Filed to story: When the Moon Hatched Book
Fuck.
Again, Rygun swoops past, the thorned tip of his vast wing slicing the air so close to me I’m certain it’s not an accident.
“Stop fussing!” I scream in his direction, head tipping as I take in my tentative grip on the crumbling root, my next words mumbled. “I’m fine …”
I reach forward with my flailing hand and wedge my fingers into the cliff, find a foothold, and transfer my weight back onto the stone, dumping the painful image on the shore of my icy lake where I can deal with it later.
When I’m not scaling a cliff.
I secure myself to the stone, then loosen my grip on the root and continue my ascent, threading my arm over the ledge when I reach the top. I slap my hand on the landing patch and pull myself up, stare stabbing left toward the hutch’s gloomy hollow. Heaving myself onto flat ground, I peer over my shoulder to see Rygun still circling through the sky behind me, watching on from a distance.
Still fussing from a distance.
Sighing, I creep toward the hutch, pausing by a black mesh mask big enough to fit a dragon—ripped through, as though a talon tore it free.
I crouch, running my fingers across the sheer fabric not dissimilar to the roll of material Kaan instructed me to veil my face with while on Rygun’s back.
A shiver crawls up my spine, something inside me shifting heavily. Paying attention.
I pause.
Turn.
My blood ices at the sight of the coiled Moonplume trembling in the lump of shadow over the other side of the landing patch, emitting a dull light.
A frosty wail of mourning threatens to carve up my throat from somewhere deep beneath my ribs as I scour the dragon’s leathery skin riddled with welts, shreds of sizzled flesh hanging off its haunches. The massive holes burnt through the elegant sweep of its shimmery wings.
Through one of those tattered lacerations, a single glistening globe peers at me, snatching my breath and the frayed tips of my stubby heartstrings.
That slit in my chest widens, a lump swelling in my throat that’s hard to breathe past as I study the wounded creature—a quarter the size of Sl?tra’s moon. As I take in the hole gouged into its saddle beneath the stirrups. The trail of blood weeping from deep, fleshy wounds.
My knees threaten to give way, my fizzing, spitting rage yielding to ribbons of icy sadness that bind around my brittle ribs and chill me to the core.
Somebody has wheeled a barrow of chunked-up meat close to the dragon, not that it appears to have been touched. Same goes for the copper trough of water that’s still filled to the brim, the surface rippling with each rumbled breath the creature releases.
A crackling boom rips across the sky, and I draw on the sweet scent of impending rain, a single drip plummeting past my ear. Splatting against the ground.
The sky is crying for you …
“I have them too,” I whisper, and the Moonplume blinks.
I swallow the swelling lump in my throat and study those welts, moving forward a step.
Another.
“You can’t see mine,” I rasp, stepping over a web of hairline cracks in the ground. “Not anymore.”
I release my truth like a charred skeleton dredged up from the shore of my icy lake, spat on the stone beside this beautiful, broken creature.
I steal another step toward the trembling beast.
Another.
“The pain … it never goes away. No matter how hard you pretend.”
My voice cracks on the last word, memories of my own burning flesh shoving up my nose, muddying my lungs. Making my gut clench, the muscles beneath my tongue tingling with a surge of nausea.
“I used to believe the Creators were punishing me for something.”
I move closer still, more drops of rain splashing upon my shoulders and weeping down my skin, recalling the memory that struck me on the cliff and almost tore me to my death. A jagged blade now wedged in my chest as I dip inside myself, lift the memory from the obsidian shore within, and put it where it’s meant to be.
In my chest—where I can feel it always.
Forever.
“I think that might be true,” I sob past the pit in my throat growing bigger with each tentative step toward the beast still staring at me. Like she’s taking me in, weighing my words, my actions. She sniffs at the air, perhaps pulling my scent into her lungs.
“I think I failed my Moonplume Sl?tra many phases ago,” I admit with soul-crushing certainty, like finally chewing a splinter from my hand that was rooted deep, the flesh around it swollen.
Infected.
The admission … it feels right.
So heartbreakingly right.
Another tear slips down my cheek as the sky continues to weep. As I draw close enough to the trembling beast to settle my hand on an untarnished patch of cold leathery skin—
Athump pulses through my spine, like somebody tore the cord of bones from my body, whipped it against the stone, then threaded it back through me.
This brisk, flesh-biting cold … It feels like home.
The creature blinks, a truth settling in my marrow, deep and yearning.
Vulnerable.
A truth that’s both frightening and abrupt.
“I think you and I were supposed to find one another,” I whisper, peering into the Moonplume’s glimmering globes as another tear slips down my cheek. As a promise plunges between the calloused ridges of my heart like a thorn—straightening my spine. Reinforcing my bones.
My resolve.
Like an icy sun just crested the horizon in my chest and filled my lungs with the first full breath I’ve pulled since I woke in this strange, foreign reality of pain.
“No one will ever hurt you again.”
Barely any light threads through the mouth of the cave, the storm rattling the sky outside, howling against the din. Heavy clouds that blocked the sun long enough for three hutchkeepers to help me coax the Moonplume into the shadowy burrow.
They told me her name is L?ri. That she’s just shy of adolescence, based on the length of the tendrils dangling from her jowls, but that she’s very small for her age. She certainly looks it—curled up in the middle of the lofty cavern. A delicate loop of interlacing runes surrounds us, creating a chilled environment that makes every soft word I sing expel with a puff of milky air.
My hand circles over the wide curve of L?ri’s nose, her flesh an icy nip against my palm that calms something inside me.
She blows a cold, rumbling breath across my leg, lids threatening to sink shut over her gloomy eyes, and my gaze drifts between her and the Imperial Stronghold’s Fleshthread.
“This one will hurt,” Agni says, her words muffled past the thick woven material bound around her head, keeping her warm.
She’s crouched beside one of L?ri’s half-stretched wings, sketching a preliminary path of runes around a gaping hole in the largest panel of membrane—doused in the glow emitting off L?ri’s hide.
She flicks me a dubious look. “It’s a tender spot, and the tear is—“
“Large.”
She nods. “There’s a lot of flesh to be remade with a single bind of runes, but I really didn’t want to have to repeat the process more than once in this spot. So … we’re going to try.”
I reach behind me for the hard, wiry tuft of ghorsi grass, cracking some of the stems to release the sedative stench and resting it against my thigh—right before L?ri’s left nostril. Running my hand up between her eyes, I give Agni a tight nod.
She dips the sharp tip of her etching stick in a jar, gaze nipping at L?ri before she tucks her head and begins carving the runes.
L?ri’s lids pry open to slits, her upper lip lifting from a row of piercing sabers as her eyes narrow on Agni. The long muscles in her lanky neck bulge, tendons tightening, as though she’s deciding whether or not she wants to whip her head around and snap.
Agni pauses, stare set on the snarling creature.
“Hais te na veil de nel, L?ri.” I crack more fronds of ghorsi grass, slicking my palms in the milky residue and rubbing it across her snout. “Hais te na veil
…