Chapter 2
Kia
It ends.
Drake sees it first, but it is my body that reacts. It is my arms that drop to my sides, allowing Geraint’s dagger to clatter onto the cobbles, and it is my heart that stops. It is my soul that tears.
And still it ends: this fight, the world. Everything.
A breath trickles out past my ear, a heavy, poisoned breath. It’s a breath of wonder and it’s a breath of defeat, it’s the first of the last, and I can hear Geraint’s shudder right to its very core.
“So that’s it, then,” he says.
“That’s it then,” I reply.
No one speaks. It happens around us, it happens to us, and I just allow myself to slip to the floor in silence. Nothing can stop it happening. Null's palm settles firmly down on Viper's skull, like the judge's gavel, and I cannot help but think how fitting it is that, even in his demise, he finishes with his own hand of fate.
I try and look away but Geraint does not allow it, pressing his palm softly into the small of my back as he crouches down to my side. “Watch it,” he whispers, “if you have the means to do so.”
“Why? So I can tell my children I was here? Or so I can tell them it’s my fault that it happened?”
“So you can tell yourself that you tried. We shan't be living long enough to have children, Kia.”
I say nothing, just trying to pretend I don’t believe him. Dimly I realise that the silence is only in my head. Elsewhere, people are screaming. It’s chaos: a damp, foggy chaos that cannot quite penetrate comprehension.
“Watch it,” Geraint repeats and, eventually, I do.
Viper wakes. The future ends.
Her bones shimmer with consciousness, a toxic pond of half memories and tiny movements that fool the eyes and chill the blood. It makes me sick. And what makes me sicker is the expression on Drake’s reptilian face. As he senses my attention upon him he turns his head with a flick but it’s already too late. I have seen the worship in his eyes.
My stomach knots.
But she demands too much attention in this moment, just for the now. I have to leave it alone, stop doubting him, and concentrate on her return to the world.
The air shimmers around her, sparkling like ocean spray. It's heaving, breathing, changing. She's coiling, broiling, living.
And that hot, potent mixture of magic and wind combines with her life, his death, and destiny. In the very moment that Null stops being Null, the Viper becomes the Viper, glorious and strong once again.
The heat ripples around her: once twice and then it's air no more but rather skin. It's strong, armoured, reptilian skin. And it continues to swell as the rest of her life fills out beneath it. She remains translucent until the very last moment until, suddenly, she exists.
She's beautiful, though I hate to admit it. She's a beautiful, deadly Viper, and I can see it in the scarlet fire of her eyes alone. Drake grows by the day, and though his shoulders would brush the eaves of any house, she still towers over him, resplendent in her red and gold.
But there is something about her that is not as the stories told. She is everything else that I expected. She is strong and noble and imperious and proud. She towers over an entire square of panicked people and yet, in her eyes, I can see that they do not even exist. Her heart has not changed, her size has not changed, but her scales are different. That gold still remains beneath, it is almost blinding in the sunlight, but it is no longer flawless colour. It is no longer perfect, it is no longer pristine.
From top to tail, over every inch of her body, a hundred, thousand handprints have been burned into her visage. They vary through every colour of blood, from the oldest, most ominous brown all the way through to one print, Null's print, just beneath her left eye, which lies upon her skin in violent red, bright enough to challenge even the shade of her pupils.
She looks like a goddess of the autumn sky, she looks like falling leaves.
She’s hypnotic. She’s poison.
And with one final glance over her shoulder, she’s gone.
Her handprint ridden wings stretch wide, increasing the glare until I flinch. They hover there for nothing more than a second and then all it takes is a single, powerful thrust for her to launch skyward. Her downdraft batters against my ribs, a swift gale that sends Geraint rocking backwards on his heels. Within a minute, maybe two, she’s nothing more than a glint on the horizon... and then I can see her no more. My common sense insists that not knowing where she is or where she’s headed is far more dangerous than having her before me but the stress seems to ebb nonetheless, releasing my chest.
Drake, finding himself suddenly free of her glamour, blinks once, twice, and turns. He shakes himself, sending the life rippling back through his limbs, and treads delicately over to my side. I rest a hand on his neck and take a deep breath, allowing the true focus of the world to come back to me.
“What do we do now?” I ask.
