FURY

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. Furies hadn’t always ruled the skies. But after Ages of peace, the humans had arrived in their golden starships with all their shining tools and glittering dreams. They built a city of silver and steel, ideas and optimism. They built machines to quarry magic from the ground and wonders from the water; they quickened gold from tin and jewels from blood. They awoke evil with a well-intentioned kiss. And then the Furies came. And they brought the dragons with them.

That was a century ago. The few humans who’d survived the purge went into hiding, their sparkling civilization reduced to ruins in a matter of weeks. It was not a war. It was an annihilation.

Ayrk had found me in the ruins of Somnium as a little girl and brought me home to his family like a piece of salvage or a stray pet. Father had welcomed me. Pleia, Father’s wife, had been tolerant if not friendly, but I was never invited to call her Mother, so I never did. The dragons killed Ayrk a few years later, Pleia the year after that. And then it was just Father, Ayrk’s younger brother Aazari, and me, living at the northeastern edge of the Amaranth Valley where the forests and grasslands turned to highland moors and mountain ranges.

Whatever I had been doing hiding in the ruins, I had no memory of it, nor of my parents. Ayrk was my first memory, and so my life divided into With Ayrk and After Ayrk. Father named me Amarin after his late sister and gave me family and a home, but it was Ayrk who raised me, who formed me. He taught me to hunt and forage. He taught me to fight, with dubious results. He taught me the art of stillness. He taught me to read and write and to want more for myself than what the Carafey Tribe could give me in their isolated pocket of wilderness at the edge of the world. He said that once I was old enough, he’d take me to the legendary Starlight Elves where I could learn everything he couldn’t teach me. And then we would wander the land together, dodging Furies and fighting dragons. But he died, and the dream died with him.

The Elves might still have taken me into their center of learning—when it came to education, they were said to welcome everyone, no matter the color of their fur or skin, no matter their heritage—but the Elves lived far to the West, a world away. A lethal world away for someone like me, the last of the human race in a land that had been destroyed by it.

* * *

The Fury found me just before sunrise.

Dawn was both the best and stupidest time to be out foraging. It was the best time because it was the changing of the guard so to speak, the Furies growing languid and sleepy and the dragons just awakening. It was the stupidest time for essentially the same reason—all the monsters were awake at once while I was rooting around for anything edible or shiny.

The ruins of Somnium lay within a day’s journey of Father’s den, a cozy burrow house nestled in the roots of an ancient elm at the farthest reaches of the Carafey settlement. The remains of the devastated city had lured me all my life, but not because of any burning need to know more about my past. I accepted what I was—the last of a species who should never have been here in the first place. In that sense, I knew everything I needed to know about myself. My primary interest in the city lay in its supplies and valuable artifacts. Due to its remote location and the pesky fact that dragons frequented it, there was still a treasure trove of salvage to be found if you were patient enough—and foolish enough—to look for it.

