An image flashes in my mind. Iridescent scales. Smoke curled around a snout. Fangs as long as my own body. Heat and brimstone, then gone. A creation of his or my own mind, I don’t know.

“I will leave because you wish me to, but I am only here because you sought me out. By your blood, on your heart.”

“Stop talking!” Suddenly, my irritation at Arthur flares into anger, red root pulsing out from me in waves.

“We fought as one because you summoned me. You will summon me again, because we are each other’s bri.” His voice thunders in my ears. “Only a dragon may meet a dragon, Briana. Only a king can teach a king….”

I won’t let him force me into anything, no matter how alike we are.

“Leave me alone,” I grit out. “Now.” As my root rises, Arthur’s presence dissipates around me. Flames roar into the room to burn him out, burn him away, but they don’t stop there. The walls catch fire. Then the floor beneath my feet. The entire vision is burning.

Startled, I stumble backward, falling. Brace myself to strike the ground—but instead of hitting the hard stone floor of the great room, I land with a… splash.

The stone floor of the medieval room is gone. In its place is a wide expanse of packed dirt and the shallow stream of water I’m sitting in. In the middle of a forest. At twilight.

Glowing water sluices over my ankles and around my hips, ripples over stones beneath my hands. The stream flows toward and then behind me, and I cannot see its end. Its banks are obscured by low clouds of glowing mist. Its shape is jagged, like a bolt of lightning over the surface of the soil.

‘Daughter of sons… my bri…’

Arthur’s voice is muted, far away, but it jolts me to my feet. As I stand in the stream, the light emanating from its water begins to dim.

‘My bri…’

His voice is quieter this time. Fading with the light. I take two steps upstream and by the third, the water has gone dark, and somehow I know he is gone.

Up ahead, I spot a raised stone resting in a grassy clearing and decide that it is my target.

As I walk, other voices rise up on either side of me in bursts. Disembodied whispers in the darkness.

“The point of our arrow.”

“The tip of our spear.”

“Wound turned weapon.”

As I arrive at the mossy stone and step up, the stream behind me—Arthur’s stream—shrinks and dries into the barest trickle of water over the earth.