Finn felt it instantly. "Opportunities like this do not repeat themselves because you feel unready."
My jaw tightened. "You think I'm scared."
"I know you are scared. You would be an idiot not to be."
I almost snapped at that. But I didn't.
Because fear had nothing to do with whether he was wrong.
The dragon breathed again, and the air shifted warmly through the chamber. A faint scrape came with it from somewhere beneath one folded wing, scale against stone.
My mouth had gone dry all over again.
"This is madness."
Finn was silent for a moment.
"Astralon burned because you were weak."
The words struck hard and low.
"I know."
"The lion left you dying because you were weak."
My hand tightened around the sword until my knuckles ached.
"I know."
"Nate died while you lived because you were weak."
That one landed like a knife.
I shut my eyes for one second, not long enough to miss anything important, just long enough to stop the chamber from spinning around the memory.
When I opened them, my gaze went first to the dragon. Then to the fruit.
"I know," I said again, quieter this time.
Finn did not soften.
"If you want to stop being weak," he said, "then at some point you stop waiting for power to arrive in a safe shape."
I hated how well he understood where to strike.
Because he was right.
Because every part of me knew he was right.
The goal wasn't just to survive the road to Sylarion. It wasn't just to limp into an academy and hope training made me into something different eventually. I wanted more than that. Needed more than that. Needed to become stronger, faster, harder to kill. Needed enough power one day that the next monster like the lion wouldn't get to decide whether I lived or died by mere whim.
And there it was. Hanging within reach of a risk I had no right to survive.
I studied the chamber more carefully.
Distance.
That was the first thing.
From where I stood to the dragon's flank, farther than I had thought at first, but not impossibly far. Beyond that, the shelf of stone where the tree grew. The dragon lay angled slightly away from it, one wing stretched partway across the nearer side of the chamber. The fruit sat above the line of that wing, maybe three body lengths from the nearest part of the dragon's torso.
Not close enough to feel safe.
Close enough to feel suicidal.
I forced myself to look at the dragon properly, not as an impossible terror but as a problem.
The breathing was slow. Deep. Measured. Each inhale lifted the chest and one folded wing slightly before the weight settled again on the exhale. There was a pause between breaths, not long, but there.
The floor between me and the tree was the next problem.
Not smooth. Uneven stone broken by scattered bones, fragments of scale, and patches of loose grit. Plenty of ways to make noise if I stepped wrong. Plenty of ways to die for clumsiness.
I lowered my gaze to the sword in my hand.
Too long. Too likely to scrape.
I crouched slowly and set it down behind a narrow pillar of stone near the chamber entrance where I could still snatch it if everything went wrong in the first few seconds and I needed the comfort of pretending steel mattered here.
Leaving it behind felt wrong.
Necessary, but wrong.
I flexed my empty fingers.
The dragon did not stir.
"Breathing pattern," Finn said. "Watch it."
"I am."
"Then do it better."
I glared inwardly and obeyed.
Inhale. Lift. Heat drifting outward.
Exhale. Settle. A faint low rumble deep in the chest.
Pause.
Again.
My own breathing was too fast by comparison. I made myself slow it. Not to match the dragon, nothing in me wanted that, but enough that I wasn't shaking quite so badly.
The bones around the chamber kept catching my eye.
A shattered skull with horns broken clean off near the base. A spine twice the length of my body lying in a cracked curve beneath the dragon's tail. Plates of armoured hide from some creature I could not name. Strong monsters, Finn had not needed to say it. The evidence shouted it.
The hunting beast outside had feared this place because it knew what hunted here.
So did I now.
"Still want to leave?" Finn asked.
"Yes."
"Good. Go anyway."
I let out a slow breath through my nose.
Astralon. Smoke. My mother's face. My father's broken body. Nate pinned in the air. The lion's paw through flesh. My own blood on broken floors. The road. The forest. The thing outside that I had only escaped by luck.
And beyond all of it, Sylarion. Training. Power. The chance to stop being prey.
My gaze settled on the fruit and stayed there.
"I hate you," I muttered.
"I know."
That would have almost been funny in another life.
I rose very slowly from my crouch.
The chamber seemed to feel it immediately, though nothing changed. The same warm dry breath. The same silence. The same impossible weight sleeping at the center of it all.
I took one careful step forward.
No sound.
Another.
This close to the dragon, the heat became more noticeable. Not burning. Just present, carried with each breath over the stone. The smell of scale sharpened too, dry, mineral, faintly metallic, layered over the blood scent of old kills.
I kept my eyes moving between the ground and the dragon's chest.
Inhale. Move when it rose.
Pause. Freeze.
Exhale. One more step.
The distance disappeared painfully slowly.
A loose chip of bone lay directly in my path. I crouched just enough to move it aside with two fingers and nearly swore when it clicked softly against the stone. The dragon's nearest foreclaw twitched.
My whole body froze.
The chamber held still around me. My heartbeat felt loud enough to wake the dead.
The dragon breathed out.
Settled.
Did not wake.
I waited three full breaths before moving again.
The tree stood only a few steps away now.
Up close it looked even stranger. The bark carried a silver sheen like moonlight caught in wood grain. Its leaves were cool green edged in pale gold. No dust clung to them, no cave grime, as though the whole thing rejected the chamber's filth by existing. The fruit hung at about chest height from one narrow branch, heavy enough to bend it slightly downward.
I stood close enough now to reach for it.
I didn't.
Not yet.
Because directly beyond the tree, one folded edge of the dragon's wing lay stretched across the stone like a dark wall of scaled leather and bone. Close enough now that I could make out the individual scales, layered, hard, each one bigger than the scale I had found in the passage. One carried an old white scar the length of my forearm. Another reflected the dimness with a deep copper-black sheen.
One wrong move.
One breath mistimed.
One small sound.
I looked at the fruit.
Then at the dragon.
Then at the fruit again.
My fingers curled slowly at my side.
"The next movement decides it," Finn said.
I swallowed.
The fruit seemed brighter now, though maybe that was only because it held my whole attention. Strength. A deeper well. A real beginning. Everything I wanted condensed into something I could carry in one hand, if I survived touching it.
The dragon breathed in.
Heat brushed over my face.
I waited.
The breath released in a slow long stream. The wing settled a fraction lower.
I reached up, hand shaking only slightly now, and wrapped my fingers around the profound spirit fruit.
And in that suspended instant, with the dragon sleeping beside me and death close enough to hear breathe, I understood with perfect clarity that the next sound in this cavern might decide whether I lived to become stronger…
or died exactly as weak as I had always feared I was.