In the years After Ayrk, I became an effective scavenger. I was drawn to everything, inspired by everything, curious about everything. Father encouraged this. My future was inevitably lackluster. There would be no marriage, no children. No love. Not that kind anyway. It wasn’t that mixed-race unions never happened, just that… who would want a human? In addition to being one of the two races responsible for breaking the world, I was mocked for my dull hearing, round ears, and bald face and compared to a hairless rat on frequent occasion, even though I had hair, lots of it, just… not on my face. Ayrk had said my exposed skin was like an elf’s, and I should never be ashamed of it. I knew the Elves were furless like me, but it did not escape my notice that no one else compared me to the Children of Everly, the renowned and beautiful race sired by a Fallen Star and the Fey girl who’d saved him many millennia ago. I’d never seen an elf, but I’d heard of their moon-gold skin and silver hair. My own skin was a sort of creamy caramel, dappled brown from years spent in the sun without the protection of fur, my hair colored like maple sap and honey. These hues, so close to the rich, tawny gold of the Carafey, managed to seem like a poor imitation of them instead—a clumsy forgery of something far more beautiful. I kept my blousy curls impractically long to cover my stupid little ears, but the tactic was so effective that I appeared to have no ears at all, and I doubted if that was an improvement. That I was most often seen in the company of my handsome father and brother couldn’t help, and that Aazari was considered particularly beautiful for a Carafey was almost as annoying as how effortlessly athletic and competent he was. At everything. After Ayrk and Pleia died, Father didn’t quite know what to do with me, and I think he’d hoped that Aazari would finally accept me as a sister. I’d been with them ten years by then, but ten years was barely a blink to a Fey. I’ve wondered more than once if I’d been accepted so easily by Father because of my fleeting lifespan. If I was a mistake, Time itself would rectify it. In less than a century I would be gone, and Father would barely sport another gray hair to show the passing years. But Aazari had no interest in picking up where Ayrk had left off. He was never rude—rudeness would have implied I was worth the effort. He just sort of tolerated me like his mother had. He neither bullied me nor defended me when I was bullied by others. He was neither enemy nor friend. We merely existed in the same space. His revenge, if that’s what it was, was gut-wrenchingly effective. He simply ignored me. He was an accomplished tracker and occasionally allowed me to follow him, so long as he was alone and I was silent. But he rarely spoke to me, never took the trouble to teach, and so I learned whatever I could by watching. When he’d had enough of me trailing him, he’d simply disappear. So by using the accumulation of knowledge bestowed by my beloved brother and the scraps of knowledge acquired from my reluctant one, I ventured farther and farther afield from the safe little hollow of home.

Ayrk could have left me where he’d found me. No one would have faulted him for it. He could have sold me to a menagerie like a rare animal. He could have killed me on the spot. There was no law against it among the Fey, old tongue for “the people.” They had their own laws that to kill another Fey allowed the victim’s family to take a life in turn, but since humans were not native to the world, they did not fall under the same protection. If they’d been here long enough, that doubtless would have changed, but they were slaughtered within a single generation, and whoever remained lived in hiding. There couldn’t be more than a handful of humans left on the entire planet. The Furies had done their work well. But if they had awakened for the purpose of destroying humanity, fulfilling that had not sent them back to sleep in their frozen tundra. They killed indiscriminately, Fey and non Fey. They were the enemy of all races, and they’d recruited the lesser dragons to their cause. The only reason they hadn’t utterly destroyed the world was because the Elves kept them in check with small bands of highly trained warriors dispatched throughout the land.

But there were no Elves here. There was only me digging through the detritus of a fallen empire with nothing but determination and curiosity as my guardians. I had spent months watching the city from a distance before I’d ventured near it the first time years ago, and I had learned the rhythm of the place. The Furies haunted the ruins nightly, and at least three dragons made their nests there, but dragons slept hard and deeply through the evenings, and the Furies flew by at midnight but never lingered. The hours right before dawn were always quiet.

Until today.

The Fury appeared out of the graying night in a ruffle of leathery wings as she landed atop a tumbled wall. I never heard her approach, but I saw her the second before she saw me, and the second saved me. I flattened myself against the stone and made myself go still. Not quiet. Not motionless. Still. At one with my surroundings. I calmed my mind and banished all fear so that it could leave no scent or ripple. There was an art to stillness—to slowing your breath and the beat of your blood, to becoming the ground, the trees, the stone, the air. To becoming the shadows instead of hiding in them.

