Burn(56)

The change.

It was an understatement to say she had not expected that.

The pain had been extraordinary, like she was being skinned alive, which perhaps she had been. She felt as if she had exploded from the inside, stretched beyond what was possible for her meager human body.

That was what had made it so confusing. Even in the intensity of the pain—which had lasted what felt like a lifetime even though it had clearly passed in an instant—she had also felt . . . liberation.

All her life she had been driven by a devotion matched only by its accompanying rage. She wanted to destroy men for dragons, knowing all the while it meant her own destruction. A self-hate so grand it was almost theology on its own. Even so, she’d hoped for her survival somehow. She knew what the Spur was capable of—there was no greater scholar of it in the world than she—she knew it offered an escape, but to another world entirely. Which was a difficult pill to swallow. She would save one world for her beloveds and be exiled to another without them, no credit for her heroism, only the fact of it, which no one would ever know. Unless she could convince the dragons in this new world, make herself indispensable to them, show them what one committed Believer could accomplish. They would know the truth of it, she felt. They would have to.

There had been another option, an unlikely one, which embarrassed her to think of now . . .

But then something wonderful had happened.

She was now dragon. She was now an enormous, red, fire-breathing dragon. She inhaled to try it and made herself cough and cough, the aches ringing out like bells through her enormous body.

She inhaled again, more slowly this time, feeling the fire organ in her chest engage—she knew how to do this, as instinctively as she had known how to fly—and breathed out a blast so strong and hot, it not only melted the top of the glacier but the rocks below, the orange glow of molten lava reflecting back up to her in a brief shine, before the perilously low temperatures froze even the steam, causing a flurry of snow around her.

See her strength. See her incredible dragon strength.

She was not cold. Dragons carried their own heating system, did they not? She could wait up here until the break healed, which she also seemed to know instinctively would not take long. A dragon with a broken foreleg was not a dragon. Their evolution would have made the healing of bones top priority.

So she would wait. And then she would conquer.

She did not know how yet—and that the only other dragon she smelled was that puny little blue who had interfered (and how her nose was like a second brain all of a sudden! How marvelous! How impossibly blind she had always been!) was a matter of some small concern. She would have to seek them out, wherever they might be hiding. She would have to . . .

She sniffed again. And again.

Well, now. That was unexpected.

There were no other dragons to lead to war over the humans here.

But then again, now that she thought of it, that meant there were no other dragons to share power with after the war was finished.

Fate took away, but fate also gave.

She inhaled another deep breath, not for fire, but to gather herself and her wobbly wings. She flew straight up from the mountaintop, into the clouds, pushing through into open air.

The sun was setting, nearly gone in the far western horizon. To her east lay the night, stars already a-twinkle. Far to the southwest, she saw—and distantly heard—an airplane. It seemed commercial rather than military. Any passenger looking this direction might spot her dark redness against the white of the clouds and wonder what they were hallucinating.

She laughed to herself, then scanned the sky above.

It was empty. Nothing blinked. No satellite flew overhead.

That might not mean anything, of course. It might be in its orbit on the other side of the planet, it might have failed at launch, or that launch might be tomorrow or next month or next year. The point was, she had no satellite yet with which to start a war.

So war would have to come from somewhere else.

She smiled to herself, turning back to the mountain to rest some more and consider what had happened to her.

She had, against all odds and after many years, accomplished the impossible: nuclear blasts would kill a dragon, but only if hit directly. They were immune to the radiation that fell out afterwards. So let men bomb one another into oblivion in a war she had worked so hard to start. With the planet rid of humans, dragons could fly free again, fly free as they obviously should, the top of all creation.

In all these accomplishments, though, there had been the embarrassing other option. Oh, how she had dreamt, deep in her heart of hearts, never spoken aloud to another soul, how she might be the sole survivor. She would go to the bosom of dragons as the bombs were falling and she would tell them what she had done. They would listen to her this time, these beasts she worshipped but who ignored her devotion. They would protect her, shield her, because they would finally see her for what she always knew she was. She was more than just a Believer (and hadn’t she been right? Just look at her now. Look at her.) and they would know it, too, the human who had given them this unparalleled gift.

Who had given them not just her faith, not just her life, but the whole world.

They would smile on her. They would grant her her dearest wish. They could do it. There were stories of it happening. Stories over the millennia (but none very recent) of humans who had done great service to dragons and dragons who had done the greatest of dragon magic in return.