized beast that at least played by rules he could understand.

  He took one more step inland.

  The ground rippled under his boot like liquid canvas. His reflection in a puddle of seawater showed his visor cracked into a dozen impossible colours that hurt to look at.

  He slammed his eyes shut, opened them, and fixed on a single green rock until the spinning stopped.

  The color-bleed ended at the waterline, like the ocean itself was holding the madness back.

  He crouched, dug fingers into the wet sand, and let the grains run through his gauntlet like hourglass blood. The color-bleed stopped exactly at the waterline (sharp as a guillotine cut). One centimeter into the surf and everything was normal: blue water, white foam, grey log. One centimeter inland and reality had been gutted and stitched back together by a drunk god.

  He stared at the line for a long, long moment.

  Somewhere behind his eyes the Zaxvoyan part of him (the part trained to catalogue anomalies, file reports, request orbital bombardment) screamed that this violated every law of physics he’d ever sworn to defend.

  The rest of him (the part that had held Antoinette’s cold dead hand, that had watched five hundred escape pods burn across a night sky) just felt tired.

  He pressed his forehead to the cool, normal wood of the log.

  “First dragons. Then murder-machines. Then bleeding continents. Now this.” A cracked laugh escaped him.

  “Universe, you really don’t do subtle, do you?”

  Standing, he stretched and faced the impossible landscape.

  He dragged his log higher onto the shore (anchor, reference point, proof he hadn’t gone completely insane).

  Then he ate a square of ration that tasted like cardboard and regret, planted his boots, and wondered what madness he was about to face next.

  North it was.

  Whatever the hell was waiting out there, he felt like it already knew he was coming.

  Mereque shouldered his pack, gripped the log like a walking staff, and started marching into the bleeding world ahead.