Of all the things Ayrk had taught me, stillness was the most valuable. It’s not something that came naturally to humans, and I’d been determined to learn it for that reason. It was a practical skill too, for it made me more tolerable to the Carafey. I could never blend in with my bald face and round ears that could barely detect the most common sounds, but I could at least move like them. When Ayrk had first brought me to his people, I’d been considered a rattletrap of motion and noise, even afraid and quiet as I was. But humans and Carafey had very different definitions of quiet according to Father who remembered the humans from when Somnium was at its zenith. After a few weeks, I’d learned to hush my words to something below a murmur. I’d learned to silence any sighs, coughs, or yawns, any hisses of frustration or grumbles. I’d learned to quiet my breathing and footfalls. It was years before my silence had the effortless quality of the Carafey, but it was a hard-won victory, and Father praised me for it with his wordless nod and a crinkling of his slitted amber eyes. That wordless nod was a cherished prize, for when Father spoke audibly to me, he took an embarrassing pleasure in projecting his voice loudly enough that I could hear him. Wherever we happened to be. It was kindly meant but mortifying and unnecessary since Ayrk had taught me to sign and read lips, which served me far better. No one else was interested in projecting for me or in having their quiet serenity shattered as others did so. My useless ears couldn’t even hear the songbirds that filled the trees much less the quiet murmurs of Fey speech, but my eyes had no such deficiencies.

Ayrk had given me three rules to survive by, and I had taken them to heart.

One: Know When to be Still.

Two: Always Keep Watch.

Three: Never Scream.

Those rules had kept me alive in spite of my disabilities. By the time I’d past twenty years, I could slip in and out of the Somnium ruins every week without being seen. Some salvage I took to Father to barter away or use as he wished, but some I kept, like the books—even ones I couldn’t read. More than anything else there, I thought of them as my heritage. My inheritance.

I had been digging through a collapsed chamber in search of books and food tins when I saw the Fury.

I eased into stillness. My cloak was a complicated reversible affair I had constructed myself from a tracker’s coat and a watcher’s night cape. The day side was carefully sewn with dried grasses to blend with the ground, and I had added living leaves, a rootless ivy-like plant that needed only air and dew to survive; the night side was similar but dark-streaked with gray shade and inky shadows. Standing there against the wall, I was not a girl—I was a cluster of ivy on the stone, a piece of the ruins, a slice of the night and nothing more.

It should have worked. It had worked many times before. This was not my first encounter with a Fury. But this Fury was different. Her gray skin was smooth like river rock instead of rough like her sisters’, and her ropes of hair, rather than writhing like snarled serpents, glittered with broken glass plaited into neat black braids. Black eyes scanned the ruins with too much intelligence. I lowered my lids to shield any eyeshine but didn’t close them entirely, my awareness spreading out like tree roots, unobtrusive but vigilant. Always Keep Watch.

Her gaze passed over me as if I wasn’t there, but she sniffed at the air and took a step toward me. She hummed something, and … I heard it. She screeched, and the sound tore through me, every part of me aching to run, but I didn’t move, Ayrk’s wisdom and training holding me fast.

She hummed again, and this time I could feel my eyes blacking out, my mind numbing. Dragon!

The mindnumb was a dragon technique—some kind of calming pheromone that slowed the victim’s thoughts to a sluggish churn. But knowledge was its own weapon. If you recognized it in time, you could fight through it. My eyes blacking, though, that wasn’t normal. I couldn’t lose my eyes. Without them I was as defenseless as a cub. I battled against the blackness, the numbness, fighting to keep my mind sharp but calm. It was early still, the skies charcoal, no hint of sunrise yet. The dragons should be slumbering, fogged with sleep. Why was this one even awake?

I saw it then, its serpentine neck and wedge-shaped head detaching from the shadows and undulating before the Fury. It was black. I’d never seen a black one before—they were usually gray or green. Its gaze too slid right by me, but that was unsurprising. The lesser dragons were day dwellers and sun worshippers. Their eyes were keen but not nocturnal. Their sense of smell, however, was exceptional. My cloak disguised me well from all senses, and I kept juniper and cedar sprays woven into my hair. Even the soap I used was made from clay, honeycomb, and ferns. I smelled like the land. I was meticulous about it because Carafey noses were as sensitive as Carafey ears, and the only thing worse than your noise heralding your presence was your odor doing so. In many ways, it was living among the Carafey themselves that had best armored me against the monsters of the world, for in making myself tolerable to the highly sensitive Carafey, I had made myself practically invisible to dragons. It was a lesson and a skill learned at great cost, but I had learned it well. Being undetectable to the dragons who had taken Ayrk from me, stealing salvage from under their sleeping snouts was my most effective revenge against them.

