And there on the desert floor, burned and bloodied, Paorah dropped to his knees.

Maybe I wasn’t that merciful after all.

CHAPTER FORTY

SCREAMING WELCOMED US AS WE APPROACHED THE ruins.

It hadn’t taken long for us to reach them, and with every wingbeat, the first dragon grew more substantial. Our shadow flickered over the hot red sands of the Anaheran desert, skeletal and strange as my power fed her, and hers fed me. A few times, the dark shadow skimming over rocks and crags looked solid.

Then there were the ruins. Tall. Ancient. Impossibly white against the red landscape, and glowing with the fire of Noore.

As we rounded one of the broken spires, light arced off and shot into us. Then another, and another, and after one circuit of the ruins, one thousand two hundred and three threads of noorestone energy bent toward us, surrounding us in a nimbus of white-blue light, filling us up. It was strength, fire, and a strange sense of coming home. As we landed on the central building with a tremendous crash, I realized something incredible.

She was whole.

For the first time in more than two thousand years, the first dragon was completely whole, with muscles and organs and arteries and scales black enough to make midnight jealous. Even her wings were complete, no longer filled in with the fire of mine. She was here. Alive. Beautiful. Fierce.

Drakontos celestus. The first dragon.

Then, slowly, she turned her head around, neck muscles flexing gracefully, and looked at me just long enough to give me a chance to notice the scar on her left cheek.

Not the first dragon.

Not only the first dragon.

And I understood. My heart beat in time with hers, and I could feel every muscle stretch and flex when she lifted her wings and straightened her body. Every motion echoed in me, though I didn’t have wings or talons or a tail; it didn’t matter, because we were the same.

We roared fire, making the desert tremble beneath us. A few people kept on fighting, determined to kill one another before the island beat them to it, but others stared up at us, dropping their weapons to the wet, red dust.

My whole body—my human body—still trembled with the blood loss and the last dregs of pain; the noorestones had finished healing the wounds, but it was much harder for the mind to recover after such trauma.

Still, I gazed down at the battle below, talons crushing the fragile stone, and soon even the people fighting surrendered.

It must have been so hard for them to look at us, what with all the white-blue light, but as I shifted LaLa to my shoulder and climbed to my feet—standing atop the Drakontos celestus, where everyone could see me clearly—I held everyone’s attention.

“This is the day.” It hardly sounded like my voice, filled with noorestone fire and dragon smoke. “When the day and the night are the same. When the first and the last become one. When hope and despair meet on the field of battle.”