Page 58 of Dragon Chaos Around

“The shift is the slowest and most dramatic of any shifter species,” he said. “It builds. Static first. Temperature drop. Then the scales.”

“Scales.”

“Silver. They emerge beneath the skin and press outward. Then the wings. Then the body expands to⁠—”

“How big.”

He hesitated.

“Chaos. How big.”

“Wingspan approximately forty-five meters.”

Alani did the math. Her brain, which had been trained on convention floor plans and booth measurements and the spatial geometry of fitting thousands of people into a building designed for thirty, converted forty-five meters automatically. One hundred and forty-seven feet. The wingspan of a 737. Parked on a Midtown sidewalk.

She sat down. Not because she chose to—because her knees made the decision without consulting her and the nearest chair caught her on the way down.

“That’s reasonable,” he said. The first break in the tension—the faintest trace of dry humor surfacing through the dragon’s resonance, the man emerging from beneath the predator.

“Forty-five meters.” She pressed her hands flat on the desk. “You’re telling me that the man I kissed in a cape in Brooklyn can become an airborne predator the size of a commercial aircraft.”

“A small commercial aircraft.”

“That’s not the reassuring qualifier you think it is.”

The amber in his eyes shifted—not colder but warmer. The edge of a smile that his face would not grant but his eyes could not prevent. She watched the human reassemble itself over the dragon—the composure returning in layers, the temperature normalizing, the resonance in his voice thinning back toward its usual register.

And then the questions started. Because she was Alani Nores, and she had spent her entire life loving the most extraordinary stories she could find, and a dragon was the most extraordinary story that had ever walked into her lighting review.

“You breathe fire?”

“Yes.”

“Silver fire. You told me on the rooftop. Silverscale signature.”

“Yes.”

“And you can talk. While shifted. You said dragons are the only species that keeps speech.”

“The voice changes. Layered. Resonant. What you heard outside—the deeper register bleeding through—that was the dragon-speech pushing into the human range.”

“So you become a hundred-and-forty-seven-foot flying reptile that breathes silver fire and can hold a conversation.” She leaned back. Stared at the ceiling. “That’s the most villain thing I’ve ever heard and I’m including Magneto.”

He blinked. She caught herself smiling despite the adrenaline still buzzing through her limbs—the crack in his composure so unexpected it had ambushed her.

She pushed off the desk. Paced. The convention floor hummed below. The fluorescent lights buzzed above. Her brain had shifted from triage into the mode she used when building cosplay—the mode where she dismantled a problem into its component parts and rebuilt it into a form she could wear.

“The territorial dispute with Erlen. The rooftop briefing. You told me about the fight, the grudge, the three centuries.” She stopped pacing. Faced him. “You fought him. In dragon form. You won.”

“I won.”

“In a field in northern England.”

“Yes.”

“Three hundred years ago.”

“Yes.”