The Savage Dawn

by Melissa Grey

  He supposed he’d always known how his story would end, even if he had not realized it until the moment it did.

  His sister’s eyes gleamed black. Darker than the night sky above, darker than the velvety shadows of the in-between, darker even than the rift she had torn open in the world. They were unfathomable. Alien.

  Pain lanced up his arm. His wrist was broken. But pain was a physical concern, the body crying out against some unpleasantness. Decades of Caius’s life had been spent training to push pain away, to lock it behind a seal to be dealt with at a later time. The pain was nothing. The pain would not win, would not make him pliable, would not soften him for the shadows to claim. Not this time.

  Tanith’s power—not hers, not truly, but the power that rode her body like a knight rides a horse—pushed at the boundaries of his body, aching to tear them down, to spill across his skin, into his veins.

  He held it off with all his might and choked out his sister’s name, even as the syllables were crushed in his throat by the power clawing to get in.

  Golden eyebrows furrowed, oddly pristine against the charcoal-veined ruin of her face. A flash of red fought through that black gaze. A glimmer of truth stealing an illicit peek through a curtain of darkness.

  “Caius?” Her tone was soft, tentative. Confused. Her grip on his shattered wrist loosened.

  He could hear Echo calling out to him, shouting that it was a ruse. Not to trust it. Not to trust his sister, his blood.

  Her reddish eyes rolled to the side, then upward, taking in the horror she had wrought. The wound in the heavens. The fissure in the street. The ravenous creatures of darkness and despair she had birthed in her frenzy of violence.

  Moisture gathered on her lashes, tears threatening to spill.

  More than a century had passed since the last time he’d seen his sister cry. And this was his sister. Not a monster wearing her skin like a mask. He knew it as surely as he knew the sun would set and the moon would rise.

  “I don’t want this,” she said. She was herself once more. The darkness had receded, pushed back by the strength of her emotion. But how long her reprieve would last, Caius did not know. Tanith’s grip on herself seemed a tenuous thing. There one moment, gone the next. But Caius would not let it claim her. Not again. If she died here today, she would die as herself and no other.

  Darkness be damned.

  Caius sagged against his sister. She supported his weight, as they had so often done for each other over the years. As they had forgotten to do, torn apart as they were by time and tragedy.

  “You can stop it,” he said, his forehead falling to rest against hers.

  Her eyelashes brushed against his skin. She shook her head, blond hair falling around their faces like a curtain, shielding them, this moment, from the broken world beyond.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “You can,” he countered. “You—”

  “Not by myself.”

  Her words halted his reassurances. The truth in them rang as clear as a bell, too loud, too resounding to be denied.

  She pulled away, enough to force her slightly less reddish eyes to meet his. There was a battle raging within her, and she was losing ground to the enemy. Their enemy.

  “I’m sorry, Caius. I’m so sorry.”

  The apology was too big for words, but still, she tried. He heard all the things she didn’t—couldn’t—say.

  I’m sorry for Rose.

  I’m sorry I failed you.

  I’m sorry I failed myself.

  I’m sorry for this.

  She was not wrong. He hated how right she was, but not even he, the Dragon Prince newly crowned, could defy the truth when it was so abundantly clear.

  She could not close the rifts. Not alone. It had taken both their magic to crack the seals, to open the gaping chasm in the world that was consuming it with the inexorable hunger of a black hole. It did not matter that his magic had not been willingly given, that she had stolen it for herself and her own selfish desires.

  It had taken both of them to open the rift in the world, and because the universe also loved the symmetry of stories, it would take both of them to close it.

  His blood had begun to mend the wounds the broken seals had inflicted, but it wasn’t enough. It was nowhere near enough. The universe demanded a more potent power to cage what had been unleashed, to close what had been ripped open.

  Caius spoke the words he had heard Echo say, the words of a spell as ancient and as fundamental as the changing of the tides, as the elements that gave life to the natural magic of the world.

  “By my blood.”