But perhaps I’d grown overconfident because the black dragon was moving slowly toward me.

My stillness was slipping as panic stirred, but I forced it back down, forced myself to embrace the stillness.

I was a shadow. Less than a shadow.

The dragon took another step, snout lifted, nostrils quivering.

I could smell its acrid breath. I wanted to run, to scream.

Rule Number Three: Never Scream. No matter the fear or the pain, never scream. It drew them. And if they were already there, it only brought death faster.

Running wasn’t advisable either.

This close the beast smelled like singed feathers and charred wood. If I ran, it would catch me. If I hid, it would burn me out.

And then its head dipped abruptly, nosing at something on the ground. A moment later my pack dangled from its fangs. It flung it toward the Fury who caught it effortlessly and examined it with her black, too-intelligent eyes. She reached inside and withdrew today’s find—a dirty, damp-spotted book—while the dragon nosed at the bag like a giant dog looking for a treat. She turned the pages of the book slowly, her gaze unfathomable.

I did not heave a sigh of relief when she and the dragon moved away, my book still clutched in her hand, nor even when I glimpsed a shadow flutter like wings taking flight. I remained still, part of the stone. I counted out the seconds and the minutes, not trusting my sense of time. Dragons could be very patient. After several eternities had past, I began easing slowly left, maintaining the art but in motion. Just a few more inches and I could slip beyond the wall. I was a ripple of ivy in a gentle breeze.

A dead ripple.

The Fury was back. The shadows, the pretense at flight had been a ruse to lure me out, and her patience was clearly thinning. She moved slowly between the stones, examining every crevice, every shadow. My stillness was effective, but it wasn’t magic. She would find me. There was no sign of the black dragon. Perhaps it had flown away after all. It didn’t matter. I had seconds. Less.

Her black eyes found mine, and my stillness crumbled.

She bared her jagged teeth in the perversion of a smile.

I thought of Ayrk as I waited for the end.

Her head suddenly jerked to the side, her gaze shifting, her snarl blooming into something much worse.

I followed her eyes, my heart pounding so loudly I could hear it. And that’s when I saw them.

On the plain below, they streamed out of the shadows in a veil of light, transcending the darkness. Nine of them on moon-white horses that glowed like the starlight from which they’d been fashioned, the luminous horses and riders melded into a gorgeous confusion of glimmer and gleam that utterly bewildered the gaze.

I forgot my fear. Forgot the violence about to overtake me. I had never seen anything so beautiful as their symphony of movement.

I had been taught to become shadows.

But the Elves had learned to become light.

The Fury shrieked a battlecry, and a trio of gray dragons breached from the center of the ruins and streaked toward the attack.

The Elves didn’t slow, didn’t hesitate. They spread into a V formation, closing on the dragons with shocking speed, their own brilliance trailing behind them in an afterimage of liquid light. The elven woman leading the charge had silver hair shot through with dazzling white. She glowed brighter than the others, marking her as an elder. She was so bright it was hard to focus on her, but it was even harder to look away.

One dragon expelled a burst of flame in a seething barrier, but the horses ran straight through it, their glow flaring into a protective shield. The other two dragons raked over the company and swept two elves from their horses, but the elder dipped lower on her mount in an agile twist, skating just below their talons, and kept riding.

The horses leapt nimbly over lashing barbed tails and danced aside from sweeping wings and rending claws while the Elves slashed at scaled limbs with shining swords. A pair of elven twins fought together as effortlessly as if they shared one mind, even their horses moving in perfect stride.

