ℝ𝕚𝕕𝕖 𝔻𝕠𝕨𝕟 [Becboc║Ryees]

[Ryees]

 

"So her head is sideways, at this point, her horns are wedged..."

Gaelyn continued on with the story of a baby dragon in an adult body without missing a beat. It ended with Kisa going through the doorway backwards, tail whipping around the hallway and properly jump-scaring a group of passing first-years as a full-sized dragon whipped from a dorm room and started battering about the hallway trying to free its horns from a doorway that did not yield. The imagery had even the cool-headed Nitani and stone-faced Tessa snorting and holding their sides, while Beillahn and Roki had lost their rights to oxygen.

Even without their link, Gaelyn would have noticed Ivy's disappearance. Despite his high spirits, he had never stopped being both aware and wary of her at the table, determined to help her feel like she fit in but cognizant that this was a shift of stark contrast for her that would likely require an adjustment period before it felt right. And so when she disappeared, his eyes flicked to one side to follow her. As they did, he met Nitani's eyes who, as a light drinker, was not nearly far gone enough to not watch her expertly lean backwards out of the limelight and disappear at the peak of a joke.

The two shared a second of eye contact. Nitani nodded, and Gaelyn nodded back.

"...an' o'course they were first years! Would've been too easy if they'd been 'ere more'n a month, but—"

"Slipping for a piss, back in a moment."

"—aye, heard—but a senior wouldn't've peed themselves like that!"

Gaelyn's personal rune, traced on the bottom of the table, had Directed the attention away from him, and so his mention of slipping away was barely registered by those gathered. As he stood, the only eyes that noticed were Nitani's, who had been exempted from the effect of the sigil as it was traced. Kisa did not move—her psychic link with them was fully aware of their mental landscapes, and as such she had known about this incoming outburst before any of them.

He could have found her with his eyes closed, but walking whilst intoxicated was a dangerous pastime so he kept them open as he slipped into the halls and trotted his way up a flight of stairs, circling around the interior of the tower to let himself out in the walkways above the Great Hall. A break in the wall led to an outdoor balcony, and Gaelyn made for the door.

As he passed through the doorway, he touched the wall, tracing a rune into it to shift the Direction of light away from the doorway and guarantee their privacy.

"Colder up here than down there," he murmured from behind her as he loped up to the railing, leaning forward on his elbows and casting his gaze out over the academy. Below them was the central square that had hosted Commencement that morning, stretching as far as the eye could see in the failing light—as far as his eyes could, anyway. He suspected that Ivy's affinity for the dark meant she could see well beyond the edge of the horizon at night. "Hoping you wouldn't be missed?"

She sensed him before she saw or heard his approach, the tickling sensation of their bond snapping back into satisfaction. It was why she did not turn, and only hummed acknowledgement of his initial observation.

It was his question in the end, that drifted a somewhat introspective response from her, "Something like that."

Another beat of contemplative silence passed before she continued, with a little more vulnerability and naturally, gentle tease to counter it; "I didn't expect anyone to follow. It's… colder up here than down there."

Gaelyn looked over to her for a long moment. Without changing his posture, he scooted sideways, sliding along the railing until his hips and flank touched hers. "So what's the deal?" he asked, cocking his head sideways wryly. "You're brilliant and charming and funny and pretty; why did you spend eight years being completely insufferable when you clearly—" he gestured back down towards the hall with one twisting wrist "—could have had proper friends?"

"Brilliant, charming, funny and pretty? How much have you actually drank?" There was an imperceptible lean of her shoulder against his however, despite her teasing, and her smile grew briefly at the first part of his question. "Oh wait, we're back." She wasn't insulted though because she knew he was right; and besides, she'd thought the same about him. It was something that they shared.

She looked back out at the mountains before speaking. "Because… I didn't know any better?" she tried. "Because… that wasn't why I came here. Because…" Then she sighed, deflating at her own avoidance. "Because I wanted to be a rider, even though I always knew I wasn't built for it and… my mother wanted that too, even though she knew the same."

"Mm," Gaelyn grunted from the back of his throat, but the sound was pensive, not dismissive. "Professor Mindya spoke of that mindset once," he announced, drawing to memory the image of the diminutive woman who he had served as their history and world knowledge professor. "Despite it being about you and your dragon, at the end of the day, Kaarm exists because we're all on the same team. Different places, maybe, doing different things, but always to the same end. Same same, but different."

At his word, a thought occurred to him sparkling out of the blue like electric snow. "Do you think that is what really stopped you, maybe? Trying to be a lone wolf? Because Fate has a funny way of being a proper bastard sometimes and it would be just like her to tell you that you could be what you wanted to be but only if you didn't do it alone." He let his words hang on the gravity of their connection, glancing up at her curiously.

"I wasn't trying to be a lone wolf," Ivy prickled, just a little, but the claws retracted as quickly as they had appeared in the wake of what Gaelyn was saying to her. "I didn't think about it at all, really. I was too focused to even consider anyone else. I don't know which is more pathetic." Ivy shook her head and sighed again but when a new thought occurred to her she turned to glance down at Gaelyn as he did up to her. Her voice was softer when she spoke again, quieter. "Are you trying to tell me that… I don't have to go it alone, Gaelyn?"

When their eyes met, he let his gaze linger for a drawn out, intimate moment, gold resting on obsidian for two breaths. Then, slowly, quietly, he nodded, bouncing his head and curling his lips into a sentimental smile. "Yeah... Yeah, I am," he said finally, voice almost a whisper. "Tessa's already looking into how to register a bond in triplicate, and if there's no way, she reckons that if we just omit you from the paperwork, I could 'hire' you as an apprentice, and you could just... never graduate." He chewed the inside of his cheek. "It's not glamorous, I know, but it's all legal, and you could ride on-grounds without anyone ever asking questions."

She hadn't realized she was holding her breath until Gaelyn smiled and Ivy blinked, as if released from the moment. She looked away at his confession, though her brow furrowed at the mention of Tessa. "Tessa's looking into that?" She asked quietly, guilt tingling at the back of her neck for her earlier thoughts. "But I thought that she…" Ivy didn't finish that sentence however, as she tried to consider the actual information rather than her stupid, dumb, stupid feelings.

Gaelyn's brows twitched up expectantly, but when she carried on, he let her.

"At this point, I'll take anything," she eventually admitted on an exhale. "Anything that means I get to keep Kisa and y…" A pause. "And our bond." Her cheeks flared a little and she found herself once more, grateful for the darkness. "Turns out being a lone wolf is sort of overrated." Those words at least, were punctuated with a smile and a bump of her shoulder against his before she settled and spoke again, the thing that had been on her mind since she had left the hall. The thing she didn't want to talk about, but the thing she couldn't ignore either.

"So… you and Tessa are pretty close, huh?"

Gaelyn was still a half-gallon of wine deep, but missing the break in her speech would have been impossible unless he had gone deaf and not realized it. He let it slide, for now, but filed that thought away for later examination. Much later. Perhaps never.

"We go all the way back to primary," he answered her with a brisk nod. "Same age, same classes, basically had her as a study buddy and practice partner for some twenty years, now. She got accepted as a Rider two years later than me, so she's a bit behind me on her dragon, and that was really the first time our paths split."

Ivy nodded, realizing she didn't feel any better for asking. "Must have been weird to not have her by your side after all that time. It doesn't seem to have affected either of you too much though. Anyone can see you're both… well, y'know." She waved her hand and then as if she had sobered and suddenly remembered where she was, Ivy swung one leg over the railing and then the other so that she was facing the opposite way, her feet finally back on solid ground. She paused again however, rather than moving any further.

"Before we go back inside… can I ask you something? And will you promise to answer me truthfully?"

Gaelyn tilted his head a fraction, leaning on one arm to peer up at her. "Sure. Promise."

Ivy looked at him again, eyes skittering over his features in the shadows. "Why did you follow me out here?"

"Ghosting away from the table," Gaelyn answered right away, "is rarely a sign that anything good is going on up there." He leaned his head to tap the side of it with one perched arm. "I was concerned. Am, concerned."

He only paused for a moment to consider his following words. "The circumstances that brought us together are what they are. The moment's passed. I could live forever pissed with you and make us both miserable, or we can make the best of it—and really, I could have gotten much, much less lucky with who could have walked around that corner."

Ivy didn't speak for long moments after his answer, contemplating the words, what they meant and how they made her feel. In the end she simply… nodded. "Okay. Thank you for answering honestly." Then she pushed up from the wall and exhaled a breath, before tilting her head back towards the building.

"Shall we?"

---

That they had left separately did not change the fact that they returned together. Beillahn, of course, saw them first, and called out, "Oi, 'bout time! A man and woman alone together are rarely saying prayers, what were y'up to?"

"No more than you," Tessa cut in smoothly, gesturing with her flute, now empty, at Beillahn. "You didn't even notice until the server came by to pour you more wine."

"I cer'ainly did notice!" the artificer retorted, but then Nitani spoke up.

"You noticed an empty cup," he corrected. "You noticed that your cup was empty, and that there was an empty cup on the table, and then you realized that Gaelyn had gone."

"Well I—"

"I swear, you're a lighter weight every year, Lahny."

"I am not a light—"

"We should maybe put her back in white," Nitani proclaimed, alluding to the white robes worn by novices their first years at primary.

Aghast, Beillahn slammed her hand on the table and leaned forward on it, a virulent grin breaking her cherubic face in half. "You think I'm goin' back into whites you're mental," she spat, and off her tirade went, Gaelyn and Ivy's absence now long forgotten as she pulled Roki into the drinking contest of honor that was to ensue. Nitani and Tessa both exchanged self-satisfied nods and winks with the returning Riders, and Gaelyn offered an appreciative tilt of his head in return. Having politicians for friends was worthwhile, sometimes.

Barely another hour passed before the Great Hall started to clear out. The torches were dim in their sconces, the food long since removed for sweet and pastries that had themselves now gone cold. Nearly every table had a stack of empty decanters at its heel that was being steadily collected by the pages and whites and carted off to the kitchens for washing. Laughs had become yawns, and limbs started to stretch stiffly, connected to full bellies and weary bodies.

As Gaelyn wandered into the hall, he lagged behind the rest of his cohort, spinning a message and sending it through the proverbial tube through his bond with Ivy. He had left ahead of her to dislodge any further accusations or comments, but she was the first and foremost thing on his mind as he plodded into the dim torchlight of the corridors. "I'll leave my door unlocked for another half hour. Tessa will be sleeping in the eyries, now I—"

Even as the message composed itself his mind, he felt the third tug on the bond take offense to those words. A skittering came from behind him, and he nearly jumped out of his skin as something scaly and sharp darted up his leg. When Kisa's tiny head poked over his shoulder and leveled her eyes with him, he would have fallen over if not for the hand he lurched out with to grab the wall.

As he recovered and trudged off towards his dorm, he sent an addendum. "Never mind, I guess. Kisa's small again."​

 

[Becboc]

Ivy had been fully expecting some acknowledgement of the fact that she and Gaelyn returned to the group together, but what she hadn't been expecting was the expertise of Tessa and Nitani in redirecting Lahny's suspicions.

Law types, she considered with her own subtle hint of a smirk, before settling back into the flow of Gaelyn's group once more.

It soon became apparent that the festivities were winding down, as wine stopped flowing and chatter began to fade to odd chirrups of laughter and the hushed tones of the weary. Ivy stayed with her newfound friends up until the very end and when it was time for them to depart, she was scooped into an array of goodbyes, from hugs to kisses and even a curtsy from Roki that she returned with a flourish and a bow.