  He felt the ripples of magic those words created. Sensed the electric potential they carried.

  The magic swelled in the air around them, a glittering crescendo to the grand finale.

  Caius wrapped his arms around his sister. Over her shoulder, he saw Echo kneeling, holding the fabric of reality together with little more than the force of her will. Her hair—as brown as rich soil—tumbled around her face, freed from the ferocity of her fight. Her eyes were rimmed with red, and tears had tracked through the soot and ash on her face, leaving trails of pristine skin in their wake. He could see the plea forming on her lips, and he hoped that she would not cry out for him to stop, to not do what he knew he must. He was only so strong. Oh, how beautiful she was. How brave. It was a privilege to love her.

  Caius had indeed always loved the symmetry of stories. He had lost a love and found another. He had lost a sister and found her again. He had lost his crown, his title, himself, and found the role he was meant to play, the piece of the tapestry into which all their lives had been woven. He was but a collection of threads, unable to see the totality of the image until he stepped away from it, but now he saw.

  He should have seen it coming. He should have known the familiar lines of his tale, one as old as time itself: a king sacrificed so the rain would come and the crops would grow and the sun would shine and the world would keep on spinning another turn.

  The wholeness of his story was laid bare before him, and he knew his story would end just as it had begun.

  He stepped back, guiding his sister with him. One step, and his foot felt the ground give way beneath him, drawing them both into the abyss. Another step, and there was only air and darkness.

  Caius and Tanith—his sister, his twin, his blood—had entered this world together. And that was how they left it.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  The pivotal moments in one’s life happened in slow motion. It was the universe’s way of forcing every moment to be experienced in its fullest, most excruciating detail. The speed of objects slowed to a molasses crawl. The air stilled. The earth held its breath.

  Watch, the universe said.

  Watch him fall.

  Watch him take the demon with him.

  Watch the darkness follow.

  Watch the blackness swallow them up and disappear behind them.

  Watch nothing stand in the place where someone had once stood.

  Echo watched and felt threads of magic slip between her fingers as the ripped seam in the fabric of the world sewed itself back together because of Caius. Because he had been there and now he was not.

  He mended the holes in the world only to tear one open in her chest.

  The sound of gunfire rattled against the night, petering out as the shadows broke apart. The sky shuddered, heaving a great sigh as its broken shards re-formed into something whole. The ozone tang of the in-between faded like a bad dream.

  Echo couldn’t tear her eyes away from the spot where Caius had stood, where he had offered her one last piercing look before plunging himself and his sister into the abyss, taking the kuçedra with him.

  Her heart sputtered against her ribs, an engine that wouldn’t properly start.

  Caius was gone.

  Caius was gone.

  Echo pushed herself off her knees and stood. Her body was still swollen with magic, far too much for any one person to bear
. Her bones were as heavy as stone. With unsteady steps, her feet carried her along the fissure still wide-open in the asphalt. But it was a mundane disruption in the topography of the street. A wide crack running the length of Fifth Avenue as far as Echo could see. No shadows leaking onto the cement. No unfathomable black depths threatening to spill over into the world. The avenue was ruined, but it was a normal ruin. It could be repaired with gravel and tar and paint, a scar scabbed over.

  She dropped to her knees. Her fingers traced the ragged edge of the pavement as if she could tear the world back open and pull him out. The knowledge that she couldn’t stole the air from her lungs, suffocating her in its terrible immensity.

  To be lost in the in-between was to be claimed by the great tracts of nothingness in the void. To be lost in the in-between was to be lost forever.

  “Echo!”

  She didn’t turn at the sound of her name. She couldn’t shift her gaze from the spot where Caius had been seconds, minutes earlier. Time had become elastic for her.

  How long had it been since his hands had been on her hands, lacing their fingers together as they fell asleep in the library of Wyvern’s Keep? How long since his lips had traced a path down her throat from the patch of skin just below her ear to the juncture of her neck? How long since he had played the magpie’s lullaby for her on the piano? Hours. Not even a whole day.

