But beneath them, I saw something else.
His dragon-nature.
I shouldn't have been able to perceive it. Wound-walkers didn't have that kind of sight. But something about this place—this chamber at the heart of shadow itself—had opened my eyes to things they'd never seen before.
It was vast. Ancient. Beautiful in a way that made my soul ache. A presence of living darkness and captured stars, coiled beneath his human skin like a sleeping god. Ten thousand years of existence compressed into a form barely larger than my own. And it was about to be torn away.
"Here."
Morgrith's voice pulled me back. He gestured to a position beside the altar—close. Close enough that I could reach out and touch him. Close enough to smell the strange, velvet darkness that clung to his skin.
"When the pain begins—" He paused. His voice was calm, but his hands, resting at his sides, trembled almost imperceptibly. "And it will begin. Place your hands on my chest. Draw it into yourself as you would any wound."
I nodded. My tongue felt thick, useless.
"But Lena—"
My name. He used my name.
His starlight eyes met mine, and something passed between us that I couldn't name. Recognition, maybe. Or understanding. The way two people who had spent their lives alone could see each other's loneliness and know it for what it was.
"Don't try to take all of it." His voice dropped. Softer now. Intimate. "Take only what you must to keep me breathing. The rest—" A muscle in his jaw tightened. "The rest I have to endure."
I wanted to argue. Wanted to tell him that was my gift—that I could bear what others couldn't, that I'd been doing it my whole life. That he didn't need to suffer more than necessary because I was there.
But I saw in his eyes that this wasn't about capability.
This was penance. A sacrifice that had to cost something to mean anything.
"I understand," I said.
He smiled. Just slightly. Just enough to transform his face from something ancient and untouchable into something almost human. Almost vulnerable.
Almost mine.
The Dragon Lords began to chant.
The language was nothing I recognized. Older than human speech—older than the mountains, older than the sea. It resonated not in my ears but in my bones, in the spaces between my cells, in parts of me I hadn't known existed. The starlight veins in the walls pulsed faster, keeping time with the rhythm of the words.
The shadows deepened.
The fire burned brighter.
The ice spread.
The lightning crackled.
The sound that tore from Morgrith's throat was nothing human.
It was the death-cry of something ancient. Something vast. Something that had existed since before the world had a name for darkness, had shaped shadows with its will for ten thousand years, had watched civilizations rise and crumble and rise again while remaining unchanged.
And now it was being unmade.
I watched in horror as his dragon-nature began to separate from his body. It rose from his skin like smoke—no, not smoke. Smoke was passive. This was violent. A mass of living shadow and captured starlight, pulling away from his flesh with the terrible slowness of a soul being ripped from its housing. It stretched and twisted, fought to return, reached tendrils back toward the body it was being torn from.
And Morgrith screamed.
The chamber shook. The other Dragon Lords staggered in their positions, struggling to maintain the chant, to hold the magic steady. Fire flared. Ice cracked. Lightning struck wild patterns across the ceiling. But they held. They held because they had to, because letting go now would kill him faster than the ritual itself.