Certainly, the night had not been one that she had expected, but for the first time ever she found herself reluctant to leave and return to the solemnity of her own dorm. Her and Gaelyn's conversation had lingered in the back of her mind since it had happened and those were the words she began to replay to herself as she meandered her way back to more familiar ground. She had just begun up the spiralling stairs when she felt a tug upon his end of the bond, shortly followed by... words.

"I'll leave my door unlocked for another half hour. Tessa will be sleeping in the eyries, now I—"

Ivy's footsteps slowed to a stop, her heart stuttering in a way that she wished she could deny. Was he... offering to spend the night with her? Another frown creased onto her brow; he hadn't exactly denied what she thought she had implied of he and Tessa earlier on the balcony yet his invitation... Was he... booty calling her? Through their bond?

It was possible, yet when Ivy considered the night properly; how Gaelyn had followed her outside because he was concerned about her, how he had wanted to check that she was okay, how he had invited her to spend the night with his friends--

"Never mind, I guess. Kisa's small again."

Ivy's frown deepened if that were even possible, for just a moment before a shake of her head followed and then... a smile. A slow but genuine, incredulous smile as she once more started back up the stairs to her bedroom door.

Perhaps it didn't matter why Gaelyn had wanted to leave his door unlocked for her. Perhaps what truly mattered was that he had wanted to and it only wasn't happening because Kisa apparently, had other ideas. As Ivy flicked her wrist to unlock her own door, she began to mentally prepare a message to push back, the smile in her first question still evident.

"We really need to get to the bottom of that personal rune, don't we?" A pause. "... Another time, maybe?"

Once she was inside and the door had been closed behind her, Ivy let the question linger while she took a moment to simply rest her back against the cool wooden surface. In the silence of her room, she took in her space, the night and the strange warmth flowing through her body.

"Goodnight Gaelyn," she eventually added, seemingly bringing their brief conversation to a close. "And thank you." Though despite the physical space between them and the end to their brief conversation, Ivy let her side of their connection remain open, tangible and present as she finally clambered into bed; let it remain open in a way that she perhaps hadn't before.

---

She had been deep within the throes of sleep when the first explosions began, distant and muffled, followed by voices and eventually, a clanging, urgent ring of a large, metal bell.

It would have been easy to convince herself that she was dreaming, had it not been for the closer blast that hurtled into the centre of the quad and reverberated along the walls of the school, shuddering the structure in a way that saw dust spill from the rooves and furniture detach from the walls. Ivy jerked upwards in her bed, waking to the sounds of... war, outside of her window.

Her heart was already thundering as she leapt from the sheets and ran to it, only to see black smoke and the brief flash of shouting bodies, the crackle of magic already palpable in the air. On the horizon though... the clamouring, hissing screeches of dragons could not be denied.

"WAKE UP! WE'RE UNDER ATTACK! WAKE UP!" A loud hammering on the wood of her door jumped Ivy away from the glass and finally into a slow but at least moving, action. She scrabbled around her room, heart pounding, blood thundering, yanking on her dragon scale uniform and sheathing dagger after dagger across her chest, attaching them to her thighs, her boots. It was like muscle memory, what all Lohia Kaarm students had been trained for... but Ivy's mind was not in the same room as she reached for Gaelyn and Kisa in her mind, trying and failing to claw at the link that tethered them together.

For whatever reason, silence was the only response that gaped back at her pleas for them to answer, and while Ivy knew that she needed to rally with her classmates... it was also a need for her to warn Kisa and Gaelyn, to know that they were okay, that they weren't in danger. Because as long as she didn't know that? She would be fit for very little, let alone joining a counterattack to whatever force was upon the School.

There was no hesitation in the runes that Ivy drew. Her hands moved quickly, first Shadow and then Door. The portal was before her in seconds, and just like she might have stepped through her bedroom door, she did so into the portal, and back out in front of Gaelyn's. His wards would not allow her to portal directly into his room, so this? This had to do, and to be honest, Ivy was somewhat relieved that there was still the tower standing for her to emerge in.

She moved quickly then, launching herself at the bedroom door before her, her palms slamming into the wood.

"Kisa! Gaelyn! Are you in there?" Her voice was loud, pitched and panicked and when an immediate answer did not respond, it only seemed to climb octaves. "GAELYN! KISA! The school, it's... there's.... fuck," Ivy leaned her forehead onto the surface momentarily as her voice cracked. She inhaled deeply, once, twice, before the slamming resumed. "PLEASE! OPEN THE DOOR!"

 

[Ryees]

 

The pounding on the door wasn't what woke him.

It was the smell—smoke, thick and bitter, curling in from somewhere unseen. Gaelyn stirred, eyes crusted, head full of thudding cotton. It wasn't the slow, luxurious waking of the morning after, but the bleary, head-splitting disorientation of a man who had won too many toasts and was now paying the debt.

Then the door shook on its hinges, Ivy's voice cracked against the wood, and the bond snapped taut in his chest like a drawn bowstring.

"Kisa—"

He staggered to the door and flung it open just as Ivy's palm struck it again. She nearly bowled into him, and for a heartbeat all he could do was stare at her wild eyes, breathless panic—

"Inside," he snapped, pulling her in, slamming the door shut. Kisa, still small from the regression hours before, stood on the desk like a curious statue, tail twitching.

"There's smoke—screaming—explosions outside the quad. Dragons." She said it all in a rush, but he'd already started moving, tugging on his harness, buckling it over bare skin, then dragging on the uniform shirt in shaking hands. He didn't ask if she was sure. The reek in the air confirmed it.

"Water," Ivy said, thrusting his flask into his chest. "I need you clear."

He blinked at her, then nodded, pulling the flask and turning it up.

Kisa, watching them begin to prepare, leapt from the desk—and changed.

˙ɹǝƃɹɐl ʇou 'ɹǝplo sɐʍ ǝɥS ˙ǝƃɐ sɐʍ sᴉɥ┴ ˙ɥʇʍoɹƃ ʇ,usɐʍ sᴉɥ┴ ˙pǝuǝdɹɐɥs suɹoɥ ɹǝH ˙ɹǝʞɔᴉɥʇ ʍǝɹƃ sʍɐlɔ ɹǝH ˙ʎpoq ɹǝɥ ssoɹɔɐ pǝlddᴉɹ—ǝuoʇs ɹǝʌo sǝʌɐʍ ʇɐǝɥ ǝʞᴉl 'ƃuᴉlddᴉɹ ʇnq 'ƃuᴉʍolƃ ʇou—ʇɥƃᴉl ɟo ɹǝɯɯᴉɥs ∀ ˙pǝɥɔɹɐ ǝuᴉdS ˙pǝuǝɥʇƃuǝl sqɯᴉl ɹǝH ˙ᴉɯɐƃᴉɹo ƃuᴉploɟun ǝʞᴉl pɐǝɹds puɐ pǝʇɟᴉɥs ǝlɐɔs ɟo sǝʇɐld ǝɥʇ ǝɹǝɥʍ 'sɹǝplnoɥs ɹǝɥ uᴉ pǝʇɹɐʇs ʇI The eye twisted as she jumped. Like a salmon breaching the white water, she seemed to hit a space in the air where, after passing through, her body swelled to its full, regal size.

Gaelyn, eyes failing to properly catch the spectacle even as it unfolded in his won bedroom, stood agape. The baby mind still echoed in the back of his head—excited, uncertain, frightened—but the body that paced toward the door now was coiled with adult strength.

There was no time to try and unpack the moment. "We're going," he growled, slinging his cloak and grabbing the spare blade from beneath his bed. "To the courtyard."

They slipped through the first levels without incident, save the red haze of torchlight and the rising sound of panic from deeper inside. The main corridor toward the courtyard yawned ahead. Gaelyn staggered slightly as they rounded the corner—but muscle memory did what sobriety could not.

Two soldiers in leather and chain rounded the opposite turn at speed, not expecting resistance. Gaelyn's rune flared across the back of his hand as he dropped low, pivoting off his left foot in a tight half-circle that brought his shoulder up beneath the first man's sword arm. The strike to the ribs with the pommel was clean, sword still in sheath and jerked forward, the same one he'd practiced against sandbags since he was thirteen. The breath left the soldier in a single stunned grunt. Gaelyn's second step lifted him forward and up; he carried the first man's collapsing weight with one shoulder as he whipped his sword free and thrust up beneath the second man's breastplate in a short, brutal jab. The spear he carried clattered against the wall.

Gaelyn let the first body drop and, in the same motion, followed his throat down with the tip of his sword. He turned to Ivy, breath catching against the tightness in his chest... and then stopped.

Down the hall, barely twenty feet beyond where the men had come from, were more. Half-armored shadows in the torchlight numbering ten, maybe twenty. A small unit of shields, short blades, and at least one pike.

"They're in already," he said flatly, "courtyard's a death trap."

Kisa's head pressed between them, long body winding through the corridor like a climbing vine with her eyes cast upwards. Her nostrils flared, her suggestion clear.

"Up," Gaelyn said. "To the walls. Now."

The halls narrowed as they climbed, stone passageways giving way to sharp-angled stairs and low ceilings. The school had been built for beauty and defense, though the latter rarely came up in memory. Now, Gaelyn's boots scraped stone with every upward lunge, heart pounding harder from the drink still souring his gut than from fear.

Ivy was behind him. Kisa brought up the rear, winding through the space like a specter of coral and stormlight, her form now fully matured but still, unmistakably hers. The weight of her presence in the bond was constant, if not quite focused.

She was confused. So was Gaelyn.

The stairwell opened at last into the outer cloister, where decorative archways overlooked the academy's outer wall. Gaelyn shoved the last door open with his shoulder and stumbled onto the parapet, sucking in cold air like a drowned man breaching surf. The rooftop stones were slick with dew and something darker—ash, maybe—and the wind tore at his cloak like it meant to take him with it.

Below them, the main courtyard was chaos: figures ran between buildings, fires had broken out along the eastern dormitories, and a number of dragons spiraled high overhead, shrieking like crows over a battlefield. These weren't training mounts. These were war beasts. Combat-bonded.

"Shit," he muttered, dragging the hair from his face. "They're already on the walls."

Kisa rose beside him, neck arching to survey the sky. She didn't growl, didn't posture. But every scale on her body began to shift tone, just faintly—soft pink and pearl fading to a harder, steelier, darker silver edged in pink.

"Here," he said, pointing to an overhang near the main bell tower. "We cut across there, drop down the ladder to the west stairwell. That'll take us to the inner wards, where—"

Steel on stone.

He turned just as the shadow detached itself from the arch ahead—followed by two more. Three figures emerged from the darkness, not foot soldiers, not children of conscription. A man and two dragons. It was clear by the way they moved that they were bonded, footsteps in time and eyes never overlapping the same space as they leveled sword and claw at their quarry.

The air behind the man shimmered with heat, and a massive orange pearlescent pulled itself up behind, jaws smoldering. Another thick-bodied gray landed on the opposite end of the parapet, scales the color of ashen broken glass.

Gaelyn didn't need to glance back at Ivy to speak his next words. "Run!"

Kisa twisted, coiling around them both like a falling banner of scale and muscle, and they turned heel and sprinted the opposite way down the wall. Behind them, there was no roar, and no warning, just the hard thrum of dragons alighting behind their enemies, and the shriek of stone under claw.

Their boots rang off the ramparts. The night wind slapped their faces like open palms, and below, the school screamed.

Ahead on the wall were soldiers. A half dozen at least, between them and the next archway. Gaelyn's steps faltered for only a heartbeat.

"Ivy—left side!"

Intention rolling through the bond well ahead of his commands, she was already moving.

