In the throne room below, under the rumble of rain and thunder, I could hear shouts and orders to summon archers and mages. And from the palace grounds and city, terrified screams sounded.

We had to go.

Carefully, I climbed down the first dragon’s spine, until I reached the vertebrae directly between her wings.

Power pulsed through me, a thousand lightning strikes, as I bent low and breathed.

Fire rippled.

My back muscles flexed and grew.

Seven big dragons pushed into the air.

LaLa and Crystal floated around me, chittering with encouragement and excitement.

And when the way was clear, my wings—huge and fiery and strong—settled perfectly inside the skeletal wings of the first dragon, and together, we leaped into the sky.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

MY WINGS.

My wings.

They were fire and thunder, wind and song, strength and light as they carried me over the imperial palace. Rain sizzled through the flame, passed between the bones, but still we—the first dragon and I—stayed aloft. My wings defied the rules of the world as I’d previously understood them, and yet the fact that we were flying was undeniable. It was exhilarating, terrifying, overwhelming.

I spun through the sky, shrieking with unadulterated joy at the simple miracle of flight.

And it was a miracle, because though we were both dragons, neither of us was particularly suited to the task right now: one of us wore frail human skin, and the other was long dead. Yet alive. Mixed up with each other, it didn’t matter.

And we were going home.

Wind tangled my hair and dress, glided around the curves of my body. I could feel both the piece of me clutching the knobs of the first dragon’s spine, and the electric flickers of muscle and sinew and scales that shimmered across the skeletal expanse. The effect was fleeting, but from the corner of my eye, it almost looked as though she was struggling to become whole again.

Soon.

Very soon.

The eclipse was only seven days away.

With a sky-shattering roar, I flapped my wings, echoing thunder as I pushed myself higher and higher over the city. The sight drew memories from both sides of me, and as I looked down on the soft curves of orderly streets, the gentle turn of the River Akron, and the black crater where the noorestone had struck and its conflagration spread out, I saw the past lying atop the present: crowded, cluttered roads with crumbling houses, wild growth on the banks of the river, and everything burning under the brilliant fire blasted from all the dragons who’d come here to defend the Fallen Isles.

A city razed. A city reborn. A part of me wanted to complete my—her—mission from two thousand years ago, but these were different people, and they’d already been hurt.

I breathed in the scent of ash that boiled up from the noorestone site, making myself look at the broken buildings and medical tents before moving onward, toward the obsidian dragons that stood at the mouth of the river.