The Fury sent an avalanche of rubble toward the company with a gesture, the stone obeying her command not with the usual reluctant rumble but with a violent crush. The horses fluidly dodged the chunks of masonry, leaping and side stepping, grace and power entwining into one.

A dragon spiraled toward the ground, skimming the grass with a spiked wing, and an elf in snowy armor leaped from his charger onto the beast’s back. It was only for a second, but that was all he needed, shearing a wing off with one blow of his sword even as the dragon climbed starward. The creature howled and tumbled from the sky. The elf spun in a controlled fall, his horse rushing to meet him, and the man’s boots had scarcely kissed the ground before he had vaulted back onto his steed without either of them missing a single stride.

The Fury screamed and descended upon the Elves like a dream of madness. There was something impossible about the way she moved—a shuddering, languid surge of motion and sound. I didn’t have to read her inky lips or strain my ears. I could hear every utterance she made as if it were inside my head.

Fury and dragons dove repeatedly, talons yanking at limbs and raking armor and flesh, while the injured dragon wreaked havoc from the ground. Anyone else would have been torn to pieces by now, but the Elves were a match for them, working as one, flanking and driving, whirling and leading, drawing the beasts one way and then collapsing on them in coordinated rushes. One dragon was cut down. Then another. The wing-clipped dragon was last to fall, but fall it did. The enraged Fury pulled back, snarling and spitting as she withdrew into the gloom of the pre-dawn skies.

I leaned, shaking, against the stone wall. It was over.

With the dragons dispatched and the Fury retreating, the Elves warily gathered at the edge of the ruins, and I stared in awe. The Carafey were slightly built, the men and women all roughly my own height. The Elves by contrast were massive. While the men were noticeably taller and broader than the women, they were all well over six feet with strong frames of sculpted muscles, their pointed ears less dramatic than the Carafey’s tasseled ones but just as elegant. Their legendary hair and skin were no less striking, the former various shades of silver and white, the latter the pale gold of a low moon. Their jewel-bright eyes ranged from sapphire to amethyst, except for the man with the white leather armor whose eyes were emerald green.

They were scuffed with scrapes and bruises, everyone bleeding from somewhere, but they laughed and joked as they bound up their wounds, some remaining at watch on horseback as they did so, their gazes ever alert and sweeping their surroundings. None had fallen. They had seen me but hadn’t spoken to me, and my lipreading had only caught snatches. For all the tearing talons and fire, the horses were almost completely unscathed, and I wondered if they were even flesh and blood.

A form appeared directly in front of me, slight and agile with tall, elegantly-tasseled ears.

I blinked, and my heart lurched. Ayrk! It couldn’t be. But there he stood in the gathering dawnlight, beautiful and impossible and heroic. I wondered if I was dreaming. I wondered if I was dead.

And that’s when the black dragon loomed out of the shadows, jaws gaping, expanding chest glowing dull red as its ember stirred, the Fury hovering just behind with a smirk.

I didn’t think. I just reacted.

Rule Number Three: Never Scream.

I screamed.

I’d always assumed that Ayrk’s Rule Number Three was as much due to the Carafey’s sensitive ears as to the fact that screams tended to draw dangers rather than aid. And so at approximately twenty-two years of age, I had never in living memory actually screamed. I wouldn’t have even recognized the sound as mine had I heard it. Except that I did recognize the sound. It was impossible not to.

Because my scream was a Fury’s scream, raw and primal.

I felt my vision going black, and I dug my fingernails into my palms sharply enough to draw blood, the pricks of pain clearing my sight and my head.

Ayrk hit the ground, his head turning to the side, and I saw that it was Aazari. Of course it was Aazari. His hands were covering his ears, fangs flashing in a grimace.

Something was happening to the dragon, the ember in its chest flaring brilliantly and then splitting in two behind its scales. The dragon writhed and thrashed on the ground, screaming. A silver sword sliced through air, through shadow and scale, severing the beast’s head and ending its agony.