Gaelyn veered right, drawing his sword as he went. The first soldier came at him too confidently, shield up and spear forward—good posture, poor reflexes. Gaelyn's foot caught the edge of a crenelation, Redirecting his weight just enough to dip under the spearhead. His arm snapped up and his wrist curled, swinging his sword in a smooth arc with his hand high to vector his sword to slip behind the man's shield. The blade caught the back of the man's ear, ripping half his jaw off his head and sending him to the stone screaming.

A second came in swinging, but the angle was off, with too much horizontal commitment in close quarters. Gaelyn stepped into it, pushing the blade wide with his off arm and pulling his off hand up to half-sword the tip of his blade into the soldier's chest. Capturing the arm he had blocked, Gaelyn drove in, then up, slicing a six-inch gap in the man's chest cavity.

On the other side, Ivy moved like shadow made flesh. Her fingers dipped into the holster at her hip and came out already in throwing postuer, one knife, two, then three so quickly the glint of the blades blurred into streaks of moonlight. They found the gaps in armor: shoulder, throat, knee. One soldier pitched forward with a scream, clutching his neck. Another took a knife to the eye before he could even level his sword.

The duo moved like they'd trained it. They hadn't.

A final soldier tried to slip past Ivy to flank Gaelyn, but she whirled, a short blade now drawn in her hand, and slashed his hamstring with perfect form before jamming the point up through his ribs when he dropped. Gaelyn, having retrieved the shield of the first man he had downed, slammed the flat steel against the man's forehead with a satisfying, sickening crunch.

Their boots splashed through blood as they pushed onward. The gatehouse loomed ahead—shelter, maybe, or at least the promise of cover. But as they neared the archway, another presence made itself known.

She stepped through. The air changed.

It was subtle, like the silence before a storm. Her boots rang sharp on the stone, deliberate, clean. She stood framed in the arch, her slim-fit plate shining like cut glass under the moon. Blonde hair swept back from a high, aristocratic face. Her eyes, ice-pale and piercing, found Gaelyn, then Ivy. Then Kisa, who reared up behind them with a low growl.

The woman didn't flinch. She tilted her head slightly. Curious. Measuring.

Two dragons flanked her as if summoned from shadow: one broad and brown like carved granite, the other lean and serpentine, scales green and slick as wet leaves. Their runes glimmered in the air like floating script, the magic bound to them so dense it distorted the light.

Gaelyn didn't reach for Ivy's hand. But he thought about it.

"Stay behind me," he said quietly. Not because she was weaker.

Because someone had to live.​

 

[Becboc]

This wasn't real, it couldn't be happening.

And yet it was.

From the moment that Gaelyn opened the door to them trying to get to higher ground, all of it passed by in a blur of adrenaline and instinct. Their small unit moved as one in a way that was beyond practice or conscious thought. There was little time for anything other than attack, then move, attack then move. Even Kisa's display in Gaelyn's room did not receive the attention that it deserved, simply because there was no time. Their lives, the School, everything they had ever known; it could all depend on the actions they took in the vital minutes that followed.

Attack, move, attack, move.

The gatehouse came into view and finally, finally they appeared to have a clear run... until they didn't anymore.

All three of them sensed the change in the air simultaneously, like the oxygen itself was being charged with something insurmountable. It was enough to freeze them in place as a figure emerged, not one that any of them recognised but one that they knew from the armour she wore, was not a friend but an enemy. Perhaps the enemy. She was strikingly beautiful in her own way, yet the terror that Ivy felt seeping into her chest like ice did little to allow her to admire the stranger's feline grace.

Even Kisa recognised the threat, a growl rumbling from her throat which seemed to trigger the appearance of not one... but two other dragons. Two other dragons who moved and coiled around the woman, in a way that only bonded creatures would.

"Stay behind me," Gaelyn said and for once, Ivy couldn't find the words to argue. Instead, she she held out her arm to signify that Kisa should do the same, while her other hand... it found comfort in gripping Gaelyn's upper arm, as though she needed the contact to ground herself, to reassure herself that for now, they were together. They were in this together.

The stranger's lips seemed to twitch then, as if she had read Ivy's mind and planned on wravelling all of it. The look was enough that Ivy couldn't hold back any longer, the fear evident amongst the anger in her voice.

"Who are you?!" She shouted, but the stranger's smile only grew. Knowing. Satisfied. "Why are you doing this?!"

A verbal answer was not given however, Ivy noticed the air shift again, as if gaining traction, the static generated prickling along her skin. Her grip upon Gaelyn tightened and she had just opened her mouth to speak again when--

"Ivy!" The failiar voice pierced through the tension and she whipped her head, looking for the source.

In the end, nothing could have prepared her for what was to follow... for Dale appearing beside the stranger and her dragons, neither of whom even attempted to stop him.

"Ivy," he said again breathlessly, giving her a chance to take him in. The blood spattered across his face, his dishevelled dark hair, the sword in his hand. "Stop," he gasped out. "You... you don't have to do this."

Ivy's brow furrowed.

"Dale?" Her voice sounded weak, distant.

"If you surrender now, you won't get hurt. Either of you." His brown eyes flickered briefly to Gaelyn and then back to Ivy's own that flooded with confusion.

"Surrender?"

It didn't take long however, for the penny to drop, not when Kisa growled again, lowering her head in reaction to the pain that had begun to constrict around one of her rider's like a vice in realisation of what was happening here. In realisation of what Dale, her friend Dale, was saying to her.

"Please, it's not what it looks like," he continued, one of his hands outstretched as if waiting for her to take it. "This is... it's for the greater good, Ivy! Your bond, the two of you? You know Kaarm will never accept it, will never accept you. This is the only way!"

The pieces began to click into place with those words, slowly, one by one. What she had told Dale that night, what she had trusted him with. Was he... was he the reason for all of this? Was she?

"You... You betrayed us?"

"I'm trying to help you!" Dale exploded. "When you told me about you and him, I had to do something--"

"I trusted you!" Ivy screamed the words, the anguish in her voice richocheting off the stone archways, the walls.

"Ivy, please--"

Any words he had intended to speak however, were cut off by a clamouring of footsteps and shouting voices behind them that had been gradually growing in volume the closer they got. Ivy whipped around to see soldiers, more and more beginning towards them. She still clung to Gaelyn but her back was to him now, while Kisa coiled around the two of them as if trying to shield them from all of it. They were completely surrounded but she knew, she knew through their bond and beyond that surrendering wasn't an option, no matter Dale's warped sense of heroism. They would do everything they could to find a way out of this.

Even if they died trying.

Ivy took in a breath and briefly closed her eyes against the roaring in her ears, the pain; all of it.

"If we go," she pushed through their bond. "We go together." Her hand began to move to the pouch at her hip in preparation, the activation rune glimmering as her fingers curled around the first blade. The plan was clear. Ivy would hold off the soldiers for as long as she could while Gaelyn? Gaelyn would go straight for the throat.

"Kisa, if this all goes to shit, you run, do you hear me?"

A soft clicking was all that came in response before Ivy reopened her eyes again to see the first of the soldiers detaching from the group, sword glinting in raised hand. She counted down the seconds in her mind; 3, 2, 1...

"No!" Dale's voice rang out when he realised what she planned, just as Ivy raised her elbow and backhanded her first dagger. The blade sung through the air, slicing true as it buried into the soldier's throat, crimson spurting like an overzealous fountain. The body went down, the few behind their comrade faltering for just a moment. And then?

Then, all hell broke loose.

 

[Ryees]

 

The moment Ivy's blade found the first soldier's throat, the rampart exploded into motion.

Gaelyn didn't hesitate. The second Ivy moved, so did he, launching forward with Kisa's shadow keeping pace just behind. The walkway was narrow, bordered on one side by a sheer drop to the courtyard and on the other by jagged teeth of parapet stone. Enemies spilled toward them like floodwater. There were too many. But Gaelyn moved like a man possessed.

The first blade came high, a wide cut meant for fear more than precision. Gaelyn ducked under it, letting the momentum pass over his shoulder, and jammed his sword up and under the armpit of the man's breastplate. It sprouted out the top of his shoulder and Gaelyn ripped down, severing half the man's shoulder and sending him spilling to the stone.

To his left, Ivy was a blur, one hand drawing from the rune-sewn holster, the other sending daggers in wicked arcs. Steel bloomed in necks and chests. The enemy formation faltered. Kisa snapped her tail forward like a whip, catching a spear and cracking it in half. Her body surged between the two Riders, their serpentine overwatch, curling back just enough to protect their backs from attacks outside their vision.

But they were being hemmed in. For every one they felled, two more pushed forward. The dragons behind the mirror-armored woman made no move to advance, watching, measuring, holding their line. Something was wrong.

Gaelyn moved to close the space between him and Ivy, taking one soldier through the knee with a precise downward thrust, then slamming the man's shield into his own comrade to open breathing room. His heart was hammering, but his movements were sharp. Focused.

And still, too many.

"Fall back." he urged through the bond. "They're not trying to kill us, just drive us."

Too late. One of the Riders, mounted atop the slick green, had slunk around the edge of the rampart, talons clinging to the crenellations to allow its Rider to peek up over the edge. What caught Gaelyn's attention was the rune glowing in his palm, drawn in bright white and humming with kinetic promise.

Push. The disciple drove his palm forward, the rune flaring like a second sun. Air compressed with a thunderclap. Gaelyn felt his feet leave the stone.

For a split second, the world hung still, just long enough to see the man who had cast the rune turn, expecting a clean end.

But the mirror was already moving. Her sword flashed once in the torchlight, and the disciple barely had time to gasp before her blade passed cleanly through his collarbone, down and through his chest. He collapsed without a sound, falling into the courtyard below and landing with an unceremonious thud. "Idiot," she hissed, low and cold. "I said alive." The green, its Rider suddenly eviscerated, darted downwards towards the body, panic in its movements. With a jerk of her head, one of the sentinels behind the mirror dove off the edge after it. Turning her attention back to the matter at hand, the woman clicked her tongue in irritation.

Gaelyn was already gone. The rampart dropped away beneath him. Cold wind howled in his ears. He twisted, tried to right himself, but his sword was gone, pulled from his grasp in the blast. His back struck something—hard stone, maybe a buttress—then air again. No thought. Only instinct and the bond, still faint, still open, still there.​

 

[Becboc]

The moved, they fought, but nothing felt like enough.

More and more soldiers piled along the rampart while the mirror remained, observing, unmoving. Dale stayed at her side, visibly twitching in horror as he watched the girl that he loved move closer and closer to potential death. He made no attempt to move himself, though. No attempt to stop the attacks, or intervene.

By the time that Ivy felt Gaelyn urge through the bond, she was panting, breathless, sweat beginning to bead upon her brow with the exertion of their battle. The parapette they balanced on was beginning to slosh with crimson that dashed along Ivy's cheek, that smeared onto Kisa's pearlescent scales as she snapped her teeth, again and again, leaving a pile of screams in her wake.

They were all too focussed to notice the disciple on his green, until it was far, far too late.

The flash of a rune, a moment of silence and then--

Gaelyn's feet were not the only pair that left the ground. Ivy was flailing before she even realised what was happening. Her back slammed into the wall, the blast of the rune sending she and the other rider in opposite directions.

The impact winded her for a moment, enough to see her struggling for breath as she tried to scramble back to her feet. Somewhere in her mind she had heard Dale shout and when she lifted her head, she was met with the sight of the mirror, yanking her sword from the chest of the disciple responsible. A frown creased between her brows in confusion, while her dark, amber eyes scanned for Gaelyn and found... nothing.