  “Echo.”

  The voice was closer now, cutting through the shrill ringing in her ears. Hands landed under her arms, trying to pull her up. Echo reached behind her to brush them away, but the owner of the hands was persistent.

  “Echo.”

  Someone dropped down to a crouch next to her.

  “Look at me,” came the voice. A hand gently pressed against her chin, forcing her eyes away from the spot to which they had been riveted.

  The Ala gazed at Echo, her raven-black feathers matted with soot and sweat and blood. Her obsidian eyes were unspeakably sad.

  “He—”

  Echo couldn’t get the words out. Words had a power all their own, and if she spoke the ones she could not say, then they would be imbued with a power she did not want them to have. They would accelerate the moment, solidify its reality. They were a finality to which she was not ready to commit.

  He’s gone, she did not say.

  But the Ala didn’t need her to say it. She knew. She must have seen. No one understood magic or the in-between like the Ala.

  Echo was distantly aware that a trembling had taken her chin. Her vision blurred. Her head swam. She was going to be sick.

  The Ala’s brow creased. Wordlessly, she pulled Echo into her arms, whispering soft Avicet words into Echo’s hair as Echo shattered against her, a wave breaking against rocks.

  “I’m so sorry, dah re’ain.” “My child” in Avicet. Not a phrase the Ala used often. The power in those words prodded at Echo’s wounds. “But there is work yet to be done.”

  Gently but firmly, the Ala pushed Echo inches away, just enough for her to look upon the devastation that remained.

  The broken sky had been healed, but all around them was ruin.

  “They need you, dah re’ain.”

  Echo lurched away from the Ala, falling back against the street, the scrapes on her abraded palms reminding her of their existence. Who needed her? What else did she have to give? She had nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  As if she could read Echo’s thoughts, the Ala took Echo’s hand in her own and said, “Look.”

  Echo looked.

  Her veins were not black.

  They burned brilliantly, subdued by the shield of her skin, but bright enough to make it look like she had light flowing through her veins. Her skin had taken on a strange luminescence.

  “What is this?” Echo asked, staring at her oddly translucent flesh. Those words came easier. They were less awful. Now that she had seen the light in her veins, she felt it. Her body burned as if she had the world’s worst fever. Her skin was too tight against her skeleton.

  “Magic,” said the Ala. “You took it into yourself. And now you have to release it.”

  Echo shifted her gaze back to the Ala, swallowing past the sickness threatening to rise. It was too much for her. It was all too much. “How?”

  The Ala answered as if it were the simplest thing in the world. “Share it.”

  She helped Echo to her feet, bracing Echo’s elbows with her cupped palms, holding her steady as if she knew that Echo would crumble without her. The Ala guided Echo away from the gravitational pull of the place where Caius had disappeared into the blackness of the in-between, her arm a solid weight against Echo’s shoulder blades, pressing Echo onward to witness the chaos Tanith had left in her wake.

  The sickness swirling within Echo swelled with every step she took. There were bodies all along the street, draped in white cloaks and clothed in camouflage. Armed with swords and guns. Not bodies, she reminded herself. It didn’t help to think of them as bodies. People had bodies. These were corpses. If they’d had souls, they’d long since fled.

  Echo reached out to touch the sloped shoulder of a fallen Avicen she recognized but whose name she could not remember. The pulsating glow of the magic in her veins dimmed the closer her hand got. The Ala placed a hand on her wrist, pulling her away.

  “It’s too late for them. But there are others you can help.”

  The Ala led her to a small huddle of humans. Two men leaned over the body of a boy. Blood soaked the front of his uniform, so much that the fabric was almost black. Most of the skin she could see was covered in wicked gashes made by something with claws. It took a moment for her brain to assemble the pieces of his face into one she knew.

  The boy who had covered her with gunfire. The boy who’d saved her.

