The rex lowered her eyes to me, blinking as though seeing something strange. But I didn’t know this dragon. She didn’t know me.

Except . . .

Wings. Mine.

They were great, plasmic wings that stretched around me—and around the dragons as well. They were blue-white, like noorestone light, and crackling with energy. They were foreign and familiar at once, like a dream that felt like memory.

The last dragon.

Thunder rolled across the sky. The ground trembled. One at a time, the other dragons looked at me.

One thousand noorestones had darkened by now, but power still poured into them, giving more and more life.

Tails lashed, knocking noorestones out of the way, and talons dug into the dark, muddying ground. The whole park smelled like smoke as they tested their spark glands and let out small breaths of fire.

“Should she move away now?” someone asked, and at once, I remembered the crowd gathered near the keepers’ building, and rain drumming on the tent, and eyes locked onto the beautiful draconic wings extending from my back.

“I don’t think we need to worry about her.” That was Apolla, her voice confident in spite of the seven—eight, maybe—dragons before her.

Another three hundred noorestones went dark.

The dragons rolled their bodies in long, serpentine movements, like cats stretching. The mimikus’s scales shifted to black—same as the scorched ground beneath him—and the ignituses shimmered with ghosts of fire around their brilliant red bodies.

They were beautiful. Majestic. Powerful.

They were alive.

Fire roared through me, into the dragons, and as lightning flared and thunder pealed above us, the titanus lowered his head directly in front of me.

Then the maior, the rex, the maximus, the mimikus, and the pair of ignitsuses.

All of them pressed their chins to the ground at my feet, their forelegs carefully bent, and wings stretched in neat arcs.

“Are they—”

“They’re bowing to her,” someone whispered.

Four hundred noorestones darkened as the dragons held their positions before me.

“How can they do that?”

“Look at her.”

“Why does she have wings?”

“Didn’t you hear about this scorch mark? That was her.”

“Stop. Both of you, stop.” Apolla’s voice was crisp with confusion and anger. And . . . jealousy. “She is the dragon soul. That is why they bow.”

My heart pounded, and the remaining two hundred noorestones pulsed in answer.

One hundred noorestones.

Seventy-five.

Thirty-three.

The dragons waited, soaking in the last of the fire as rain drummed across their bodies and smoke and steam poured through the clearing.

Two noorestones.

One.

When the last noorestone flickered dark, my wings dissolved into ghosts of light, and then nothing at all.

“Is that it?” someone asked.

The dragons all lifted their heads. Beautiful. Sharp. Wild and powerful and unknowable, just as the gods.

I lifted my hand before me, and an ignitus bumped my palm before twisting away and launching into the rain-soaked sky. Then the maior, and the rest and the rest until only the titanus remained. He pressed his nose into my hand, so gentle for something so big, and then he, too, flew.