The scene replayed in her mind and that's when she realised...

"GAELYN!"

Her own scream pierced the air as she stumbled towards the sheer drop, skittering at the edge of and searching wildly for any sign that Gaelyn had caught something, landed on something, could in any way or shape be alive after a fall like that.

She tried to tug on their bond, tried to think through the panic clawing up her throat but before she could do anything more, the sound of approaching footsteps dragged her attention away. When Ivy turned, she was met with a group of bodies approaching, hemming her to the edge, leaving her with nowhere else to go.

"Ivy," Dale's voice came from the side again, "This... all of this. I did it for you. You... you don't have to do this."

The words rolled off her like water, her mind scrabbling to try and come up with a plan, any plan.

"We can start over if you just... come with me. Come with me and you can be everything you were meant to be. I promise."

The soldiers grew closer still and Ivy looked back to the edge again, still searching in fading hope for Gaelyn. She wobbled slightly on the edge, the toes of her boots sending crumbling stones down into the courtyard.

"Ivy, please..."

"... Gaelyn?"

The unsheathing of metal behind her was the only thing that answered and Ivy knew that she was out of time. So in the end, she did the only thing she knew that she could...

If we go, we go together.

... and leapt off the wall after him.

 

[Ryees]

 

As Ivy launched over the parapet, Kisa was on her heels. A trio of soldiers made to give her chase, angling pikes to try and reach up and hook her horns. With a snap of her body, her head spun around to face backwards like the cracking head of a whip, mouth agape, the glands in the corners of her mouth flaring like nostrils. When the liquid hit oxygen, it superheated and ignited. A plume of flame ripped from her mouth three meters wide, its orange-yellow body tinged at the edges with something more sickly green like burning copper. When the fire met the men, it clung to their armor and their flesh like a burning gel, caustic napalm chewing through skin and hair like mites through wood. The same motion that had whipped her around carried her forward again, and her scales flared as she prepared for her first jump.

Through the bond came a bolt of irritation underneath the panic and the fear, a note of frustration as she whipped over the edge, body spiraling into the air for the first time. Her takeoff was clumsy, her flight unstable, but she held in the air like a ribbon caught in a windstorm as she nose-dived down after her falling Rider. Some ten meters before they hit the tree line, Kisa pulled up sharply, tucking her head under Ivy and scooping the tumbling researcher out of the air. Instinct came through the bond as a feeling, guiding Ivy's hands to catch onto Kisa's horns. Once righted, they skimmed over the tops of the trees, a crystalline banner waving over the tops of the murky green backdrop below.

Behind them, the brown and its Rider had seemed to start to give chase, also flying off over the edge of the rampart. But their path did not follow Kisa; instead, they tore straight into the treetops, disappearing through the canopy, presumably to give chase to Gaelyn. But that told the pair an important fact: Gaelyn was alive.

---

The air tore the scream from his lungs. Gaelyn spun through open sky, the world flipping end over end. The rampart, the dragons, Ivy's silhouette, they all vanished above him in a flash of torchlight and smoke, replaced by a blur of midnight trees rushing up to greet him.

He pulled his hands together, touching the rigid plate sewn into the wrist of his gloves. His fingers locked into the familiar motion, not for summoning power, but altering it. The rune on his hand flared hot, then twisted, a sharp pull in his chest, like a hook through his ribs. The momentum of his fall shunted sideways. He hit the treetops not like a stone dropped but like a one skipped across a lake, skimming the canopy at a brutal angle that tore branches and leaves in a storm of shredded green.

A thick limb caught his leg. The spin wrenched him sideways. He bounced once, twice, and then impacted the dirt, the forest floor rising to meet him like a hammer. He flopped on his back, the breath blown out of him in one shuddering exhale. His sword was gone, and his shoulder screamed, but he was alive.

Branches creaked above, distant cries echoing across the treetops. He rolled, spat dirt, and dragged himself to his feet. He could feel Kisa, bright and wild in the air above, but couldn't answer. The bond was a lifeline, and right now, lifelines could be traced. Someone had already tried. A psionic pressure like needles behind his eyes still lingered at the edges of his awareness. The mirror, the woman in the plate: whoever she was, her dragons were sniffing for him.

It was like slamming a door inside his own mind. Not cutting the link—never that—but muffling it. Dimming the light, making it harder to be seen. It felt like wrenching his own hand off the tiller of a ship mid-storm.

His boots tore through the underbrush, silent only in comparison to the chaos above. He veered down a slope and across a shallow stream, letting the cold bite at the shock clinging to his limbs. The shadows were deep here, but not silent. Branches creaked. Something hissed. Somewhere behind, metal clanked, boots on the ground pounding through the forest.

They'd be searching.

He ducked under a fallen tree, slipped through brambles, his cloak catching and tearing. The rune on his hand flickered again—Direction—and he veered left, down into a gully, angling to put terrain between himself and the search lines he knew were already forming.

Stay moving. Stay hidden. Stay alive.

The school was behind him, burning. Ivy was falling. Kisa was flying. The world had broken open like a fault line and all that mattered now was surviving long enough to find them again.​

 

[Becboc]

There was no plan, no clear path forward - only gushing air and the ground rushing up to meet her.

Ivy hadn't thought past her need to escape, or her desperation to follow Gaelyn. She had been backed into a corner and she had done the only thing she thought that she could. But now as she fell, panic gripped her in the face of trying to think against the impending death she had purposefully fallen towards. The world was spinning, sounds roaring in her ears and the treeline… she was going to plummet into them with a force that could possibly snap her in two. If a branch didn't skewer her first.

The rider tried to swing her arms out to grab onto something, anything, to find even a fraction of purchase but she had jumped clear of the wall and any surrounding ledges. No, if she was going to survive this then she needed shadow, she needed to—

The blur of pearls beneath her appeared from nowhere and Ivy hit into firm muscle with a rather unceremonious thunk. Her hands moved seemingly of their own accord to hook onto Kisa's horns as the dragon twisted her body back upwards into the sky, with Ivy's flailing limbs bumping along the scales of her back like a flag caught in the wind. Ivy struggled to force her legs into position, struggled to do anything that wasn't screw her eyes shut and hope for the best but no sooner than Kisa had caught her did she bank until she was near horizontal again so that finally, her rider felt her thighs and knees scrabble into place. They clenched against scaled and flesh, while her feet scraped along two open scales in an attempt to use them as footholds.

Ivy gasped for air as she tried secure herself, while simultaneously attempting to breathe against the cold hitting her flushed cheeks. The oxygen felt like it was being wrenched from her until Kisa recognised her struggle and dipped again, forcing them downwards and as close to the earth as she sensed was safe. In any other instance, Ivy would have marvelled at where she currently was, what she was currently doing. But right now? Right now, there was no time for celebration, no time for awe. Gaelyn was still missing and she couldn't feel him. In fact, the only thing that she could feel was the tingle of a touch poking at the edges of her mind, a touch that was unfamiliar, strange and… unwanted. It was as though it was probing, seeking, looking for entry where permission had not been granted.

Instinct saw her slam her mental door shut and while she knew that it could cut her off from finding Gaelyn, it may also lead unwanted attention straight to him. If he was still alive.

Swallowing that thought, Ivy chose to use her voice instead to communicate with her dragon, deeming that safer, at least for now. "Kisa! The trees!" She tried, unsure whether the wind had whipped her voice away from her until the pearlescent white twisted her body and banked for a second time, tilting Ivy enough that she could see the different hues of brown and green beneath. Her hold tightened but for the first time she took proper stock of where they were and what was happening around them. Behind them, Lohia Kaarm, their school, their home burned. Flames licked higher than the structure itself that was slowly disintegrating into ash, while plumes of black smoke billowed into the sky above. The sounds of screams and shouts were barely audible above the wind in her ears, but she could already hear them in her dreams, her nightmares.

It was as Ivy turned away though, back to the trees beneath that she saw it; movement down below, rustling trees and branches and then… something bigger, a tree that seemed to tilt, sway and then… fall. Ivy watched as it was followed by another, and another; something down there was moving she realised, searching – its movement pattern was frantic yet efficient, as though it were looking for something they could not see. Kisa sniffed the air and the low growl in her throat told Ivy all that she needed to know. And despite her fear, despite her panic? Strangely, knowing that there was another dragon down there hunting was the one thing that sparked a moment of hope within her heart; hope that Gaelyn, wherever he was… was still alive.

Ivy didn't need to push that through her and Kisa's channel of communication with words for her dragon to put the beginnings of a plan into motion. She was circling above the forest, keeping them out of sight in a path that appeared aimless… but in reality, that movement of the Brown never left their sight. Not once.

 

[Ryees]

 

The trees were too close together. Good.

Gaelyn ducked under a moss-draped limb, boots barely skimming the loam as he twisted between trunks. The ache in his shoulder had gone dull and electric, but he didn’t stop, not even to breathe. Every dozen paces, he pivoted. Veered left. Slipped down a slope, then scrambled up the opposite rise. He doubled back once, skirted a stream, then crossed it again further down, leaving no straight lines, no trail too clean. Let them chase a ghost.

The scent of smoke clung to his cloak. That was a problem. He tore it free, wrapped it once around a low bough, and left it flapping like bait before ricocheting hard downslope again into a stand of tight-trunked cedar. Their dense undergrowth swallowed him in moments.

A distant shout. Closer this time. He’d bought seconds, not safety.

Gaelyn skidded into a shallow ravine and braced his back to the wall of tangled roots. Fingers to the rune plate on his left wrist, he carved the shape into the metal—Growth.

The earth listened.

A thrum passed through the soil beneath him, and then vines burst from the slope behind, twisting into a thick wall of bramble and brush that stretched high into the trees. Footsteps crashed somewhere overhead. He was moving again before it finished growing.

He nearly glided up the far side of the ravine, hand dragging along bark for balance, eyes scanning for his next escape route. He heard the first soldier hit the barrier, then another. Metal clanged. Branches snapped.

“Here! I see—!”

Bind. He drew the rune in the air, finger glowing faintly against the dark, and flung it down toward the roots below. The ground reacted like a snare come alive. Roots curled and shot upward, winding around ankles and knees. The first man fell with a grunt and his comrade barreled into him. Gaelyn didn’t wait for the fallout. He was already angling away, steps crunching low ferns underfoot.

A whir, then a hiss; he turned his head just in time to catch the flash of an arrow slicing through the air. It missed, thudding into bark inches from his ear. Gaelyn dropped low, shoulder slamming into a tree, then surged toward the base of a thorny bush.

One hand extended to the rock beside it. Tear. The rune flared like a brand.

The bramble shuddered. It didn’t lash, but consumed. Vines erupted outward in a coil of motion too fast to track and too vicious to block. The soldiers were caught mid-run. One vanished in a snare of thorns. The other tried to scream. He barely managed a choked, gurgling sound before the bush silenced him.

The forest went quiet, for a breath, before the sound of distant footsteps started to prick his ears.

Gaelyn exhaled, shoulders heaving, chest damp with sweat. Then he turned again and bolted deeper into the shadows. No time to rest. No safety yet.

But the ground listened. And so long as it did, so long as he kept moving, he was still in this fight. And as long as he lived, he knew they would find him. It was not that he could properly feel them, not with the bond closed, but that he knew that they were slowly getting closer. Their direction was murky at best, but a telltale pressure in his head was slowly, steadily building, telling him that they were on their way. And he needed to be alive when they found him.​

 

[Becboc]

The trees were too close together. This wasn't good.

The compact nature of the branches, leaves and trunks made visibility between them near impossible, even more so as Kisa weaved in anything but a clear path to avoid drawing unwanted attention to Gaelyn's potential location.