Geraint lifts an eyebrow, turning with the aid of Ella’s eyes.
“Wait to die?” He suggests, a light chuckle brushing across his lips.
“Not funny,” I murmur sullenly, turning back to the startling blue dragon at my side.
Drake tips his head sideways, the serpent equivalent of a shrug. I wonder if he’s hiding something but I don’t have the opportunity to question it because, suddenly, there’s just this tiny scrap of stillness, hidden in amongst the panic. It catches my eye, grabs on instantly, and won’t let go.
Melissa, the perfect embodiment of my past, just standing there, frozen in horror.
How could I have forgotten about her? Even across the utter chaos of the square, I can see her, jaw dropped wide. And despite my new world, my new person, Martha flashes through my mind just as she did every day for over a decade of my life. I cannot resist it. I have to protect her, Melissa, this woman that I used to hate.
I stand.
Drake’s head follows me warily; he knows what I’m doing but he doesn’t know how to react. He does not know if he should stop me but all it takes is the single shake of my head to quell his fears and he accompanies without complaint.
Geraint says nothing, allowing us to simply walk away. He looks so small without his cloak and, in a way, the slump of his shoulders speaks more to me than anything else that's happening. I cannot comprehend the thought of the Viper rising, I cannot fathom the sound of screaming. But Geraint? I understand Geraint. I know what it takes to defeat him.
People part before us, Drake and I; we are Kin and, right now, it just seems to be right.
A sense of history has already settled over the square, this place that birthed the Viper into second life. If asked, I would have predicted the space to empty but this is not the case. Twisted, these men of the Mirror City. They crowd further in, more, even, than there were before. What they want, I do not know, but they watch us strangely, half fearful, half expectant. I care only about Melissa so I pay them no heed. It’s a coping mechanism, I know it is: I’ve used it for years. I place my attention on one useless thing and one thing alone, it saves me from thinking about how we ended the world.
My breath rasps dryly through my lips, too quiet a sound but I hear it nonetheless. Melissa’s face flickers, covered briefly by someone else. I tense but she reappears almost immediately. She hasn’t changed, turned to stone. I cannot believe we have done this to her. Why is she here, standing in the nucleus of apocalypse?
And then the first flickers of colour begin to grab at the sky.
I ignore it at first but Drake’s attention is captured instantly and what he does, I too must follow. I pause, stumble in the surety of my footsteps. He has broken the spell I cast over myself and I must return to reality.
The heavens fill with the beating of wings. My breath catches in my throat.
Dragon-Kin: they fill every inch of blue, rising from the rooftops, from the apex of walls. The serpents scramble over the surface of every building, stretching themselves desperately upwards, necks craned, skin tremouring feverishly until eventually something snaps within them and they launch skyward, the tiny forms of their Kin balanced perfectly between reptilian shoulder blades.
“Kia!”
I flinch as Geraint’s familiar voice fills my ears.
“Kia!”
“I’m here,” I murmur, hypnotised. The response is far too quiet to beckon anyone but Ella can always find Drake and he’s at my side in a second.
Fingers latch onto my arm, a grip so tight it’s painful enough to elicit a gasp.
“Gerai…”
“Don’t go,” he commands. “Whatever you do, don’t let her have you.”
He’s not even looking at me. His face is craned skyward, even though it’s Ella’s sight that matters and she’s sat at his side trembling, eyes shut.
“Go?” I ask but it’s unnecessary. I can feel Drake in my heart, can almost taste his desperation.
“I don’t understand….” I begin but it’s not true. I do.
Bron was a blight on our history, a dark smudge that this species simply could not erase from memory. A man so terrible his reach spanned decades.
But Viper? Viper was their goddess, a queen amongst queens. She promised them unity. She promised them power. They all have that selfsame, crystalline memory and if there is one thing a serpent values above and beyond anything else, it is a promise.
That emotion, the one Drake has been hiding from me for the past hour: it is hope.
I do not know what to do with this.
“Geraint…?”
The city skyline is slowly beginning to empty, the final serpents scrambling into the air, leaving a thousand perches empty. We two are the last to remain.
“Drake…” I begin. How do I even begin to explain it? I love him, and all I want is for his happiness, but this one thing, this thing he desires so much, it is the one thing I cannot allow.