  He was near death. Echo slid to her knees beside him. The light inside her brimmed, eager to be let out of its mortal cage.

  “How do I help him?” Echo asked the Ala.

  “Put your hands on him,” the Ala replied.

  Echo did as she was told, placing one on his hand, the back of which was curiously pale, the other on his cheek. Her fingers slicked with blood. The soldiers didn’t stop her. They seemed numb as they watched her.

  “And push.”

  Echo pushed.

  The magic didn’t need much coaxing. It flowed outward from the core of her body, through veins and arteries, over bone and muscle. It spilled from her skin and across the boy’s, motes of light dancing with joy, put to a purpose.

  A moment passed in tense silence as the Ala and the soldiers and Echo watched. Then another moment.

  “It’s not wor—”

  A ragged gasp burst from the boy’s lips as his chest heaved with breath.

  One of the soldiers, the one who’d been cradling his younger comrade’s head in his lap, shot Echo a bewildered look. “How did you…”

  But his question died on his lips. Perhaps he knew she wouldn’t be able to provide an answer.

  The Ala helped Echo up and led her to the next victim, and the next, and the next. Every time, Echo put her hands on someone near death and breathed her magic into them. But it wasn’t really her magic. Magic, despite what Tanith and so many like her believed, could not be collected. It could not be hoarded. It defied ownership. The magic belonged to Echo as much as it belonged to the Ala and the human soldiers and the Avicen civilians who had taken up arms to defend the only home they had ever known.

  The magic left Echo and went into them, healing their wounds, filling them with life like sunlight on soil. With every wounded person she tended to, she felt a tether in her snap, like an anchor had been severed, leaving a boat to float free, far away from her. She recognized the sensation as she felt the presence of the firebird vessels lessen. They had lived in her like white noise—her own private Greek chorus, bearing witness to her triumphs and her tragedies—and now they were falling silent, dissipating with the magic she was releasing into the people who needed it more than she did. The Ala helped E
cho stand and walk and heal.

  Somewhere in the distance, a broken sob cut through the sound of survivors scuffling about, dazed. Echo stumbled. She knew that voice. It was broken and jagged, but she knew it.

  Jasper.

  Echo pushed away from the Ala and the huddle of soldiers and broke into a run, careening toward the source of that horrible broken sound.

  When she found them, she almost couldn’t bear it.

  Jasper knelt on the ground, his jeans torn, his shoulders shaking, his arms streaked with blood. Most of it was not his. His feathered head was bent over Dorian’s face, partially hiding it from Echo’s view. Ivy knelt beside Jasper, one hand on his shoulder, the other holding a cloth to Dorian’s face. She raised her eyes to Echo, and there was a hopelessness in them Echo had never seen before.

  Echo let her legs fold under her as she joined them. Dorian was so still.

  “Let me see,” she said.

  Jasper wrapped his arms tighter around Dorian, his shoulders shaking.

  “Jasper,” Ivy said gently. She pulled the cloth away and pried his arms looser as he finally looked up, seeing Echo for the first time. Confusion flitted across his face at the sight of her still-bright veins, but it was swiftly replaced by absolute, utter despair.

  Echo had never seen him look so wretched. She looked away from his stricken expression and down at Dorian’s face, and that was worse.

  There was a mass of blood and flesh and bone where his one good eye had been.

  Jasper’s voice was hoarse from crying. “Help him.”

  She could. She would.

  Echo reached for Dorian’s face. Her hand hovered over the worst of the wounds. She didn’t want to touch him. He wasn’t moving. His chest rose and fell in the shallowest of breaths. He was, perhaps, past the point of pain, but she didn’t want to cause him any more.

  “Please,” Jasper breathed, his nose pressed to the crown of Dorian’s head, his voice muffled by silver hair.

  Echo laid her hand against Dorian’s bloodied face. It didn’t look like there was much left to salvage. Skin against skin, she could feel the thread of life left in him, flimsy and weak and almost worn down to nothing. He was nearly gone.