Ivy wasn't sure how long they could keep this up for as they circled the skies while the Brown covered the Earth. The creature had not stopped moving, which meant at least, that it had not found its target - not yet. But then neither had they.

"Fuck." Ivy's hands gripped the horns she still held harder as Kisa's back rippled, her fingers beginning to cramp from the effort and the cold of the wind. Riders were not designed to fly unaided and while she had somehow managed the impossible, maintaining it was going to prove more difficult. They had limited time, and so did Gaelyn.

"Kisa?" Ivy shouted again over the rush of air. "We need to go lower!"

The dragon gave a huff of disapproval. "I know!" Ivy yelled back. "But if we stay up here we don't stand a chance!" A pause followed as she leaned slightly to get another view of the trees. "Head North!"

Though somewhat reluctant, Kisa banked, perhaps a little too sharply than was entirely comfortable for Ivy. Her rider grunted with the exertion of trying to remain on the scales but not once did her gaze falter from the moving collision below and the areas surrounding it, should she blink and miss something vital.

Kisa drew them closer as instructed, until Ivy could see the individual leaves on the trees and the branches that held them. They skimmed over the tops so quickly their presence was a whisper from the sky, nothing more and nothing less. Ivy tried her best to get a clearer view but before she could, her Dragon's scales reopened to signify another ascent.

"Damn it." They needed to go again, to get closer, and Ivy had just been about to say as much when she saw it.

There, amongst the trees. A rustling of up ahead of the larger funnel of moving destruction. And ahead of that movement again? A space. A break in the trees only visible from above.

Ivy didn't know if Gaelyn was close by but what she did know, is that if they didn't take this chance? They might as well give up completely without even trying, that's how vital this could be.

There was no doubt in Ivy's mind that the decision had to be made. She and Kisa were going in.

With a final gush of effort, the rider pulled herself a little further up Kisa's back and within her mind she cracked open the door to their connection, just enough to let her dragon see the plan. When Kisa reacted by changing direction again and switching into a descent, Ivy didn't hesitate in closing it off again so that she could focus on pushing herself into the scales beneath her to streamline their movement as best they could.

The two of them circled once, twice, each time getting lower and lower until… Ivy lifted her finger, the tip already glowing. She drew her shadow rune expertly quickly and followed it with *expand*, before daring to let go of one of Kisa's horns so she could hold out her hand out so that it hovered above the trees. Beneath them, the darkness that existed between the branches and trunks began to contract and expand, bit by bit, as though it were coughing into existence, sputtering coal from a sparking fire. The start was slow but it quickly gained momentum, shadows shrouding the trees into nothingness and swallowing the life around it. Sounds were strangled, light was engulfed. The world around the opening became nothing but an empty void, one that Kisa and Ivy silently descended into, landing finally on the forest ground in the only small space untouched by the magic of her rune.

As Kisa found her feet, Ivy hauled herself from the dragon's back and landed in a crouch, listening for the slightest hint of sound or movement. Only when she found and heard nothing did she straighten, slowly, her hand moving to the knife pouch at her hip. The rider was keen to keep her dragon behind her, so should the worst happen she could at least give Kisa a chance to launch and escape before it was too late.

Hopefully it wouldn't come to that, though. Not if her risk paid off.

She was almost fully standing now but she remained alert, her ears straining, and only when she heard nothing did she close her eyes… and breathe. Ivy's focus settled and she allowed herself to dip into the avenue in her mind that had been fully closed since she had jumped from the rampart. Opening it was dangerous and could lead their enemies straight to them, if they weren't already en route. They only had a few moments; a few moments in which to make contact, a few moments in which they would risk their lives if it meant getting back to each other.

Ivy took a breath and then another as she slipped down her mental barrier, inch by painful inch, and forced one word towards and through the cracks, a flare in an otherwise pitch black night sky.

"… Gaelyn?"

 

[Ryees]

 

The word wasn't loud. It didn't need to be.

"…Gaelyn?"

It slid into his mind like a hot wire under the skin, urgent, bright, and alive. Ivy. She’d cracked the door between them, and through the gap came not just the sound of her voice, but the shape of her: fear, fury, the flicker of hope like a candle on the edge of a gust.

He didn’t have time to respond. Because someone else had heard it, too.

A roar split the canopy. It wasn’t rage—it was direction. The brown dragon from behind, riderless but not lost, jerked mid-stride, and twisted toward him like a lodestone snapping to steel. Gaelyn didn’t stop to think. The forest trembled with the weight of the beast barreling through it.

Hand to the rune plate on his glove—Direction—he flared it, hard, pouring intent into the cast. The world skewed underfoot. No more winding trails or angled routes to throw off scent, just a vector, one clean line carved through chaos.

Branches blurred past. Brambles tore at his trousers. His shoulder screamed, but his feet moved like they no longer belonged to him. Ivy’s presence was a beacon now, unmistakable, sharp-edged and immediate. She was close. North and low.

He saw the shadow void bloom ahead like a tear in reality, black where the world should have been green. The edge of it roiled, swallowing light and sound. He didn’t hesitate. Gaelyn hit it at full speed.

The forest didn’t vanish so much as it simply changed. The same trees were there, the same trunks, same roots, but drenched in shadow. The leaves drank sound. The silence was almost physical, thick enough to feel in the lungs. Sight was useless. But through the bond, Ivy lit the world like a flare. Not with her eyes, but her will.

Here. Left. Duck. Up and over. Jump. Slide. Vault. Run. Run. RunrunrunrunrunrunRUNRUNRUN

He obeyed without thought, dipping under a bent branch just as the dragon hit the void behind him.

It didn’t land so much as crash, wood exploding, ground splitting. The great brown thing tore into the dark, its mass too large to maneuver, too angry to stop. Gaelyn felt the heat of its breath behind him, but he didn’t look back. Couldn’t.

The bond between them was screaming now—Kisa’s wild, flaring fear; Ivy’s sharp, focused drive. And then he was out.

He burst from the far side of the shadow veil like a bullet, stumbling but upright, boots punching into real soil again. He caught himself on a trunk, turned just in time to see the roiling edge of the void still trembling.

Then Ivy raised her hand, closed a fist, and the darkness collapsed.

With a sound like breath reversing in the lungs, the shadow swallowed in on itself. The air imploded. The trees snapped back into place. And where the dragon had been…

There was nothing.

No more pounding feet. No more smoke. Just the rapid fire thud of Gaelyn’s heart and the sudden, staggering reality that they were—however briefly—alive.

His eyes found hers. And finally, he breathed.​

 

[Becboc]

Her eyes found his. And finally, she breathed.

Ivy was moving before it even felt like a conscious decision to do so. She all but collided with Gaelyn, her hands gripping at his shoulders as her gaze roamed over him, looking for signs of hurt, of injury. Her fingers found his face and cupped his cheeks as if she dared not believe that he was here, that he was real.

That her hope had not been in vain.

"You... You're alive," Ivy whispered, almost laughter and disbelief shaking her small body, her hands pushing his matted locks away from his features while her eyes shone with tears that she would probably deny until her dying breath. She just... she had needed him to be okay, so damn hard. So damn hard it scared her actually, but for now she could shelve that in favour of simply leaning into her relief.

"W-When you fell, I--"

"This way!" An unfamiliar voice echoed through the trees and Ivy's attention snapped back towards the thicket that was no longer doused in shadow. Not after she had closed it down... and taken every living creature in the vicinity with it. That was something to consider later though, perhaps when they weren't still in imminent danger.

Ivy turned back to where Kisa stood at the edges of the opening, her ears twitching like a cat's might in response to sounds humans couldn't hear, and without hesitation, she slipped her hands away from Gaelyn, her fingers of one finding his. "Come on," she urged, beginning them in a run across the small opening towards their dragon.

Instinctively, the white lowered herself to her belly so that her riders could ascend to her back quickly. Ivy scrambled up into position, knowing how this must look, how insane it appeared for two without cloaks. But there was no time to explain as she wrapped her hands onto Kisa's horns again, and encouraged Gaelyn to do the same around her.

"Hold tight," she instructed, as the dragon flared her pearled scales, bending her legs and then--

She was airborne in seconds but it wasn't enough time. Soldiers burst into the opening, bows loaded and ready. Panic flooded through Ivy as Kisa moved higher, in doing so her scales leaving her open and vulnerable to the arrows that began to whistle by their heads. "KISA!" She screamed the dragon's name, but the white was already dipping again, halting her ascent to glide between branches and leaves, using the forest as cover. The twigs scratched along the riders, trees and foliage groaning in protest at the disturbance. Ivy ducked as best she could but a branch caught her cheek, slicing a nasty gash along her flushed skin. She hardly felt it though; the sting, or the warm trickle of blood, not when adrenaline was coursing through her veins, not when her only focus right now was them all getting out of this alive.

Kisa thrashed as the last of the arrows threatened her tail, her feet crashing onto the forest floor beneath. The landing was jolted, sudden, but she didn't lose momentum as she weaved through the trees, faster than any man could run, or even most dragons come to that. She grained speed bit by bit until the soldiers were a distant memory, until the sky and the wind and the clouds called to her, until...

Her white, shimmering body erupted from the treetops, sending birds and nature scattering in different directions.

Ivy hadn't realised her eyes were screwed shut until she felt wind whipping through her hair again, until the noise and sounds of the forest faded to a memory, until she realised that her knuckles were white and Gaelyn's chest felt warm against her back.

Until she realised... that they had made it. For now, at least... they had made it.

 

[Ryees]

 

Gaelyn had no time to brace before Kisa leapt.

The takeoff hit him like a sucker punch to the chest. His weight snapped backward, only the grip on Ivy and the frantic clutch of scaled horn keeping him from being flung into the void again. Wind roared in his ears. His legs scrambled for purchase, boots scraping the dragon’s back until he locked in behind Ivy, his chest pressed to her spine.

They were airborne. And Gaelyn was not ready.

In practice, they’d always had cloaks, woven and rune-laced, designed to anchor a Rider to the saddle, to sync movement and weight with the dragon’s rhythm. Kisa had no saddle now, no bindings, no anchor but instinct and desperation. The flight was erratic, panicked, young. She banked too hard, dropped too fast, and every twitch of her body sent Gaelyn into a fresh battle for balance.

They hurtled into the canopy. Arrows screamed by his ear. He ducked low, saw ivy lash past his vision, heard Ivy's breath catch as bark drew blood from her cheek. Kisa dove again, skimming through the trees like a stone on water, and Gaelyn's knuckles went white on her horns. Then, with a final surge of muscle and will, the dragon broke free of the trees and clawed into open air.

Sky. Pure sky.

Gaelyn’s head lifted, the wind tugging at sweat-matted hair, and for the first time in what felt like hours, he breathed a whole breath that was not interrupted by something horrible.

This was the moment he’d imagined for years: his first flight not in drills, not under supervision, but his. No teacher calling maneuvers. No safety net. Just him and a dragon and the sky. And it was a disaster.

No cloak. No saddle. No plan. The world behind them in flames, and the woman he’d half-fallen for bleeding and gasping in front of him. He didn’t feel victorious. He felt like something brittle holding on too tightly to a dream.

And yet…

And yet Ivy was here. Ivy had jumped. Ivy had found him. And despite everything—despite the chaos and the blood and the hundreds of ways this could still undoubtedly go wrong—Gaelyn felt something rise in his chest that wasn’t panic or pain. It wasn’t pride either. Not exactly. It was steadier than that. Simpler.