But Drake knows, he always knows what I keep in my heart, and he shakes his head, eyes brimming with sincerity as he leans down into my side, pressing a head larger than a man’s torso into my waist.
He has promised the sky, he reminds, and how would we win such a thing if he were surrendered to the Viper?
The relief is so potent I feel faint. My fingers wrap around the spines on his neck and I draw myself further in, resting my temples on his skin. My knuckles whiten beneath the desperate pressure I assert, holding as though someone were already trying to remove me, and I breathe into his neck, allowing the panic to ebb.
“Thank you,” I gasp, “Thank you.”
No magic need not turn to dark magic. Not now. Not ever.
Geraint is having a harder time than I. Man and beast, they both shake, as though Geraint is grounding Ella with nothing more than his mind, as if one is pulling the life from the other. It takes everything I have not to interfere. It feels as though I’m waiting for my own verdict. What would we do if they left?
But Geraint, like Drake, has never let me down, and eventually Ella slips back into tranquility. Slowly they turn, in unison, and fix me with their shared gaze.
“We have decided we are done with killing,” he says, as though this is all the explanation he needs.
And in that moment I realise how close we are becoming, how tied together these four minds, because as he speaks, the words are accompanied by a single, flashing image, one I know he would not choose to share. It is Ella, a different creature from now, coated in a shimmering film of blood. It is Ella, drenched in battle. And though she despises herself, was never born to be a fighter, she cannot help but love it.
This is what dragons are.
Geraint smiles wanly. I do not believe he knows what I saw.
“Never again,” he promises, and something in his face makes me think this is accredited to my presence.
“Never,” I whisper but it is interrupted by the gentle clearing of a throat.
“These are dangerous promises to make at the best of times, my dears, but at the end of the world?” A chuckle, “I have to add to the count of crazy. Four crazy foreigners in the Mirror City, what is a man to do?”
I turn, finally strong enough to release Drake.
“I know you,” I blurt out, incapable of decorum.
The man before us smiles, sweeping his dark cloak aside so that he may drop into a deep bow.
“Psycho, ma’am. Might I be so forward as to interrupt? His majesty is of a desire to know if you plan to remain in this great city. I do believe his words were of the form ‘now that’ll be the greatest joke the Jester ever pulled’.”
Geraint frowns. He stands behind me but I can feel it, do not need to see his face.
“Just because we do not follow the Viper does not mean we will be staying,” he growls, “tell the man he can laugh all he wants - we’re choosing to survive.”
“We’re not staying?” I ask, incredulous. “Where will we go?”
“Anywhere!” There is panic in Geraint’s voice and for the first time, anyone could hear it. “Kia, how can you not understand? We’re all dead, all of us! We did not leave when they chose to follow and now we’re dead: that’s it. Where will we go? Anywhere. We’re just going to run. We’re going to run and run and run and we’re going to hope that maybe, just maybe, it will buy us a little time in which to live.”
“But… we have to fix it.”
“Fix it!? There’s nothing to fix, little girl, it’s all over.”
“No.” My anger flares and Drake dives almost instantly into the emotion, adding indignant serpentine strength to my convictions. “This is our fault, Geraint.”
He pauses, stepping back slightly as though my words have hit him. Dimly I am aware of people behind me, of a hundred other witnesses beyond the messenger.
“Yes,” he breathes, “I know.”
“So we will fix it.”
“How, Kia? Tell me that.”
“It doesn’t matter.” I shake my head with the words. “Geraint, we promised to be good.”
“We will be good. We won’t hurt anyone.”
“We will allow them to die? How good is that?”
“We won’t be able to stop it, Kia!”
“It has been done before.”
“It was done with the will of the Gods and if it is to be done again, it will be done the same.” Geraint runs a hand through his silver hair, more distressed than I have ever seen him. “I just want you to live,” he says.
“I…” I pause, neglecting words in favour of finishing the sentiment through the connection between us.
If I am to die, and if he is to be believed I will have no choice in it, then I would rather die a hero than a villain.
Geraint purses his lips, screws his eyes tight, and sighs. “Ella,” he breathes, shaking his head, and I know that we all three stand together against him. If Ella is to abandon the Viper, then she will to choose to face the cruel queen’s wrath head on.
“Fine,” Geraint sighs, “we shall all die young, in blood and flame. How glorious.”