He took a step forward. He was a man proposing to kill a god. It was an impossibility, a contradiction in terms, but if it meant saving Fillory then there had to be a way. He held on to that knowledge tightly. If magic was for anything it was for this. He’d faced up to his dead father and Mayakovsky. He’d faced losing Fillory and losing Brakebills. He’d even faced Alice. He was circling back to all the things he’d fought and lost over the years, and one by one he was putting them to rest. Now it was time for him to face Ember.

He took another step and now Ember turned on him. The god’s eyes were wild, blank with panic. His nostrils flared. Ember was out of His mind with fear. Quentin felt a surge of pity and even of love for the ridiculous old beast, but it didn’t change what he had to do.

He’d hoped inspiration would come to him, but it didn’t. It came to Alice instead.

“Your turn this time,” she said, and then she did something strange: she bit the back of her left hand, scraping skin off the knuckles, and then touched Quentin’s cheek with it.

It wasn’t a spell Quentin knew, or would ever know—the technicalities were too much for him, and the raw power too, probably, but he’d seen Alice do it once before. As she chanted the words his arms burst with masses of muscle, and his skin thickened and toughened at the same time. He felt the special force that belonged to Alice’s magic alone transforming him. His legs exploded with strength, he was rising upward on two pillars, and his neck lengthened and the base of his spine flowed out into a long sinuous tail. His head was stretching forward into a snout, and his flat grinding omnivore’s teeth grew and sharpened until they interlocked with each other, the way teeth were always meant to do.

His nails sprouted into claws. His vertebrae threw up a ridge of spines—it was like his back being scratched only even better. He was made of power, and there was a furnace in his belly. He opened his mouth and roared a word, and the word was made of fire. He was a dragon, and he was ready. He was going to blast the immortal living shit out of Ember.