He was grateful. Not for the way this had unfolded, but for her. For the hand on his cheek, the scream over the parapet, the grip on Kisa’s horns pulling him into the sky. For her voice, cutting through the dark when he’d been ready to run himself to death. He didn’t have to shout it over the wind. The bond between them was open again now. He let her feel it.

“Thank you,” he pushed gently, wordless and warm through the link between them. They had made it. Somehow. And they were still together.​

 

[Becboc]

The silence stretched on between them, as though they both needed it, as though they both needed the sacred moments that the sky allowed them to just… breathe. Ivy tried to regain control of herself by taking in deep and steady gulps of air and slowly, bit by bit, the tension began to leave her shoulders. She felt terrible; both mentally and physically drained. Her cheek stung, her muscles ached, her mouth was dry and yet she couldn't bring herself to feel anything other than sagging relief. Relief for the man behind her and the dragon beneath them because if they had never bonded that day in the hatchery? Ivy tried not to think about where she would be now. Where any of them would be now.

And it would seem that Gaelyn was experiencing thoughts similar.

His gratitude flowed through the open channel between them without a need for words. Ivy felt it, felt it warming her from the inside out like an embrace that was holding her tight, keeping her upright, a support she hadn't realised she had needed. All this time she had believed herself to be nothing but a burden, an irritating accident, especially to him; Gaelyn however, was telling her, whether he meant to or not that she was more than that, and for a moment Ivy felt a deep, constricting ball of emotion wrap around her throat. Her eyes began to blur, her bottom lip trembling as her emotions threatened a loss of control. In the end, she didn't speak simply because she couldn't and instead, she let the feeling settle under the weight of their shared gratitude and gently leant her back into Gaelyn's chest as her form of comfort. Kisa levelled out into a gliding soar beneath them and Ivy closed her eyes, the pressure of her light but present against him.

Her feelings were a storm, much like they always were but this time? She let him feel all of it; her fear, her confusion, her relief that he was here with her. And for just a minute or so, the world became quiet in their shared moment.

This shared moment that should have always been theirs.

---

It wasn't clear how long they flew for, as the world changed beneath them and the scent of smoke and blood and death got left behind. All three of them were exhausted; they could feel it radiating from each other and Ivy knew they would need to stop soon, not just so that she and Gaelyn could rest, but Kisa too.

The terrain beneath them had given way to mountainous, rocky ledges and peaks, the tips of which stood desolate and lonely. Somewhere in the back of Ivy's mind she knew that this particular mountain range, the one that could be seen from Lohia Kaarm's balconies, eventually gave way to flatter land and a settlement they knew from their Geography studies as Arborough. It seemed like the most logical place for them to stop, and it seemed as though there was an unspoken consensus on that, when Kisa broke through another set of low hovering clouds so that the very town in question came into view upon their horizon.

Ivy straightened slightly but she knew she didn't need to give any instructions, not when their dragon was already beginning her descent towards the outskirts.

They landed not more than twenty minutes later and Ivy slipped her stiffened body from Kisa's back, her boots crunching onto the dirt path beneath. She stroked a brief hand along their dragon's now closed scales in silent thanks before she wearily looked about their surroundings, her expression somewhat blank… numb. Dazed. As though solid ground had suddenly jolted the reality of their situation back into her with startling, alarming clarity and she didn't know what to do with it.

"We should find somewhere to rest," she murmured, her voice distant. "See if there's somewhere with space for a dragon too."

 

[Ryees]

 

Gaelyn didn’t answer Ivy at first, just gave a small, absent nod as his eyes swept the narrow road ahead. The wind had teeth here, slicing down from the peaks, but it also swept the scent of smoke behind them, scattering it. Good. Let the forest bury the rest.

He adjusted the strap of his gear across his sore shoulder and started forward. It was a light pack, just the emergency kit he had kept ready under his bed, but the weight on his shoulder felt overbearing. Ivy fell into step beside him, and Kisa followed at a slow, lumbering pace, each footfall heavy, deliberate. Her talons and horns were dulled with grime and sap, but the thin sheen over her body meant her scales remained pristine and glittering in the dull moonlight, tucked close to conserve warmth.

The outskirts of Arborough were quiet, the kind of quiet that came with routine: low lantern light in windows, the scent of chimney smoke and salted pork and feed left out in stables. Gaelyn passed a fruit stand long since shuttered and a wooden sign swaying gently in the breeze: The Bothered Boar, hand-painted in fading ochre. A squat, two-story structure with thick beams and warm light bleeding through its shuttered windows. He gave Ivy a glance and pushed the door open.

Inside, the inn smelled like roasted onion and pipe smoke. The hearth still held a bed of glowing coals, and the common room was scattered with only a few late-night lingerers—mostly merchants or couriers nursing drinks before bed. No one looked up.

“Evenin’,” came a voice from the side. A broad-shouldered man in an apron pushed himself up from behind the bar, wiping his hands on a cloth that had seen better days. “You lot look like you’ve wrestled a bear.”

“We won,” Gaelyn muttered.

The man blinked at that, then gave a slow, warm chuckle that made his belly jumble pleasantly. “Name’s Berthier, I run the Boar. We’ve beds, hot food, and a stone stable out back if your dragon needs a rest.” He squinted past them, out the door where Kisa’s silhouette loomed faint in the torchlight. “Bit young yet, eh? She fly all the way from Kaarm?”

Gaelyn’s blood went cold for a heartbeat.

Ivy answered first, smoothly. “She managed.”

“Well, she’s a beauty,” Berthier said with a nod. “Room’s three silver, stew’s extra, but I can throw some over the coals and get it hot again. Beds are clean, I promise. You won’t do better tonight.”

Gaelyn fished the coin from a pouch and let it clink onto the bar. “We’ll take it.”

“Up the stairs, third door on the right,” Berthier said, collecting the coins and passing across a dull copper key. “And I’ll have that stew up in a blink. You lot look half-dead. The stables—”

That phrase was interrupted when Kisa's form shuddered and shrunk. A moment later, she skittered through the door and scampered up Ivy's legs to perch on her shoulder, wrapping herself about her Rider like a lei and chittering indignantly at the suggestion of being left outside.

Gaelyn looked back to Berthier, quietly tense. "Maybe an extra side of salt pork with the stew?"

If Berthier blinked any faster his eyes likely would have fallen out, but the hearty chuckle at the scene was a comforting response. "All types, you Riders, amazin' honestly. Aye, I'll send her up and extra loin, and a pail of water."

Gaelyn offered a shallow but earnestly grateful nod and turned for the stairs. Ivy followed, but not before sparing a glance toward the hearth, where the coals crackled soft and low like the fading pulse of everything they'd just escaped. No one in the inn knew yet. Not about the attack. Not about the dragons. Not about the sky ripping open above Lohia Kaarm. And that was good: It meant, for one night at least, they were safe.​

 

[Becboc]

Ivy had hoped, as they descended the stairs up towards their room, that the inn would provide some comfort in the face of their trauma. Berthier had been pleasant, jovial and he didn't ask too many questions, exactly the type they needed right now. But even his warm, hearty chuckles, the dull crackling of the low fire and the promise of warm stew to fill their bellies; it did little to quell the ache in her chest and the roaring in her ears.

Kisa around her neck granted a marginal reassurance, at least. Ivy might have usually chuckled at their dragon's indignation at being left outside and her resulting size change, but only emptiness had glazed her expression, seeing yet unseeing at the same time. The gentle pressure of her small body however, was grounding, something to focus on when the thoughts became too much.

The room when they eventually reached it was simple but clean just as the innkeeper had promised. Gaelyn let them in with the key and Ivy stepped over the threshold, glancing around at the two twin beds and the window that had a muslin type material hung at each side like makeshift curtains. In the far right of the room stood a tin bath waiting to be filled and Ivy started towards it, seemingly perusing the surroundings even though her mind was doing anything but. Absently, she lifted a hand to stroke Kisa's head that had fallen into the crook of her neck, soft, deepening huffs of breath blowing across her rider's exposed skin.

Eventually, she turned back to Gaelyn but before she could open her mouth a knock sounded at the door. A quick glance was offered his way and then Ivy began towards it, opening it to reveal a rather scrawny looking boy, who was struggling with the heavy pail of water he tried to lift towards her.

"Water, miss!" Stepping forwards, she helped to take it from him with a quiet thank you.

"Could you ask Berthier to bring up a warm one, too? I'd like to use the tub."

The boy stared at Ivy for a moment, and the dragon still snoozing about her shoulders, mouth slightly agape before he nodded quickly and then scampered away.

Closing the door behind her, the rider turned after the interaction and headed for one of the beds, perching on the end of it. The mattress beneath her sank and the frame creaked but she paid it no mind as her dark eyes followed Gaelyn about the room for a moment. She had noticed how he carried his shoulder not quite as naturally as before, how he avoided putting too much weight on it, or flinched when he did. She was also incredibly aware of every bruise, every scratch and the fact that there was little they could do about any of it in an inn in Arborough.

That didn't mean though, that she could ignore it. Any of it.

"You're hurt," she observed quietly, softly. They were both hurt in multiple different ways but it felt easier to focus on the physical, the more obvious, at least for now.

Ivy let her words settle before she patted the bed beside her. "Let me take a look?"

 

[Ryees]

 

Gaelyn didn’t answer at first. Her words hung in the air longer than they should have, as if waiting to be assigned a weight. She could have meant the shoulder. She could have meant the fall. She could’ve meant the thousand-yard stare he knew he still wore like blood in his teeth.

Or she could’ve meant something else entirely. And he wasn’t ready for that conversation, so he offered her a thin, lopsided smirk and kept his voice dry. “Figured I’d give the other shoulder a turn.”

But his body betrayed the joke. He moved stiffly, rotating with care as he crossed the room. The shirt had already begun to stick in places—dried sap, blood, sweat—and the tug as he peeled it away earned a sharp inhale through his nose as he tossed it on the back of the chair that sat squat in front of the small table in the corner of the room.

It was the same shoulder, the same side as the one that had been bruised back at the start of all this, when he had tumbled through the final rings at the end of his trial. That wound was mended now, the flesh whole, and the muscle mostly recovered, but in its place bloomed new damage: swelling along the joint from the impact, angry red lines from bark and bramble, and a ragged, shallow gash across the deltoid from the crash landing. It wasn’t life-threatening, but it hurt like hell, and it showed exactly what kind of day they’d had. The damage from his trial felt like a memory of another life for how long ago it felt.

He sat beside Ivy without meeting her eyes, his breath evening out as he let the pain settle into a dull throb. “It’s fine,” he murmured eventually, quieter now, “looks worse than it is.” But the pause that followed was real. A moment where his walls weren’t quite back up yet, where his shoulder wasn’t the only thing frayed. Kisa shifted uncomfortably on Ivy's shoulder, slinking down her Rider's back to curl up at the foot of the bed with one eye open to keep watch over them.

Gaelyn didn’t say "thank you," or "I’m glad you’re here," even though the words were tumbling around in his head like a dice cup. But he was here, sitting beside her, letting her see him. Their bond had stayed open since the forest, and he made no effort to mask what was sputtering in his heart.​

​

 

[Becboc]

"Figured I'd give the other shoulder a turn."​

Gaelyn's thinly veiled attempted at humour was met with a gentle scoff from Ivy, who followed him as he moved stiffly across the room. She didn't have the energy or headspace to offer a retort like she might have usually, so instead she watched him when he began to peel the layer of dirtied material away from his skin.

Her eyes fell to the wound immediately and her breath caught in her throat. The skin looked angry, inflamed and swollen, the gash ugly and jagged. A myriad of feelings hit her upon seeing the extent of the damage; anger, fear, guilt and her features, usually rosy and bright paled into something sickly, something so far away from the Ivy that Gaelyn had come to know since their bonding.

