Draven Ashborne's Arc

Chapter 35 of 17

Draven reached the floor of the dark keep. His six-powered blade hummed in his grip. Behind him came the others, spread wide in their circle as Eldrich had taught them. Malakorax rose ahead, huge and black, darkness dripping from its scales like slow water. Draven raised his sword to strike. Then the voice came, and it did not come through the air. It came inside his skull. Draven, it said. The word landed like a stone in still water. You fight your own blood. I made that blood. I can end the tearing. He felt the truth of it press against him. Every ten seconds of pain, every scale ripping through his skin for three years. The primordial offered to take it all. Turn your blade on the ones behind you. Do it, and you keep the beast without the cost. You rule it. It serves you. Draven's arm shook. The offer was not a lie. He knew that the way he knew his own name. Full control. No more waking to scales he mistook for burns. No more showing someone the truth and watching them walk away. He looked at Seraphina across the circle. Her white light burned in her chest, steady, a thing she could never shut off. She had learned to hold her beast. She had never once asked the dark to make it easy. "Draven." Aurelius spoke from his left. He did not know what the creature said, but he saw Draven falter. "Whatever it offers, it took something first." His golden eyes held steady. "It burned my teacher alive and called it clean. It gives nothing. It only takes and names it a gift." "He's stalling," Aldric said, flat. "It talks because it fears the six. Six powers, one edge. Nothing else scares it." Briar's voice came soft and sure. "You already chose, Draven. Weeks ago. You chose to hold your blood yourself." Celestia said nothing, but her green light reached across the circle and steadied his hand. The voice pushed harder. Answer. Before the doubt roots. Draven felt the doubt reaching for him, thin and cold. He did not let it settle. He thought of the scales on his forearm, the pain of every change, and he did not wish it gone. It was his. He had carried it three years without selling anyone to be free of it. "No," Draven said aloud. He gripped his dragon blood the way he'd learned, through his love for the six behind him, and held it still. The doubt broke apart. "I keep the cost. I keep them." He swung. The six-powered blade split the dark and bit into Malakorax's foreleg. The primordial screamed, a sound that cracked the stone floor. Black blood hissed where the light touched it. The creature reared back, wounded for the first time. The voice went silent. Draven set his feet, and the circle closed tight behind him.