Page 93 of Feralheart

I’d never been this deep in the forest. I doubted anyone had, not even the hunters. This was the part of the world marked on maps with warnings written in red ink.

The scale flared hotter.

My foot caught on a root, and I stumbled, snapping my hand out to catch myself on a tree trunk. My fingers came away sticky with sap. The sweet smell mixed with a scent that made my brain go quiet.

Cinnamon.

Not the sulfurous reek of aerie dragons, the ones who’d been fed grain and hay and kept in pens their whole lives. This smelled cleaner. Wilder.

The sound of water reached me, a roar that said the water had been falling for a long time and would keep falling after I was gone.

A chill swept through the air, carrying spray that beaded on my face.

I pushed through a stand of ferns taller than me and stopped.

A ravine gaped ahead, cut deep into the upper mountain range. Water plunged over a sheet of white quartz mixed with onyx, crashing into a pool below before disappearing into the boulders and curving around a bend. Spray misted the air, catching light and throwing rainbows.

I’d swear the scale was trying to burn its way through my leather pants.

I pulled it from my pocket. The stone-gray-purple surface gleamed in the filtered light, and for a moment I saw my reflection in it. Not the person I was now, but a woman who looked like she belonged here.

The pull yanked hard enough my knees almost buckled.

I started down, though the path wasn’t really a path, just a series of ledges and handholds shaped by water. My boots slipped on wet stone. Moss gave way under my fingers. By the time I’d reached the bottom, my hands had been scraped raw, and my left foot had gone numb.

A pool stretched ahead, dark and deep. Spray soaked my face, hair, and clothing. I couldn’t see through the falls from here, just the hint of a cave behind them.

The scale burned so hot I dropped it. It hit the stone and bounced before tumbling toward the water. I lunged and caught it, my fingers closing around heat that should leave blisters but didn’t. I straightened, and the pull yanked me up a narrow trail and to the right of the falls.

Behind.

And into…

…Home.

The word wasn’t mine, but it felt true.

I couldn’t hear myself think, couldn’t hear anything except water beating stone and my own heartbeat thudding in my ears.

I stepped forward, and the world went white before plunging back into darkness.

My boots wanted to stop. Every survival instinct I’d honed said this was the moment to turn back, that crossing this threshold would result in something I couldn’t undo.

I stepped deeper into the darkness anyway.

A cave stretched ahead, tall enough I couldn’t see the ceiling and wide enough to fit ten of our cottages inside. The walls weren’t rough like I’d expect. They’d been smoothed and scored with claws to form patterns like writing.

Shed scales speckled the floor, glinting in the weak light filtering through the falls. Stone-gray and purple, each one the size of a child’s fist.

I knelt and picked one up. Smooth on one side, ridged on the other. Beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with polish or display.

Tolross would’ve loved this. He would’ve painted it, trying to capture how the light caught the purple undertones. Then he would’ve written a poem about freedom and scales and things that grew wild.

I set it down gently.

Wild dragons weren’t savage or the monsters tales made them out to be, the threats that the elite believed needed hunting and control.

They were just free.