I didn’t turn around. Couldn’t turn around. If I saw his face now, saw the fear and the love and the grief that I knew would be written there, I might not be able to go through with it.
Very well, the Dragon said at last. You may attempt the grounding. But know this, child of fire — if you fail, if the excess energy tears through you and seeks another outlet, I will not hesitate to complete what I began. The network must survive. It is older than your kind, older than most of the life on this world, and its preservation matters more than any individual sacrifice.
“I understand.”
Do you? The Dragon’s eyes burned brighter, pressing against me with a weight that felt like the crushing depths of a black hole. You are offering to become the hearth for a fire that has burned since before your ancestors crawled from the ocean. You are offering to contain something that was never meant to be contained by human flesh. Even with the phoenix fire in your blood, the odds of survival are small.
“I know.” I set my jaw and met that ancient gaze without flinching. “Do it anyway.”
For a moment, nothing happened. The Dragon simply watched me, those burning eyes unreadable, its massive form motionless against the hellish glow of the sky.
Then it lowered its head until its snout was level with my face, close enough that I could feel the volcanic heat of its breath, could see the individual scales that covered its hide like armor forged in the heart of a dying star. Each scale was bigger than my hand, and they pulsed with an inner light that shifted through a thousand impossible colors.
Brave, it said, and there was something in its tone that might have been respect. Foolish, perhaps. But brave.
“Story of my life,” I said, and almost managed a smile.
The Dragon opened its mouth, and I saw fire gathering at the back of its throat, not the destructive beam that had vaporized Gregory’s operation, but something different. Something that pulsed with the same golden light as my scars, the same dimensional energy that flowed through the ley line network.
The excess. The poison. The wound that needed to be healed.
And I was about to become its vessel.
Thoughts of Ben came to me one last time — his smile, his warmth, the way he’d looked at me that first day in the shop like I was some kind of revelation. And there were my mother and grandmother, finally home after eight months in the Waiting Place. My father, bleeding on the forest floor, reaching for forgiveness he wasn’t sure he deserved.
My mind’s eye saw Silver Hollow, my friends and neighbors sleeping peacefully in the pre-dawn darkness, unaware of how close they had come to annihilation.
Then I closed my eyes, reached for the ley line one last time, and opened myself to the fire.
Chapter Eighteen
The fire entered me like a river breaking through a dam. There was no gradual buildup, no gentle warming that would let me adjust to what was coming. One minute I was standing in the pre-dawn darkness with the Dragon’s breath hot against my face, and the next I was drowning in dimensional energy so intense that my sense of self seemed to shatter into a million fragments.
I’d felt power before. The phoenix merge had given me a taste of what it meant to channel forces beyond human comprehension, had burned pathways into my nervous system that no ordinary person possessed. I’d thought I understood what I was offering when I volunteered to become the vessel for the Dragon’s excess energy.
But I’d been wrong.
This was nothing like the phoenix. The phoenix had been a creature of renewal, its fire designed to burn away corruption and leave clean growth in its wake. The Dragon’s fire was something far older, the raw stuff of creation itself, the energy that had shaped the ley lines and the portals and the boundary between worlds. It wasn’t meant to flow through human channels, or to be contained by flesh and blood and bone.
But I was going to contain it anyway…or I was going to die trying.
The energy poured into me through my scars, through my connection to the ley line, through pathways I hadn’t even known existed until the phoenix merge had carved them into my being. I felt it flooding every cell of my body, felt the boundaries of my physical form straining to hold something that was never meant to be held. My scars blazed so bright that even with my eyes closed, the light seemed to burn through my eyelids, turning the world into a wash of gold and white that obliterated everything else.
Ground it, I told myself, clinging to the thought like a lifeline. You have to ground it.
I reached for the earth beneath my feet, for the bedrock and the soil and the roots of ancient trees that had been growing in this forest since long before my family arrived in Silver Hollow. I imagined myself as a lightning rod, a conduit for energy that needed somewhere to go. The excess had to flow through me and into the ground, had to dissipate harmlessly into the vast mass of the planet instead of exploding outward and destroying everything I loved.
For a moment, it seemed to be working. I felt the energy pouring down through my legs and into the earth, felt the pressure in my chest ease slightly as some of the fire found its way to ground. The Dragon’s consciousness brushed against mine, and I sensed something that might have been approval…or at least, a suspension of judgment while it waited to see if I could actually do what I’d promised.
Then the energy intensified, and everything went wrong.
The channels the phoenix had carved into my nervous system weren’t designed for this kind of sustained flow. They’d been meant for brief surges, for moments of crisis when I needed to draw power quickly and release it just as fast. What the Dragon was pouring into me was a flood that showed no signs of stopping, a constant torrent that demanded more capacity than I possessed.
The first pathway burned out like a fuse blowing in an old house. A sharp, searing pain lanced through my left arm, and suddenly, I couldn’t feel the scars there anymore. I couldn’t feel anything, as if the limb had simply ceased to exist. The energy that had been flowing through that channel backed up, seeking other routes, and the pressure in my chest surged to something that made my vision go white.
Hold on, I thought desperately. Just hold on.
More pathways failed. I felt them going one by one, each loss accompanied by a burst of agony that seemed to tear something essential loose from my sense of self. The telepathy I’d developed after the phoenix merge — the ability to hear thoughts and sense emotions and communicate with creatures from other dimensions — flickered and died. The global sensing that had let me feel the entire portal network, that constant background awareness of ley lines and thresholds and the guardians who protected them — gone, snuffed out so completely that its absence left a hole in my consciousness I hadn’t even known could exist.