By evening, I was in a carriage with Arvid, leaving Arpa. Though I had set my mind on travelling beyond the city's walls one day to see the world beyond them — that day had not been meant to come this soon, and certainly not like this, with such haste driving us forward.
Even Arpa itself — the great city, the very heart of the Selon empire — I had barely explored. Even within the first wall alone, there was so much I had yet to visit. The temple district, the ruins district, and then there was the Garden of Moonlight. An entire garden composed solely of white, silver, and pale-coloured flowers, arranged so that under the night sky they caught the moonlight and seemed to shimmer, as though the petals themselves were made of crushed stars. According to Aathi, a lake sat at the heart of the garden, its shores alive with fireflies after dark. At night, it must have been something worth stopping your breath for.
It was, apparently, the most romantic place in all of Arpa — the first choice for lovers seeking the perfect evening, and the most common site of proposals in the city. Every girl who had grown up here carried some version of the same dream: to receive a proposal there, beneath the moonlight, surrounded by silver flowers.
I exhaled a quiet sigh of defeat.
I had wanted to go with Arvid. Just once. I had imagined it — the two of us walking the paths between the pale blooms, the fireflies drifting above the water's surface, the kind of night that would be easy to keep. I supposed that would have to wait. There were considerably more pressing matters demanding my attention at the moment. Turning into a dragon, for example.
As we crossed through the second wall and continued toward the third, I looked down at my hands. The twitching had spread. It now occupied both of them — several fingers on each hand jumping at irregular intervals without any cooperation from my will. And worse than that, I could feel the sensation moving. It had travelled from my fingertips to my wrists, from my wrists to my elbows, a low crawling awareness of muscle shifting beneath skin, moving on its own terms rather than mine. Before long, I suspected it would reach the rest of me. The thought made my chest tighten with a fear I couldn't quite put words to.
Aiona herself had said the transformation was painful and grueling — and she had been born a half-dragon. She had come into that nature with it already woven into her blood. But me? A mundane human woman whose only claim to dragon blood was an ancestor who had drunk it, long before I ever existed? I doubted the process would be any gentler in my case.
I raised my head and looked across to where Arvid sat opposite me, a scroll open in his hands. He was studying it carefully — the route to our destination.
The High Tower of Fonta.
Until today, I had never heard that name. I hadn't known the place existed. It did not belong to the Selon empire — it predated it. After the fall of the Kingdom of Heinnas, a new power had risen in the west, a people with vast and advanced knowledge who had come with the intention of reclaiming what had been lost. Their kingdom was called Youru, and though it never reached the height of Heinnas at its peak, they built it with ambition and craft and a firm belief in their own permanence.
As proof of that permanence, they had raised monuments across their kingdom — structures built to announce to the ages that they had once been there. The High Tower of Fonta was one of the few that had survived the civil war that eventually broke Youru apart and gave rise to the Selon empire in its place.
The tower was hollow at its core, encased in walls of thick and unyielding stone. It stood so tall it seemed to be reaching for something — a monument to the ambition of the people who had built it, their silent argument that they could touch the sky. Which made it, as Arvid had pointed out without a great deal of ceremony, the perfect place for a dragon to emerge.
I couldn't argue with the logic.
As if in agreement, both my hands chose that moment to spasm at once. The pain made me grimace before I could stop myself.
"Are you alright?" Arvid looked up from the scroll immediately.
"The spasms are spreading," I told him, trying to keep my expression composed.
"Hold on a little longer. We'll be there in three hours." He set the scroll aside and moved from his seat across from me to the space beside me without hesitation, taking my hands in his and beginning to massage them with steady, careful pressure. And then — strangely, impossibly — the spasms stopped. As though my body had simply recognized his touch and chosen, on its own, to settle.
My eyes went wide.
Well. Would you look at that.
But then my stomach decided it was tired of being left out of the evening's humiliations, and let out a growl so profound and so thoroughly audible that it would have carried through a closed door. Heat rushed straight to my face.
Arvid let out a low, deep chuckle.
He had already witnessed me tearing into a lamb bone that morning with both hands and no concern whatsoever for dignity — which had perhaps been the greater humiliation — and he had drawn his own quiet conclusions from it. Before we departed, he had spoken to the kitchens himself and arranged for a selection of meat dishes to accompany us. Which was why the interior of the carriage was filled with the warm, sweet aroma of roasted chicken and pork and lamb, curling through the air and doing absolutely nothing for my composure.
"It seems my wife is hungry," he announced to no one in particular, with the tone of a man resolved to address a practical problem. "So I must feed her."
He reached across to the platter on his side and lifted one of the parcels wrapped in steamed banana leaves, beginning to open it without further preamble. As the wrapping parted, the scent that escaped was enough to reduce me to something embarrassingly close to a starving creature — rich, savoury, impossibly good. A juicy chicken leg came into view.
Rather than hand it to my useless, twitching hands, he simply brought it toward my mouth to feed me directly.
Which was, somehow, even more humiliating than the growling stomach.
Every nerve in my body was screaming at me to open my mouth and eat, instinct overriding any remaining sense of self-possession. But I held it back. I kept my mouth shut and said nothing, my jaw set.
Arvid sighed. He lowered the chicken leg.
"Just eat it, Rhia." His voice was quiet and entirely without judgment. "I promise you, I'm not thinking anything unkind. Do you know how relieved I was watching you eat this morning? You've always eaten so little — your appetite has worried me since you arrived. The southern dishes are different from what you grew up with, and I was afraid you simply weren't enjoying the food. I had already started looking into finding a northern cook, someone who could prepare dishes more familiar to you, because I didn't know how else to help. That is how much it concerned me." He paused, and then brought the chicken leg back up. "So please. Eat. I mean nothing by it."
I looked at him for a moment.
Then I opened my mouth and ate.