Heir of the Fallen Dragons
He was only fire now. Fire and shadow and wings. No name. No past. No faces.
Just hunger, and a small creature standing in front of him in the light, and the flames climbing in his throat.
Then the creature began to sing.
"Seven stars fell, but the Queen did not…"
He knew that song. He had known it before he knew anything. Before words. Before names.
He did not know why.
* * *
Talia walked into the fire.
The heat came off him in waves. The silverflame braziers had turned gold all around the cave, and the air shimmered, and every step felt like walking into the mouth of a forge. Her eyes watered. Her skin stung. She kept walking. She kept singing.
"She sleeps in the ember, she waits in the heart."
Behind her, Osric was shouting something. Cassian had his sword drawn against High Lantern Morrec, who had come roaring down the main stairs with a dozen knights. Steel rang on steel. She didn't look back.
"Say my name and I'll carry your sky…"
She reached him. His scales were so hot they glowed. His gold eyes looked down at her without any recognition at all.
Talia reached out and took his left hand. It burned. She didn't let go. She pressed her palm flat against his, against the crescent mark, and said, as clearly as she had ever said anything in her life:
"Hold my fire and I'll never go dark. Your name is Rowan Thale. Rowan Thale. Rowan Thale."
The fire went into her.
It poured up through her hand like light through a window. It hurt. It hurt more than anything had ever hurt. It burned a mark into her palm, pressed against his, and she cried out but she still didn't let go.
And somewhere inside the storm, a boy remembered his name.
* * *
Rowan came back all at once.
Talia's hand in his. Her face in front of him, streaked with tears, fierce and furious and there. His name in her voice.
The Covenant closed around them like arms.
He felt it. He felt her. Not her thoughts, but her, steady as a rope tied around his waist, holding him to himself. And through that rope, the Queen's power flowed into him, all of it, the whole sea behind the wall. It didn't drown him this time. It couldn't. Talia was holding on.
He grew.
His shadow-wings became real. Scale spread over every inch of him, red as embers and gold underneath. His body stretched and rose, filling the cave, until he was looking down at the Crown from above, and on his brow burned a crooked white crescent.
For a few minutes, for the first time in three hundred years, there was a dragon in Aurendel.
* * *
Aldric Vane looked up at him and laughed.
"Magnificent," he said. He was younger now, dark-haired, strong, the man from the Codex sketch. The Crown blazed on his head. "You don't understand what you are, boy. None of them ever did."
He raised his hands. Stolen fire roared out of them, three hundred years of it, the fire of every dragon he had ever trapped, every Scaleborn child he had ever drained.
Rowan spread his wings and took it.
It hurt. But it was other dragons' fire, and it knew him, and it did not want to burn him. It slid off his scales like water.
On the stone tables around the platform, Osric was stumbling from one Hollow to the next with the chapel keys, unlocking the dragonsteel chains from their wrists one by one so the Crown could not pull on them any longer. Teo's chain fell away. Then another. Then another.
Now, said the Queen. Her voice was clear and warm in his mind, and sad, and very old. Now you must understand, so you can choose.
And she showed him.
Not a vision this time. A knowing. She had not fled. She had not hidden out of fear. She had given up her body, and her children's bodies, because the Covenant said a dragon must never harm the kin of its Voice, and she would not break that promise, not even to save herself. Not even when the promise was killing her.
He thought we were only power, the Queen said. That is why he could never finish his Crown. A dragon is not a weapon. A dragon is a promise. It takes both of us, dragon and human, to keep it. He never had a Voice. No one would say his name.
The Crown pulsed. Rowan felt it calling to him.
It held every ember Aldric had ever stolen. Thousands of them. If Rowan reached out and took it, all of that would be his. He would never grow old. He would never be nobody again. He could make the Order kneel. He could make the whole world kneel.
You are my heir, the Queen said gently. You may take it. That is also a choice.
Rowan looked at the Crown.
Then he looked down at Talia, standing below him with her burned hand pressed to her chest. At Teo, lying on the stone with his chain undone. At Cassian, holding back an army. At Osric with his keys.
"No," he said.
He lowered his great head and closed his jaws around the Hollow Crown and bit down.
* * *
It broke like ice on a river in spring.
Light poured out of it. Not gold this time, but every color at once, thousands and thousands of tiny sparks bursting out of the black shards and flooding through the cave like a storm of fireflies.
