Page 6 of Waking Her Dragon

“Where are they?” The Demon’s voice echoed, a psychic shockwave that detonated behind the Guardsman's eyes.

Garrett choked on a mouthful of his own smoking, silver-poisoned blood. His head throbbed so violently he couldn’t remember his own name. He didn't know who "they" were. He had spent countless years floating in a gray ocean of nothingness, and now he was awake in a room of endless black horror.

Yet, deep beneath the agony, something ancient and white-hot locked its jaws. An instinctual, nameless wall of absolution that roared, “No!”

Enraged, Leviathan drove a spike of concentrated Sorcery from the boiling waters of his Abyss straight into the center of Garrett’s skull. Twisting and jabbing, it went deeper and deeper.

The pain was a blinding, vertical fracture. It split his identity down the middle. For a microsecond, the sheer pressure of the horrific Sorcery forced a crack in his amnesia. A flash of a scent, fresh pine and winter air. The ghost of a laugh. The phantom warmth of a smaller hand resting against his scales.

His Mate. His Clan.

The realization hit him like a lightning strike, but before his conscious mind could even process the joy of his memories, his pure White Dragon Magic reacted to protect the secret. To save them, his own Enchantment turned inward and brutally incinerated the memory. It was a self-inflicted psychic lobotomy. The white light flared, blinding his inner eye, tearing the beautiful faces away from him and burying them back into the pitch-black cavern of his subconscious.

He screamed… not from the silver searing his wrists, and not from the Sorcery cracking his body. He screamed because he felt the agonizing grief of losing something precious, without knowing what he had just lost.

Hissing in frustration, Leviathan pulled back. Garrett’s mindscape was once again blank. Hanging from his chains, he panted and wept tears of blood. Utterly hollowed out, he begged for the return of those memories, but the vault remained closed.

The gruesome Sorcery struck again. A localized shockwave of pure evil turned the Guardsman's nervous system into a lattice of white-hot needles. He convulsed in his silver chains. The metal links ground against his raw collarbones.

“Think,” Leviathan hissed, his voice a slithering, oily pressure inside Garrett’s ears. “Give me a face. Give me a name. Give me anything, and the pain stops.”

Inside the bleeding theater of his own mind, Garrett scrambled through the dank darkness. The torture had stripped away his ego, his history, his pride. He was left raw and completely bereft. He wanted to give the Demon Lord what he wanted. He wanted the burning to stop. Reaching deep into the fog of his ten-year coma, he desperately searched for anything– a village, a crest, a woman’s voice– to throw at the monster before him.

Then he saw it. A thread. A golden, glowing tether buried under a mountain of black ash. He grabbed it.

Instantly, a massive, oppressive weight slammed down upon his consciousness. It wasn’t the Demon Lord. It was the Dragon King with whom he shared his soul.

Aodhan’s presence materialized in his mindscape. A towering wall of glacial ice brutally severed Garrett's hand from the golden thread. “No!” the Dragon King's silent voice boomed. Heavy with an agonizing, ancient grief, he commanded, “You must stay blind.”

Watching in utter shock as the Dragon King dragged the memories deeper into the bedrock of their shared soul, Garrett wanted to fight back. He wanted to resist, but he could do nothing as Aodhan wrapped those precious recollections in layers of Dragonfire to incinerate any psychic footprints. The effort was painful. It cost them both. In the physical world, Garrett’s eyes rolled back, a bloody foam rising to his lips as the internal tug-of-war seized his brain.

He wept. His red, bloody tears mixed with the soot on his cheeks. He felt Aodhan’s iron grip on his mind and mistook it for a second torturer. He thought his own soul had abandoned him to the darkness. He didn't know that deep in the wells of his soul, the Dragon King’s massive paws and formidable talons held onto their combined sanity with all that he was. Bleeding from his eyes, he endured the agony of silver chains just to keep the vault locked.

“I-I do-don’t know any-anything,” Garrett choked out, his voice a ruined rasp. “There’s nothing there. Please… Please…”

Leviathan snarled. Raising a hand cloaked in a jagged, violent miasma of abyssal spikes, he seethed, “I can see the wall of glacial White Magic you’ve constructed to block my path. Show me what is behind it. Show me now!”

But Garrett couldn’t. He was nothing more than a decoy. The true Guardian of all they were, the great Dragon King Aodhan, was watching through a keyhole from the depths of their soul.

Swamped in instant and unimaginable agony, the chamber dissolved into an oppressive, screaming static. The Demon Lord did not pull back the metaphorical hand. He drove it forward, sinking a localized storm of jagged, ebony Anti-Magic directly into Garrett’s chest.

The physical toll was catastrophic. The pure White Magic shielding Garrett’s core did not just shatter—it cratered. The internal pressure became so immense that the capillaries in his eyes burst, painting the pinhole of his vision in a sudden, terrifying wash of crimson. The silver wire cutting into his wrists hissed violently, smoking as the blood began to boil in his veins. He wasn't just suffocating. His cells were actively being blown apart.

Garrett’s chin dropped to his chest. His consciousness began to fray at the edges. Slipping away from the agony, it tilted backward into the cold, welcoming dark of death.

Then, the universe stopped.

Deep inside the bleeding ruins of his soul, a sudden, impossible warmth blossomed. It didn't belong to the dark room, and it didn't belong to his failing body. It was a brush, feather-light, soft as falling snow, yet radiating the undeniable heat of a summer sun. For a fraction of a second, the agonizing static in his head fell dead silent. He didn't know the name. He didn't have a face to attach to it. But his soul knew the vibration instantly.

Sydney.

Leviathan froze. His oily, black, shadowy tendrils recoiled for a split second, sensing the foreign spike of pure, unadulterated power cutting through the room. His eyes narrowed, shifting from sadistic amusement to a sharp, sudden hunger. A threat. A force of pure light capable of reaching into the depths of his own abyssal territory. A prize he wanted to hunt, conquer, possess… ultimately turn from the Light.

The shift in the Demon’s intent hit Garrett like a physical strike.

He didn't know who she was. He had been tortured beyond all human reason, his identity stripped down to raw nerve endings and broken bones. He didn't remember her laugh, her hair, if they'd even ever met. But the moment the Demon Lord's malice pivoted toward that distant, glowing warmth, a primal, ancient instinct roared to life from the deepest, best part of Garrett's soul.

Keep him away from her.