Chapter 7 – The Price of the Sky

Ysra

The heavy iron lever slams downward with a definitive, metallic crack.

For a single heartbeat, the vault is perfectly silent. Then, the central load-bearing strut disengages from the bedrock. The stasis fields holding the hundreds of stolen heart-scales flicker, turning from sickly violet to a dead, hollow grey. The buoyancy vanishes.

Oakhaven drops.

The floor falls out from beneath my boots. The sudden, violent loss of gravity throws me hard against the iron grating. A sickening, deafening crunch of limestone echoes through the cavern. It is the exact sound of the border garrison collapsing. The vibration travels up my spine, freezing the blood in my veins. The dust falls from the vaulted ceiling like snow, choking the air. The island is in free-fall, plummeting toward the churning, electrified abyss of the star-sea.

I do not look at Rovan. I do not reach for my weapon. I drag my body across the tilting, groaning iron floor, clawing my way toward the exposed bedrock at the edge of the anchor housing. My left arm is a dead, hollow weight of glass, but my right hand grips my stitching needle. I drive the tip into the stone. I try to pull a thread of gravity, to stitch the crumbling island to the ambient air, but there is nothing to anchor it to. I am pouring my frantic, useless magic into a void, trying to save the tens of thousands of civilians screaming in the residential sectors miles above our heads.

*

Rovan

The vengeance is executed. The empire is falling.

I grip the iron console, bracing against the violent, sickening descent of the island. The air pressure spikes, crushing my lungs. I look up at the cages holding the dead scales of my ancestors. They are finally returning to the sea. This is what justice was supposed to feel like.

But it tastes like ash.

I look down at the human woman on the grating. She isn’t fighting me. She isn’t running for the blast doors. She is dragging her ruined body across the fracturing stone, her fingers bleeding as she tries to stitch an entire sinking city with a single, fragile needle. She is breaking her own limits to save the very people who built this slaughterhouse.

A distant, collective scream of terror vibrates down the maintenance shafts from the city above. It is not the sound of an empire dying. It is the sound of families, of children, of a world turning to dust.

I look at Ysra’s desperate, trembling hand against the stone, and the cold, perfect logic of my hatred shatters. If I let this island fall, I am not destroying the cage. I am just becoming the executioner.

*

Rovan

I let go of the lever.

The blood-rage evaporates, leaving a terrifying, crystalline clarity. The cavern is too small for a storm-dragon, but I do not care. I force the shift. My bones crack and expand, obsidian feathers bursting from my skin as I tear through my human shape. The iron cages above me crumple as my massive wingspan hits the limestone walls, showering the vault in sparks.

I do not turn my talons toward the ceiling to escape. I drive them deep into the bedrock of the falling island to anchor myself.

Then, I reach my massive claws toward the center of my own chest.

I find the master scale. The primary anchor of my draconic buoyancy, the very core of my ability to hold the sky. I dig my talons under the keratin edge. The pain is a blinding, white-hot lance straight through my nervous system. I roar—a sound that shakes the foundation of the falling world—and I rip the scale free from my own flesh.

Electrified silver blood fountains over the iron grating. I slam the massive, glowing scale directly into the island’s primary anchor housing.

*

Ysra

The island violently decelerates.

The kinetic shockwave throws me flat against the stone. The sheer force of the braking maneuver cracks the walls of the vault. Through the settling dust, I see the massive beast collapse.

Rovan shrinks, his obsidian feathers dissolving back into skin, leaving a human man curled on the iron grating in a pool of his own glowing blood. His chest is a ruined, weeping wound. The master scale pulses in the anchor housing, fighting the descent. He didn’t just stop the fall. He gave up his sky. A storm-dragon who tears his master scale will never leave the ground again.

But the island is too heavy.

A sickening groan echoes from the primary housing. The single scale is cracking under the weight of Oakhaven. We are slowing, but we are still falling.

I look up. Through a fissure in the ceiling, the thick steel cables of the dreadnought Aegis are still embedded in the upper bedrock, pulled terrifyingly taut but holding.

I crawl toward the massive iron tether point where the cables meet the vault. I do not have enough mass in my arms to stitch an entire city to a warship.

I press my stitching needle deep into the iron tether. I reach into the marrow of my right femur, bypassing the small bones entirely. I grab the raw, absolute density of my own leg and rip it out.

The bone hollows instantly. It turns to brittle glass and shatters under my own weight.

I scream, my vision whiting out entirely as my right leg crumples beneath me. The agony is absolute, but I force the massive surge of gravity up through my hands, weaving the weight of the city directly into the iron hull of the dreadnought waiting in the storm above.

*

Rovan

The stone stops moving.

The deafening roar of the wind outside ceases. We are suspended.

I drag myself across the blood-slicked grating, my chest burning with every ragged breath. I reach Ysra just as she collapses. I pull her into my lap. She is feather-light, her skin pale as marble, her right leg twisted at a horrifying, unnatural angle. She broke her own foundation to match my sacrifice.

The silence in the vault is heavy, broken only by the terrifying, metallic shrieks of the Aegis cables groaning under the strain.

Above us, one of the secondary iron tethers snaps, whipping through the cavern like a gunshot. The island tilts precariously. We are bleeding out on a shattered rock, hanging by a single stitched cable and a dying scale.

I press my bloody forehead against hers. Her breathing is shallow, her eyes fluttering.

"Tell me to drop it, Ysra," I whisper, my voice raw, the vengeance completely stripped from my bones. "Tell me to let it go, or tell me to hold."