21. Thalia

TWENTY-ONE

THALIA

T halia spoke to Drake telepathically while strapped to a stone table. The top of her tunic and fabric near her lower back stuck to her in a puddle of sopping sweat as she strained against the metal chains.

Pyralis stood in a shadowy corner, flipping through the literature on Creation Sorceresses under dancing marigold light. When war began waging, cannons sounding, deafening pounding of stone, wails, and screeching woe, he raised his head, smirking.

He was awash in a darkly ethereal luminance that made Thalia try to shrink away.

"Oh yes, the war has begun!" he exclaimed, snapping the book closed. "Your king is walking into my trap with the ease of a man kicked by a horse."

He laughed a strange cackle, and Thalia tugged at the restraints. Her mouth was dry, her voice scratching like sandpaper over her vocal cords.

"Why don't you just kill me?" she screamed, the chains rattling against the stone table dumbly. "Poisoning me, pinning me down like this, what are you waiting for, you traitorous demon ?"

Thalia didn't really have a scheme in mind. The room was arid and stifling, the medicinal potion that he'd nearly smothered her with having stained her tongue and lips with a hideous sour taste. She writhed on the table desperate to believe that her anger would compel more of her dormant abilities to rush to the surface.

Pyralis snarled and wormed his way to her like a slippery insect. He hovered his ugly face over her own, breath rancid of decomposition. She recoiled.

"What a silly woman you are," he said, drumming his fingers against his hollow cheek. "You must be as aware as I am of the lore that the Creation Sorceress's essence can be distilled into a potent source of acute, unimaginable power, are you not?"

Thalia shook her head violently. She didn't enjoy how close he was standing. The reeking stench of his breath and black-hearted presence was enough to make the witch vomit.

But she caught something in his distant stare – uncertainty.

She stopped struggling, her breath heaving out more hot air to distort the room.

"I am not sure that sounds right. I have not heard it being so."

Pyralis was fixated on the dark beyond her. He spoke whimsically, his fingers crawling musingly along his cheeks.

"To be frank with you, pretty girl, I am not entirely aware of how to obtain such a distillation. I have read all of the literature that exists on the matter. Lore is all I have found. Accounts of the successful procedure… I am afraid…"

Pyralis blinked, catching himself lost in reverie. Thalia tried to take advantage of his candor.

"There have been no accounts?" she said, using the sweetest, minutely flirtatious of timbres as sounds of cannons swelled and obliterated far-off walls.

"Not quite," he remarked, narrowing his concave eyes at her. "Mythology can only be trusted to an extent, as I am sure you know. I cannot waste this chance at fulfilling the providence of my ancestors…"

He trailed off and floated his stare once again away and back into the dark.

It gave Thalia the chance to gather her thoughts and assess the interweaving of chains as they enveloped her wrists and ankles.

"So you are giving me one more chance…" she whispered, swallowing with somewhat feigned dread. "…to submit to you. To work alongside you, in favor of my demise?"

Pyralis cocked an eyebrow and peered down at the witch. She saw a flash of who the scholar was or could have been, had revenge not savaged his soul. He could have been noble, even handsome, had he not dedicated himself to a lifetime of avenging his departed forefathers.

For a flicker of a moment, Thalia sympathized with him. But then she reminded herself that the man was readying himself to eat her.

"That would be my preference, dearest one. I rather not have to kill you and…have you as my dinner."

He smiled deviously, staring off with a monstrous crazed gawk. Thalia's stomach churned.

"I certainly have not consumed as much literature as you have," Thalia went on, weaponizing a finely spun tale of her own. "But from what I have, it was abundantly clear that these stories of cannibalism are mere fables. Unfortunately, you require something that you simply do not possess."

The devilish stare vanished.

"Oh?" he mused.

"Yes," she muttered, exhilarated to see that she captured his attention. "From my brief studies and time with Sorcha, I saw that the practice of consumption by a non-sorcerer would be an exercise in futility. You see, you have to be a witch or have some form of magical prowess to harvest my essence as it leaves my body."

Her labored breathing had slowed, and Pyralis was staring at her suspiciously. Yet, a glint of credence remained.

"This is what you have…surmised?"

Thalia truly had no idea of the parables she was spinning as they poured out of her mouth. She didn't know if what she was saying was true but hoped desperately. She spotted no weapons in the shade of the underground hell and prayed that her words would keep him from searching for one.

"Not simply surmised," she swallowed again and blinked slowly, maintaining the aura of empty-headed innocence. "I know , Pyralis. If I am dead and you eat my flesh, you will have lost any opportunity to regain your position of power."

His lips had thinned out, and before Thalia could continue her blind seduction, the sounds of cannons and violent pleas came to an abrupt halt. Pyralis noticed, and glowered.

"What in the gods is going on?"

He moved frantically from the table and peered through a small patch of window with a periscope. He was muttering to himself when Thalia settled her eyes upon the bindings on her ankles, then her wrists. She morphed the incantations she mumbled under her breath to stretch the steel wide enough for her to quietly slip her bare feet out of, then easily did so with her wrists.

"Gods, they have halted . Why have they halted ?"

Pyralis was infuriated and screaming. Thalia tried to lift herself from the table and sneak away, but her balance was off from the potion and the sweltering environment. She stumbled forward, holding her hands out at the last second to keep from smashing her skull into the stone wall.

The bastard spun around, incensed. He came at her with two hands outstretched, poised to choke her.

Despite his frail appearance, Pyralis was still quite strong. It was the dragon shifter in him that allowed him to tangle his fingers into her locks, and tug as if hauling a bag of potatoes.

She screamed. Thalia tried to slap his hands away, to trip his feet so he crashed to the cobbles, but it would not do. She attempted to source her magic to fight him off, but she was highly unpracticed in the art of mystical combat.

"You bitch ," he sniveled, his arms relentlessly squirming to find her throat. "You don't know what's good for you. None of you do. You stupid sorceress ."

Thalia could barely hear him through the hot searing pain of her hair being yanked from her scalp. When he couldn't get his grip on her, he grunted, then dropped her to the floor.

Thalia landed on her swollen elbow. The pain scorched through her like a firestorm.

"Let's see how smart you are when you're dead."

The witch heard the crumbling of stone first as she winced, her skull pulsating like a giant bee sting, her elbow a maddening scratching of claws. When she looked up, she saw that Pyralis had shifted into dazzling shades of appalling sleek black and pungent green.

Pyralis did not look like his slender self in his dragon form. He had a dominating, wicked presence that made the witch's heart turn to ice.

She tried to cry out again. But Pyralis snatched her up with his talons, enfolding her in the same way Zendel had at the inn. The grip was strong and solid.

She shrieked.

Pyralis burst through what remained of the humid room and leaped into the sky. Thalia was instantly hammered with freezing rain as her body flailed viciously in the dragon's grasp, the sky a bright smear of an apocalyptic tapestry. She tried to dig her nails into the feet that cocooned her, but it was no use. The scaled skin was dense and impenetrable.

Thalia clamored, refusing to accept her fate as some sly dragon's final meal. She thought of her parents, her healing father, the mother she barely knew but who took up copious space in her heart, and the man who had come to call himself her king.

Lightning lit up the sky. The fraction of a flash revealed to her the battlefield below where bodies of dead men lay turned up to the heavens.

Drake, she lamented in her mind. Drake, find me. Wherever I am, find me. I will be yours again. I want to be yours.

The battle had commenced, but the fight had only begun.

As if kindled from a spell, Drake's glorious dragon form soared upward with heroic grace and tempo.