She couldn't bear to see him hurt, couldn't bear knowing that he was in pain. She wanted to be able to swap places with him, to make it better and yet she couldn't. She was helpless; they were helpless, in a way they had never been before.

He eventually sat beside her, and Ivy's own gaze was upon the floor now, her body tense, her fists balled in her lap. Her breaths were ragged in the small space of the room, as though there wasn't enough air and it was almost as though Kisa sensed that her rider needed space as she slithered from her shoulders and down towards the end of the bed.

The dragon knew something was coming, but the humans did not.

"It's fine. Looks worse than it is."​

But it wasn't, was it? None of this was fine. His shoulder, where they were, what had happened. The roaring in Ivy's ears grew louder the longer she sat, building towards some kind of crescendo with an outlet that remained uncertain. It was as she dared a look up at Gaelyn however, at his expression, at the openness there, at the bond she could still feel between them; it was all of those things that were ultimately the undoing she probably needed more than even she realised she did.

The last time Ivy had unravelled in front of him, they had ended up entwined on a lab desk, clawing to get closer to each other. But now? Now was different, now was so much rawer, so much more all encompassing for so many different reasons. And Ivy couldn't take it. Her vision began to sting and blur, her plump bottom lip trembling. She knew if she let go it would become a point of no return and yet she was too exhausted to hold it in. Too exhausted to do anything but let her head fall towards Gaelyn's good shoulder, the one closest to her. Her cool cheek met the warmth of his skin and that point of contact? Feeling him beneath her, and knowing that he could feel everything that she could?

It was the catalyst for the first few tears as they dripped and dribbled miserably down her face and off her chin, the catalyst for an outpouring of emotion like nothing Ivy had experienced before. The silence lasted only so long before the sobs followed, deep, shuddering, sniffling gulps that she tried to bury in the crook of Gaelyn's neck. It was too much, all of it; him, the school, their friends, Dale. And that was before she considered…

"All… of those p-people…" It wasn't clear who exactly she meant but in Ivy's mind, each life taken? By her hand? She couldn't shake the image of slicing daggers and vacant eyes from her mind, faces that she knew would haunt her nightmares. They had fought to survive, but at what cost?

The question lingered as it became apparent that there was no more room for words or reassurances, not while Ivy came apart. There was only pain and perhaps the small comfort of knowing that at least their broken hearts were something to be felt together.

 

[Ryees]

 

Gaelyn didn’t speak at first. He let the silence stretch between them, not heavy, but patient, like an arm extended in the dark, waiting to be taken. Ivy's sobs tore at something inside him, but he didn’t rush to quiet them. He knew too well the damage that came when pain was buried before it had been seen. He just sat there with her, shoulder warm against her cheek, unmoving save for the slow rise and fall of his chest.

But when her voice cracked on that final, broken thought, his own breath shivered in his throat. Because he had thought the same, a hundred times since the trees swallowed him. And because she was right.

So he exhaled, long and quiet, and tilted his head slightly to rest it against hers. “Come down with me,” he whispered. Not aloud, but into the narrow thread of thought still open between them. His mental voice was soft, measured, like footsteps in deep snow. “Just for a moment. Let me show you.”

He didn’t pull. Didn’t compel. He simply opened the door and let her see what waited if she stepped through.

And when she did, the world around them began to fade—not vanish, not disappear, but blur at the edges like a dream easing into another layer of sleep. The bed, the room, the weight of Kisa at Ivy’s feet were all gone, not in presence, but in priority. What mattered now was only what held. The Self. The soul beneath the skin.

They dove.

The descent wasn’t a fall but a folding, like being drawn inward and downward into the warm dark. No sky, no earth, just a sense of pressure shifting, the hum of breath and thought surrounding them. Then came light as they feel through broken fractals of discarded thoughts and half-formed ideas until they reached a somewhere. Not a place exactly, but a sense of space made whole: Gaelyn’s Sanctum.

Ivy got the sense that sense was up to interpretation, here. The ground beneath them was dry and reddish brown, like the floor of a forest after drought. Cedar bark. Pine needles. Fallen leaves crisp with age. Trees arched high overhead, but none cast shadow. The sun here was perpetual twilight, amber-gold and soft, impossible to place in any one direction. The trees weren’t always trees, either. Some looked like spires of memory, their bark rippling with light. One shimmered with glass, and Ivy would sense the memory it held before she could see it.

A young boy—Gaelyn, perhaps ten—stood on the edge of a stone pool, gripping the edge with white-knuckled fingers as an old woman with the same eyes and darker skin watched from behind. Inside the water, a dragon stirred, a shimmer of bronze and jade. Gaelyn stepped forward. The pool swallowed him. He sank like a stone. Then the image shifted.

Another tree-pillar, another moment: A small girl coughing into bloody linens while Gaelyn—older now, maybe fifteen—sat beside her bed, carving something small from wood with shaking hands. He wouldn’t look at her. Couldn’t. But he kept carving. And when the cough stopped… he just kept going.

A rush of heat and red. A fire lit in ivy and crimson. Ivy would feel it before she saw it. Lust, love, friendship, and fear all tangled in one breathless moment. Gaelyn and a girl—unmistakably Tessa—arguing in a rainstorm. She shoved him. He didn’t move. Then she pulled him into her arms and kissed him like she hated him for it. That image burned, then softened. Another followed: Gaelyn and Tessa, years later, lying in a field with heads back to back, both laughing, both exhausted, saying nothing. There was no heat in that memory. Just peace. Trust. Something solid that didn’t need fire anymore.

Gaelyn stood beside Ivy now, or what passed for him in this place. He looked as he always did, but more still, like this version of him belonged here. The light struck him softer. His presence was settled, calm in the way old trees are calm. His wounds were nowhere to be seen, and he wore a simple dark outfit chased in gold embroidery.

“I come here,” he said quietly, his voice echoing with something deeper than speech, "when it’s too much. When the world above presses in so hard I forget who I am.” He glanced to her, not touching, just offering. “I don’t come to forget death, Ivy. I come to remember that it belongs.”

He turned, and the path underfoot, moss-soft and leaf-draped, wound deeper into the grove. New spires formed at its edges: A blade left resting in a snowy cairn. A stone marked with no name. A starburst of shadow and falling light that rippled like it had been made from a memory too painful to hold.

“None of this means we don’t fight,” he said, "or that what happened tonight was just. But this place reminds me we’re not meant to carry all of it, all the time.” His voice caught faintly on that last word. He didn’t look back at her. “I don’t want to bury it. Or you. Or any part of what this night has carved into us. But you can’t hold all of it and expect to keep breathing.”

He turned then. And for the first time since the trees, his eyes looked open all the way down. “You don’t have to let go,” he said gently. “You just have to let it be.”

And then he held out his hand, not to pull her, or to lead her. Just to stand with her, here, in the one place left that was quiet enough to hear their hearts still beating.​

 

[Becboc]

Gaelyn's sanctum was not like her own.

His initial offer had confused her amongst the wave of emotion clouding her mind but the moment she had realised it was his mental voice coaxing her, something within her had momentarily settled. There was no resistance when Gaelyn dove with her, only a simmering trust as the world around them began to shift.

Ivy sank into it, allowing him to guide her through the changes in sensations, the room as they had so briefly known it. She was surprised that he was offering to take her into this part of himself, a part so private that exposure to it made one vulnerable, open. Her own Self was buried so deeply, she sometimes struggled to find it herself, but his? He dipped into it like a bird diving through warm waters and the memories rushed to greet them; images and flickering ghosts, feelings, emotion. Laughter echoed, sobs tingled.

And when they landed? The ground beneath was redish brown, and the hues of the trees, the sky; they were golden.

For a moment, Ivy's heartbreak was replaced by wonderous awe, as a memory passed her by, one then the other. The dragon in the pool, the girl in the bed, and... Tessa. That particular one twisted something within her but what that something was, she was too far away from herself to make any sense of it, much like she was too deep to recognise what Tessa and Gaelyn now were to each other, or the change in their relationship.

All of it, everything, it enveloped her into Gaelyn's world, his Self, and it was only when she felt his presence stronger beside her did she turn to see him or at least, the version of him that he was allowing her to see. He looked beautiful, dressed in dark, guilded by gold and there was a calmness about him that she had seen before, in his outside person, but it felt... heavier here. Weighted. Right.

She listened to him explain his reasoning for coming here, how it helped him in times when he needed to just... be with his feelings. Ivy had never been good at that, even in her own sanctum. She was a storm, always writhing, moving, like a ball of lightning screeching from one target to another. But this, right here, with him... was the first time she had simply... stopped. In as long as she could remember.

Her form in this place turned slowly, looking up at the trees, the memory spires but it was ultimately the catch in Gaelyn's voice that pulled her attention back again, to hearing what he was saying to her, what he was offering her.

"None of this means we don't fight, or that what happened tonight was just. But this place reminds me we're not meant to carry all of it, all the time."​

She felt the words more than she heard them, what they meant. That it was okay to sit with these feelings, that situations, events… they didn't always mean that a person was one thing, one faction, one thought. Those things came and they went but what remained was the pureness at the very core of who they were.

"I don't want to bury it. Or you. Or any part of what this night has carved into us. But you can't hold all of it and expect to keep breathing."​

She couldn't hold onto this. Not if she wanted to move past it.

"You don't have to let go. You just have to let it be."​

Ivy turned towards him as he did towards her, her dark eyes brimming even in this place. She said nothing though as he held his hand out to her, nothing as she linked their fingers together, and nothing for the long while that they stood there, watching the pain, the memories - all of it, pass them by.

Letting it be. Together.

---

It wasn't clear how long they stayed like that for; perhaps until one of them felt ready to return, or when they both did. Their ascent certainly felt lighter than their descent had, more like a lazy river drifting them back to reality.

When Ivy returned to herself her cheeks were still streaked with tears but her chest felt… lighter than it had, the emotion in her throat smaller.

She blinked slowly against Gaelyn's shoulder before lifting her head to look at him, her eyes finding his and her expression… it had softened now to something else entirely. There was no hesitation as she lifted her hand to his cheek, as she stroked her thumb along his cheekbone - no, there was only a startling clarity between them. A realisation, that he meant something to her. In a way that she had never thought he could.

And what came with that? It was a need, a desire, a pull to be closer, to speak without words. Ivy's breath stuttered as her gaze briefly dipped to his mouth just like they had that first time, right before she had--

"Gaelyn, I…" His name was a breath upon her own lips, a plea as much was it was a prayer. The words she wanted to say lingered, toyed with her, with them both until... a knock at the door dragged their attention away again. Ivy looked towards the sound but her hand remained, even as a soft dust of colour shaded her very lightly freckled cheeks when she returned to him.

"I… I think it's a really good job I never considered a career as a doctor." She recovered quickly, as was her prerogative, with a light scoff and a hint of a smile, a glimmer to her eyes that was no longer born just of tears. "Your shoulder looks no better than it did before."

Because that's how this had all started, wasn't it? With an offer that had been unknowingly disguised as something else, something other… something more.

The knock sounded for a second time but still Ivy didn't move, not yet. As if she wanted to savour these last precious moments before reality threatened to invade their lives once more.

 

[Ryees]

 

Gaelyn quietly watched her, as much admiring her figure as her strength. He watched the stutter of her breath, the way her gaze flicked to his mouth and back again. Watched the shimmer of something on the edge of speech—something real and raw and maybe terrifying to name. And he felt it, too. That same breathless clarity. That same pull.

