Listen. The concept held something that might have been amusement or might have been contempt. It was hard to tell with a being whose emotional landscape bore no resemblance to anything human. Your kind has spoken much and done little. The one who wounded me is dead, but his poison still flows through my veins. Why should I listen to more words?
“Because words aren’t all I have to offer.”
I reached for the ley line, not to draw power this time, but to open myself, to make my consciousness transparent to the ancient intelligence that regarded me with such cold patience. It was terrifying, stripping away barriers I’d spent my whole life building, letting something so vast and alien see every part of who I was…every fear, every doubt, every moment of weakness I’d tried to hide from the world.
The Dragon would see it all, would judge me by the full measure of my humanity, not just the brave face I tried to present.
But I did it anyway. I didn’t have any other choice.
Show me, the Dragon commanded, and I obeyed.
I started with Ben.
I let the Dragon see him as I saw him, not just the man with the silver scars and the hazel eyes, but everything underneath. The cryptozoologist who had chased mysteries across the country because he couldn’t stop believing that the world held far more than what ordinary people saw. The stranger who had walked into my shop back in May, pretending to need binoculars for birdwatching, and had somehow become the center of my entire existence.
The partner who had stood beside me through shadow stalkers and corrupted phoenixes and government conspiracies, never once asking for more than I could give.
I showed the Dragon the night Ben had stepped in front of Rosenthal’s weapon. The creature needed to see the moment when the beam had been charging, when I’d known with terrible certainty that I was about to die, followed by the impact of Ben’s body against mine as he threw himself between me and destruction. I let the Dragon feel what I had felt in that moment — the horror and the gratitude and the desperate, overwhelming love that had crystallized into something unbreakable.
And I showed it the aftermath. Ben in the unicorn’s healing light, his body covered in silver burns that would never fully fade, the dimensional fire seared into his flesh because he had chosen my life over his own wholeness. The weeks of recovery, the way his scars glowed when we touched, the new abilities that had emerged from his transformation, abilities he’d used tonight to protect people he barely knew, absorbing the electromagnetic weapon’s frequency even though it might have killed him.
The Dragon’s attention sharpened as I showed it that moment in the forest, Ben on his knees with blood streaming from his nose and ears, his scars blazing white-hot as he drew the pain of an entire assault into himself. I let it feel the choice he had made, the choice to suffer so that others wouldn’t have to.
A conduit, the Dragon observed, although its inner voice was so neutral that I couldn’t tell for sure if it thought that was a good or a bad thing. One who carries fire he did not choose.
“One who carries it anyway,” I said. “Because that’s what love looks like. Not just the easy parts — the flowers and the sweet words and the comfortable silences. The hard parts, too. The sacrifice. The willingness to burn if it means the person you love doesn’t have to.”
I felt something shift in the Dragon’s consciousness. I wouldn’t have called it a softening, but it did seem like a kind of recognition, as if it had seen something unexpected, something that didn’t fit the narrative it had constructed about humanity’s fundamental corruption.
Before that recognition could fade, I showed it my father.
This one was harder. The wounds here were older and deeper, tangled up with seventeen years of anger and grief and desperate, unanswered questions. But I made myself open those wounds anyway, let the Dragon see the little girl I’d been when Finn Lowell walked out the door and never came back.
I showed it the birthday cards that had arrived for a few years and then stopped. The way I’d waited by the mailbox for days after each one, hoping for something more — a letter, a phone call, any sign that my father still loved me. The slow, painful process of accepting that he wasn’t coming back, of building walls around the part of my heart he’d occupied so his absence wouldn’t hurt so much.
I showed it the canceled checks I’d found in my grandmother’s files, the ones that had seemed like proof of blackmail. The fury I’d felt when I realized he’d been taking money from my family for years, the way that fury had curdled into something cold and permanent. The seventeen years I’d spent hating a man I didn’t understand, mourning a relationship I thought had been a lie.
And then I showed it the truth.
The surveillance network Finn had built, the web of contacts and equipment and carefully cultivated relationships that had protected us from threats we never even knew existed. The night in the San Francisco bar when he’d dropped my graduation photo, knowing that Ben would find it, hoping the cryptozoologist’s curiosity would lead him to Silver Hollow. The months he’d spent watching from the shadows, intercepting dangers before they could reach us, sacrificing any chance of a relationship with his daughter so she would be safe.
And I showed the Dragon what had happened tonight — Finn emerging from the darkness to tackle my mother out of the bullet’s path, his body absorbing the impact meant for her, the blood spreading across his jacket as he asked about Josie before he asked about himself. How he’d looked at me when I told him I forgave him, the wall coming down behind his eyes, the seventeen years of distance collapsing into something raw and real and heartbreakingly human.
A sacrifice, the Dragon said. One who gave what he could not afford to lose.
“He gave up being my father so he could protect me,” I said, my voice shaking as I spoke. “He let me hate him for seventeen years because he thought that was the only way to keep me safe. That’s not cowardice. That’s not selfishness. That’s love so fierce it’s willing to destroy itself if that’s what survival requires.”
The Dragon’s eyes burned brighter, and I felt its attention intensify, probing deeper into my consciousness. It was testing me, I realized — looking for deception, for manipulation, for some hidden agenda that would prove I was just another human trying to use words to escape consequences.
It wouldn’t find one. I had nothing left to hide.
And then I showed it Sonya Rosenthal.
This was the hardest of all. The woman had tried to kill me, had built a weapon specifically designed to destroy everything that made me who I was. She’d fired it without hesitation, and if Ben hadn’t stepped in front of the beam, I would be dead or worse — a hollow shell, my consciousness fractured during a moment of utter vulnerability. Every time I thought about that moment, I felt the echo of terror, the memory of how close I’d come to losing everything.
But I made myself show the Dragon everything I’d learned about her.
I showed it September 11th, 2001. A woman in a room full of intelligence professionals, watching the towers fall on a screen that seemed too small to contain so much destruction. A husband named Michael on the ninety-third floor. A daughter named Sarah, seven years old, there for Take Your Child to Work Day. Three days of waiting, of hoping, of telling herself that maybe they got out, that information traveled slowly in the resulting chaos and she needed to give it more time.