Some of them flew to the stone tables. Others streamed away up the stairs, toward the Hollow ward and the long rows of clean white beds.
One settled on Teo's chest and sank into it. His eyes blinked. For the first time in five months, they blinked. He drew a long, shaking breath, and turned his head, and said in a cracked, confused voice, "Tali?"
Up and down the cave, on every table, the Hollow began to stir.
And the rest of the sparks, the ones whose people were long gone, rose. Up through the cave. Up through the stone. Up through the floor of the Cathedral and out into the morning sky.
Rowan felt them go. Three hundred years of dragons, finally free. Falling upward.
* * *
Aldric Vane fell to his knees.
His dark hair was turning silver again. Then white. His hands were shaking. Without the stolen fire, three hundred years were catching up with him all at once.
He looked up at the dragon above him.
"Elsbeth," he whispered. "She was fourteen. They said it was an accident. They said it didn't matter." His voice was thin as paper. "I only wanted no one to rule us from the sky. Ever again."
Rowan looked down at him with the Queen's gold eyes.
"Then you became the sky," he said.
Aldric closed his eyes. And he crumbled, softly, into grey ash, and the last of the rising sparks carried it up and away until there was nothing left at all.
* * *
In the chaos, High Lantern Morrec tore free of Cassian and lunged across the platform, sword raised, straight at Talia. She was on her knees, exhausted, her burned hand cradled against her chest. She didn't even see him coming.
Teo did.
He rolled off his stone table, barely able to stand, and threw himself in front of his sister. Copper scales bloomed over his thin arms, just in time. The blade struck them with a clang and skidded away.
A moment later, Cassian had Morrec on the ground, disarmed.
Teo looked down at his own scaly arms in total astonishment. Then he looked at Talia. "Tali," he croaked. "Why are you crying?"
She grabbed him and held on and didn't answer.
* * *
Above them, in the square, the uprising was ending.
Hedda would tell the story for the rest of her life: how the knights and the crowd had stood facing each other on the Cathedral steps, spears lowered, one shout away from disaster. And how, just then, the ground had trembled, and the great bell had gone silent, and thousands of lights of every color had burst up out of the Cathedral roof and spun across the dawn sky like a flock of shining birds.
Everyone stopped. Everyone looked up.
And then the Cathedral doors opened, and Cassian Rook walked out with High Lantern Morrec in chains behind him, and his mother, pale and blinking, leaning on his arm.
"Lower your weapons," he said to the knights. "It's over. He lied to us. He lied to all of us."
One by one, the Dawnknights knelt.
Osric climbed onto the fountain beside Hedda. His hands shook as he opened the Ashen Codex. But his voice was clear as a bell as he began to read, to the whole of Dawnspire, the true history of the dragons. And at the very end he read one more name, the name of the scholar who had found it all and paid for it.
Ilse Morrow.
* * *
A month later, the new statue went up in Greywater.
The Order of the Silver Dawn was gone. In its place was a Council of Aurendel, with Hedda Corvane grumbling in its front row and Osric as keeper of its archives. The Trial of Silverflame had been abolished. The Sanctuary had become a house of healing, where the woken Hollow were learning to walk and talk and laugh again. Cassian had founded a new order, the Wardens of the Covenant, sworn to protect the Scaleborn instead of hunting them. Pim had been the first to join.
Rowan's fire was almost gone.
Breaking the Crown had cost him. The Queen's voice had gone quiet in his head, and the wings would never come back. What was left was small: a warmth in his chest, a few copper scales when he needed them. Enough to keep a forge hot.
Master Bram had cried when he walked through the gate. Nell had kicked him in the shin for leaving and then hugged him until he couldn't breathe.
Now they all stood in the square as the canvas came off the statue.
It wasn't Aldric. It was the Queen, lying down with her wings folded, a crescent on her brow, carved tears running down her cheeks. Around her rose seven small stars.
Teo stared up at them, already naming them under his breath.
Talia stood beside Rowan. On her left palm was a mark, pale and crooked, like a fingernail moon. The same as his. Without either of them saying anything, their hands found each other, and the two crescents pressed together.
"So," she said. "Heir of the fallen dragons."
"I don't feel like an heir."
"You gave away a crown."
"That's why." He watched a few last sparks of light drift over the river Grey, turning gold in the sunset. "I think that's what it means. Not the one who gets the power. The one who keeps the promise."
Talia squeezed his hand.
For the first time in his life, Rowan Thale knew exactly who he was.