with it.”
“Call your males, lamb,” said Aklai. “Call them home.”
Arysteon’s eyes fell upon a deep depression ahead that was flanked on both sides by thick, exposed roots. The thumping of his heart and buzzing of his spark were growing overwhelmingly loud as he hurried toward the depression. His heart ached for what he had to do, but it would have shattered had he not done it.
Because he knew somehow, at the core of his soul, that Leyloni’s death would mean his own. His spark would fail if hers were snuffed out.
“If you will not call them, let your screams be the lure,” Tekal snarled.
“They are out of your reach,” said Leyloni, her words strained but bristling with defiance.
Clenching his teeth so tightly they felt on the verge of breaking, Arysteon dropped to a knee at the edge of the depression. He inspected it quickly, ensuring it wasn’t part of a larger burrow or otherwise occupied, and carefully lowered Serek into it.
Serek looked up at Arysteon with his big, dark eyes, lowered the sunfruit from his mouth, and cooed some of his meaningless words as though in question.
Despite Arysteon’s thundering heartbeat and crackling spark, he clearly heard the dull thump of flesh striking flesh at the riverside and felt a new flash of pain from Leyloni. His chest constricted. He withdrew his hands from Serek just as the first sparks of lightning arced over his scales.
“Just for a few moments, little dragon.” Arysteon’s voice trembled with barely contained fury. The lightning inside him sizzled and expanded, threatening to tear him apart from within. Just as he’d seen Leyloni do several times, he lifted a finger to his lips. “Shh.”
Serek grinned and lifted his empty hand to his own mouth, slapping it over his lips, and tried to mimic the sound—managing mainly to spray spittle and fruit juice. He promptly returned the sunfruit to his lips and resumed eating.
Arysteon’s breaths were ragged as he stood up and hastily dragged some large, leafy branches across the depression, creating a natural looking cover that hid Serek. It took a significant amount of willpower to keep his lightning from coursing through his hands and into the wood.
To his surprise, he felt his spark pushing back against his restraint—almost as though it possessed a will of its own. He turned toward Leyloni, and his spark surged with new intensity, surpassing anything he could ever have imagined.
It wanted to get out, needed to get out.
It needed to get to her.
Arysteon ran forward, eschewing all attempts at stealth. His spark crackled to the surface of his scales and coursed over him, building and building, threatening to overwhelm him and shatter his mind, to obliterate his consciousness, to annihilate his body.
He burst from the brush at the top of the riverbank. The humans, one and all, turned their gazes toward him. He saw their confusion, their startlement, their fear—and he felt Leyloni’s fear and shock, her flicker of hope, her fiery love.
The bone-clad females shouted, and one of them lifted a long, straight, hollow stick to her lips, aiming it at Arysteon. Her cheeks puffed out briefly before she blew into the stick.
He saw the small, feathered projectile speed toward him, felt it strike the scales of his chest and bounce off. In that same instant, a bolt of lightning as thick as a thousand-year-old tree struck Arysteon.
No, that wasn’t right—it hadn’t hit him, it had burst out of him. The light it produced was blinding, the boom of thunder that followed was deafening, and the heat was unbearable. It consumed Arysteon, blasted him apart, reduced his body to ash—to less than ash, less than dust. The agony should have undone his mind. He was acutely aware of each infinitesimal part of himself, aware of the pain each of those parts suffered in being violently undone. And he knew through that pain that he had become lightning. He had become his spark.
Whether that sensation lasted a single moment or an eon, he could not say. Only his will remained, clutching a singular purpose that was fully in alignment with his spark.
Save Leyloni.
Though he had no mouth, he roared, and the sound was like rumbling thunder shaking a rocky valley. His jaws formed around that roar, elongated and lined with pointed teeth. His snout materialized from the lightning next, and it led to his eyes, his backswept horns, his wicked spines, his long, powerful neck. His armored scales hardened around his large, powerful body and tail.
Draconic muscles flexed beneath those