People looked around, searching for a person, but I swept my arm down toward the first dragon, immobile beneath my feet. Yet her head was up, held aloft by nothing at all. For a skeleton, she seemed eerily alive.

Attention sharpened. Focused. Anyone who’d somehow missed the enormous dragon skeleton looked hard at her now.

I lifted my voice again; lots of these people were probably from other islands, but plenty must have been Anaheran. I hoped they’d recognize the words of their goddess. “The Book of Destruction says ‘In the moment when the day and the night are the same, when the first and the last become one, and when hope and despair meet on the field of battle: then the Great Abandonment will be done.’

“Tomorrow, the moons will cross before the sun, one after the other, and twice, our world will darken. The eclipse will make day and night the same.

“And she”—again, I gestured at the bones—“is the first dragon, the first child of our gods. Two thousand years ago, she died protecting the Fallen Isles during the Sundering. Now I’ve brought her back from the Algotti Empire because I believe she can protect us once again.”

“What about the last?” someone called.

I pressed my mouth in a line, and then I pulled. Thousands of noorestones flared, then dimmed as threads of their light spilled toward me. A corona of light formed around my body, and when I willed my wings into existence, they blazed up and out, stretching as wide as they would go.

LaLa squeaked with joy, and beneath me, the first dragon rumbled in question, but I bade her back to sleep for now.

Soon. Soon we would become one.

And then . . .

I released the noorestones. The light returned to normal; my wings vanished; no one even had a chance to scream.

“I am the last,” I whispered, but still, it carried across the crowd. “As I said: I cannot promise miracles, but I will do everything in my power to protect you. And in the meantime, we all need to prepare for the worst. So get on ships. Help others. And remember this:

“Without hope, we achieve nothing. Without one another, we have nothing.”

With that, I turned and stepped down the first dragon’s spine, with LaLa clucking soothingly into my ear as the crowd erupted into conversation and planning, and people pointing out the dragons perched on the cliffs.

At the lowest point of the spine, Aaru reached up to help me down to the main deck, his hand warm around mine. “That was good. Everyone was inspired.”

I smiled. It wasn’t my best speech, but I didn’t want to dismiss the compliment. Not from him. And not when it might be one of the last times I heard his praise. “Are you ready to go? We have ruins to find.”

“I’m ready to leave before Paorah finds out that you’re here.” He touched my face gently, and his gaze dropped to my lips. He didn’t kiss me, not here, and certainly not in front of everyone, but the moment lingered as his thumb caressed the curve of my lower lip. “Do you think after this—”