More fissures opened, releasing gas and lava, destruction and creation all in one, until at last the bottom of the sea began to breach the waves above.

Ocean life darted away from the heat, from the lifting, but not everything was fast enough. Shrimps and crabs and strangely luminous fish—and a host of other deep-sea mysteries—rose up into the open air, and steam rushed into the sky.

Small points of land formed under the waves, growing larger as the fire of creation continued below. The tiny islands rose higher, becoming mountain peaks and ridges. Hollows formed, holding water, and long stretches of hills and flatland. Wind swept through the valleys, while waves crashed against anything they could reach, already eroding this new world.

I urged it higher, and then the land caught ships on its craggy, steaming rocks, while exhausted birds found places to rest. Dragons deposited people in the first places they landed, and still the islands grew upward until they merged into one, filled with mountains and canyons and steppes. Water rolled down from the tallest places, forming lakes and rivers and underground aquifers, and although I didn’t understand how, I knew this water was fresh enough to drink.

Equally mysterious were the plants that sprouted and grew in a matter of moments, and the bugs and lizards and squirrels that darted through a forest. But it happened. Maybe it was Harta’s last gift. Regardless, I urged it onward.

This was the shadow soul of the dragon: a new island, a new home, a new chance to do better than everyone who came before us.

Then sunlight broke around the moon, and light poured onto the nascent land.

My dragon soul broke off, but I held on, hoping, wishing—

But I needed to breathe. I needed to go home.

I let go.

SOMEWHERE, ON A brand-new beach, I opened my eyes.

Sand dunes piled up around me.

Sunlight warmed my skin.

Waves crashed across my bare toes.

Palm trees swayed and creaked in the breeze.

And above, the sky yawned blue, wide open and blinding. I squinted and looked away, blinking until the sunspots faded.

Aside from not being able to look at the sun anymore, I felt . . . strangely fine.

For several long minutes, I searched inside myself, feeling around for the dragon soul, or the place where it should be. It had been there—I remembered flying and wielding noorestones and feeling what dragons felt—but there wasn’t even a phantom ache as evidence of its existence.

I just . . . couldn’t feel noorestones humming in the back of my mind, or find the threads that used to connect me to dragons. It was all just gone, as though it had never been there, but it had. I remembered. But the rest of me had expanded to fill the available space.

Tears slipped down the sides of my face, not because I wanted the loss to hurt more, but because it should have. I’d been a dragon—part dragon—and now I was not. Now I was just a girl. Just Mira. Forever.