Her hand on his cheek was a tether, and her voice—his name—landed on him like the hush before a storm.

"Gaelyn, I…"​

He saw it, knew it. But when the knock came—when she turned from it and offered him that soft, too-light jest—he let her have it, the escape hatch she clearly needed, the breath of normalcy she clawed toward. But he didn’t let her leave it unanswered.

Before she could stand, before she could shift too far from whatever had nearly broken the space between them, Gaelyn leaned in and kissed her. Quick. Not rough, but firm, deliberate. A press of lips that said I know what you meant. That said I meant it, too. That said I’m still here, we’re still here. Just long enough to make her breath hitch again, just long enough to burn that truth into the space between them.

Then he pulled back, eyes flicking over her face as if to etch the look in her eyes into memory. No explanation, no apology, just a flicker of a half-smile—almost amused by himself—and then he stood, crossing to the door. The boy from earlier stood there again, balancing a sloshing pail of steaming water with both arms. Gaelyn took it silently with a nod of thanks, and the boy barely lingered this time. Whether it was because of the weight of the bucket relieved, or the new tension in the room, it was hard to say.

Gaelyn closed the door with his foot and crossed to the waiting copper tub without a word. He moved slowly, but with purpose, easing the water in and adjusting the basin so the heat would hold. His hands were steady despite the bruises, despite the wear. With the boiling water at its base, Gaelyn turned the spigot to let the tub fill, settling the water at a temperature that was perhaps not as hot as the bath houses at Lohia Kaarm, but well warm enough to soothe aching, overworked muscles

He didn’t say, this is for you. He didn’t need to. The quiet care of it said enough, and the kiss had said the rest. He let her come to it in her own time. Let her choose whether to speak the words or keep them safe a while longer. He’d heard them either way.​

 

[Becboc]

The kiss caught her completely off guard, and that was indicative in the way her eyes widened, her body froze. Even though she had been thinking about doing the same, she had pulled away, redirected her attention but Gaelyn? Gaelyn had kept them here by finishing what she had started.

It was over quickly, too quickly; but his lips held hers long enough for Ivy to feel the intent behind the gesture, to understand the message that he was giving.

He felt it too… whatever this was between them. He saw it and he recognised it on a way that ran deeper than maybe either of them had been expecting. Ivy herself, seemed momentarily too shocked to wrap her head around it, perhaps partly because she believed herself not worthy, but also because she was scared. Scared of what it meant, scared of how it made her feel. Out of control and unfocused; so far away from what she was used to.

When Gaelyn finally pulled back, she met his gaze, confusion and hope and heat warring in her darkened gaze. It was enough to leave her to sit with as he finally moved to get the door and so she remained, trying to sift through her thoughts, her feelings, trying to compartmentalise and accept. In the end, it was the pouring of water that distracted her long enough to look up at the man who was now twisting the spigot above the tub, to level out the temperature of what was already waiting within.

Ivy knew he was doing this for her; their kiss had told her all that she needed to know. And while her feelings fluttered around her heart like angry butterflies, the gesture was enough for now to warm her through, to settle them into something more peaceful, something… purer. It had been a long time since anybody had done anything like this for her; something as complex as inviting her into their sanctum, or something as simple as running her a bath. Everything else, for now, could wait; they were here, just the two of them and their dragon, and they were all safe and alive.

What need was there to question anything when they had each other?

The next half an hour or so passed by in a companionable silence. They moved like planets orbiting each other; Gaelyn gave Ivy as much privacy as he could in the tiny room, while she settled into the warmth of the tub and let it soothe her battered body. She untangled her hair from its usual braid and let the silver-brown strands fall about her shoulders, the ends dipping into the shallows as they sought to wash away any evidence of her struggles.

The scene was almost homely, in a way, domestic, perhaps even intimate in a way that only lovers might recognise. But beneath how relaxed Ivy appeared, Gaelyn's kiss still hummed against her lips, replaying over and over in her mind. She couldn't shake how tender it had felt, how affectionate; it was nothing like their first kiss, all tongues and teeth and heat. No, this had been softer, thoughtful… and fuelled by something different altogether.

A frown etched between her brows as she lifted her fingers to her bottom lip, as if trying to savour the memory, as if trying to decipher it, but it was when her eyes flickered to where Gaelyn was on one of the beds that she felt that same tug towards him, like they were tethered by an invisible string drawing them closer, needing them closer. It had been there since they bonded but tonight? It was tighter, more insistent and even more difficult to ignore.

In fact, Ivy didn't want to even try to anymore, not when she was this exhausted, not when she didn't want to think anymore. She just wanted to feel what she had felt minutes ago, and forget about everything that wasn't his mouth against hers.

The water sloshed softly as Ivy sat up and moved towards the edge of the tub. She carefully leant her forearms against it and rested her head upon them, her expression suddenly a little vulnerable in its hopefulness. Ivy didn't know what it meant, what any of it this meant but what she did know, was that Gaelyn made her feel good. In a way that perhaps nobody had made her feel before and tonight? Tonight she needed to chase that feeling, before she went mad with trying to bury it.

Her eyes roamed in thought but eventually, they found his from across the room and lingered, until Ivy felt brave enough to speak. When she did, her voice was soft, quiet.

"Gaelyn?" A pause. "There's… there's room for two in here if… you don't want to wait anymore."

 

[Ryees]

 

There was something in the way she said his name—soft and unsure, but deliberate—that momentarily rooted him to the spot. He watched her, gaze fixed not on the water, not on the tub, but on her. Her words echoed like something both sacred and scared, and for a moment, the room held stillness like it was waiting. She was resting her arms along the rim of the tub, chin tilted just enough to catch the flickering lamplight. Water gleamed on her skin like melted moonlight, her hair loose and trailing, the steam casting a haze about her like a veil half-lifted. Vulnerability clung to her like mist as if she was unsure she wanted to know the answer to her question, but beneath it, there was strength too. Intention.

His eyes never left hers. He rose without comment, without drama. Ivy watched as Gaelyn stepped toward the tub, quiet as ever, but his movements were more than habit. Intent lived in them. A choice, a reply. His fingers found the runeplate tucked inside his wristguard, and with a press, a soft amber glow lit beneath the surface of his glove. The faint pulse of Warmth shimmered against the metal, and a moment later, the water in the tub grew a shade hotter, enough to keep its comfort as the night wore on.

He hadn't said yes, but he didn't have to. His shirt came off slowly, shoulders tight from strain and injury. There was nothing performative in it—no seduction, no show—only the familiar motions of someone who had nothing left to hide but a body that was being uncooperative. He shed the rest of his clothing and set it aside with care, setting his gloves atop the piles, then stepped into the water opposite her.

As Gaelyn slowly eased into the water, the effect was near-electric, heat surging through the torn muscle like fire chasing frost. His shoulder seized at first, a sharp clench of resistance, but then slowly, gradually, the fibers began to loosen and his clenched jaw with them. The travails of their escape, the bruises layered atop old wounds, all seemed to lift just slightly as the water enveloped him. He let his head tip back against the tub's rim, eyes closing, and for a long breath he simply sat still, letting the heat work its slow magic on a body that had forgotten softness.3

The warmth closed around him like a sigh, one that he involuntarily echoed. His limbs ached from the weight of the day, but it was the nearness of her that truly softened the pain. He settled into the space across from her, giving her time, giving her distance, just enough to breathe.

But he didn't stay far. His leg brushed hers beneath the surface, an accidental honesty, and he didn't pull back. His hand found hers a moment later, fingers curling slowly, reverently, like he was holding something delicate and precious.

And in the quiet that followed, there was no rush, no pressure. Just two people sharing a stillness they hadn't known they needed. The kind that didn't ask for anything more than now. They could carry the rest tomorrow.​

 

[Becboc]

The silence stretched out between them but neither of them broke it, didn't feel like they needed to. It was comfortable, it was soft and Ivy used it to settle her thudding heart as she watched Gaelyn undress before moving to make room when he joined her in the newly warmed water.

Her features seemed to melt at the same time that his muscles did, because Ivy knew better than anyone else how much he had needed this. How heavenly the warmth felt as it seeped into aching muscles and stung new wounds to a dull throb. It was part of the reason she'd asked him. Part of.

There was certainly peace in seeing Gaelyn relax into the space, peace and something else when she felt his leg brush her own beneath the water. Neither of them moved though, not until he found her fingers with a gentle touch and took them between his own.

Ivy's lips parted just slightly, an instinctual reaction before she allowed their now joined hands to guide her towards where Gaelyn sat. She turned as she reached him and with no hesitation she settled her smaller body between his legs, her back pressing flush against his chest. Skin against skin, heat against heat.

She didn't say anything straight away, not as she settled into the comfort of him, sliding down just enough that her head came to rest against the front of his shoulder. Ivy was acutely aware of many parts of them were now touching, stroking and pressing into each other, but there was no embarrassment, no regret.

She needed this, and she had a small feeling that perhaps… perhaps Gaelyn did too.

The silence stretched and cocooned them into their moment and Ivy closed her eyes, letting out a gentle sigh of contentment. She brought up their still joined hands so that his arm draped over her shoulder and pressed their fingers against her cheek, nuzzling softly. Her lips brushed against the sensitive skin of the back of Gaelyn's hand before they closed into a scrape of a kiss, and then another. Reverent, considered.

A promise. A prediction.

Ivy wasn't rushing this. Her movements were slow and thoughtful, like she didn't want to miss a beat, a moment. Not now they had been reminded of how precious time could be. So, she continued in her own time and only a few moments later did she lean back into Gaelyn's shoulder, so that she could tilt her chin enough to catch his gaze.

Her eyes were dark but they were alive as they met his, alive and smouldering with the kind of heat that neither of them had seen in each other. Before now.

"Can I ask you another question?" Ivy eventually spoke, but her voice was barely above a whisper of contained emotion, a newly born ember that needed only a little coaxing to ignite.

"How you kissed me, on the bed… Can you…" She paused only to smack her lips together in the smallest sign of uncertainty about what this was. Of what it meant.

"… Can you do it again?"

 

[Ryees]

 

The question lingered between them, hanging like an executioner's blade above them.

Gaelyn just looked at her for a moment, looked at her like he was seeing her for the first time, not because she was unfamiliar but because the moment made her new again. Not just the way the water curved down the slope of her shoulder, or how her lips caught in that near-question, like a butterfly hesitant to land. It was all of it; the ache in her voice, the stillness in her eyes... The trust.

It rooted him. Undid him.

His fingers curled tightly around hers. He didn’t answer with words, just movement—slow, deliberate, and painstaking. He leaned down, and the distance between them, even that final inch, felt like crossing a bridge you knew would fall behind you once stepped on. There was no going back.

The kiss, when it came, was not an echo of the last. It was deeper, slower, reverent. Less a repetition and more a continuation of something that had never really ended. He held her like she might vanish again if he let go, like she was the dream and he was the one finally waking.

Her back arched subtly against him, and it was impossible for his body not to respond. The shift of her hips against his thighs and the press of skin and breath and heartbeat all sparked something deeper than instinct. Yes, his body stirred against her lower back, inevitable and electric, but it was his heart responding just as much. The soft thump of it under her ear gave him away.

Still he didn’t rush. His free hand came to her waist, sliding slowly along the curve of her stomach, just a whisper of pressure there, as though asking permission without needing to speak. When she didn’t stop him, his palm flattened, warm against the line of her ribs, anchoring her more than claiming.

And then he kissed her again. Slower this time. Surer. Everything else would come next. But this—their mouths meeting, the water lapping around them, the way they clung without clutching—this was the spark to light the fuse.​