The Fury stared at me for a brief and endless moment and then launched into the sky, elven arrows streaking after her, embedding themselves into her scaly clothes and tough skin, but they didn’t stop her. Long after she vanished, I could still feel the weight of her black eyes. Furies tended to show little emotion besides hate and rage, but she had looked… startled? Curious? Afraid? She wasn’t alone.

The Elves were staring now too, and I had never been so terrified or so confused. What had just happened?

Aazari was rising slowly.

“Are you all right? What are you doing here?” I expected him to flinch away from me as I helped him to his feet, but he didn’t. He didn’t even look surprised.

“I’m their tracker,” he answered, rubbing at his ears. “They hired me to scout for them. Why are you here?”

My shoulders twitched helplessly.

“Never mind,” he said. “That’s a stupid question.”

I didn’t volunteer that I came here a lot, but the salvage I brought back made it obvious.

He looked at me. Really looked at me. There was something there I’d never seen before. Pity? Compassion? Exasperation?

“Why did you scream?” He signed the words, his back to the Elves. He had never signed to me before. I hadn’t even known he knew how.

“I don’t know,” I signed in reply. “I saw the dragon behind you. And you looked like… All I could think of was Ayrk. I couldn’t let it happen again.” I massaged my temples, feeling scared and young and stupid. “What happened?” I whispered. “I don’t understand.” I didn’t really expect an answer, but the muscles in his jaw twitched as he considered something.

“Ayrk died because of you.”

The words cut, but it’s not like I hadn’t heard them before. Ayrk had been well liked. His death had been mourned and placed squarely at my feet with just cause. A dragon had seen me, gone after me with surprising single-minded focus, and Ayrk had thrown himself between us. He had been scorched and carried off. All we’d ever found was a charred, blood-soaked boot. I swallowed back the tears and turned away.

Aazari wasn’t finished though. “But not in the way that you think. He chose his own path. You didn’t. Ayrk knew what you were from the beginning. The whole family did. There was never a grand plan to take you to the Elves’ learning center.”

That stopped me cold.

“The plan was always for him to turn you over to the Elven army. Ayrk just couldn’t bring himself to do that to a child. So Father let him keep you as a pet to see if the evil could be trained out of you. To see if you could be made useful. Mother and I couldn’t see the point in making you think you were part of the family when you were always intended to be given to the Elves like a prisoner or a piece of salvage when Father judged it time.”

The muffled world roared in my ears in a surge of white noise, like a waterfall inside my head. The landscape reeled around me, and I thought I might be sick. It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t be. Father. My beloved Ayrk. But that scream hadn’t been a lie. I stared at Aazari, searching his face. His expression was frank, not cruel. He had never been cruel. He wasn’t trying to hurt me, I could see that plainly. He was only telling me what I should have been told from the beginning. I suddenly wondered if I’d always had it backward—if the only one who’d shown me true kindness was the aloof, annoying man in front of me. Everything was upside down.

“What… what am I then?” I forgot to sign.

Aazari shrugged. “One of their projects. Some kind of Human-Fury hybrid.”

I was definitely going to be sick.

The Elves were gathering closer, eyeing me warily. They didn’t seem to be about to murder me, but with them, I’d never see it coming, and it was probably better that way.

“Well,” said one of the twins, gripping his sword with a casual strength that was more menacing for its nonchalance. “What is this, do you suppose?”

“A secret weapon,” said the other, sapphire eyes glimmering.

“Yes,” said a steely elfmaiden with hair of frosted pewter. “But whose? The humans’ or the Furies’?”

“Whose indeed,” echoed the elder, fixing me with her shining amethyst gaze.

The elf in the white armor watched me intently and said nothing.

Everything I thought I knew about myself fractured into a mosaic.

Whose indeed.

I wasn’t just one of the two races that had broken the world. I was both of them.