Noah pressed himself flat against the cave wall and did not breathe.
The passage he had tumbled through opened into a chamber large enough that the ceiling disappeared entirely into darkness overhead. He was at the edge of it, half-concealed behind a natural outcropping of rock where the tunnel wall curved outward before the space opened up. He had not moved since landing. Had not made a sound. Just pressed himself into the stone and looked.
She was there.
The wyvern stood in the center of the chamber with her back partially turned, her attention directed toward the far end of the space where a cluster of shapes sat in shallow depressions in the cave floor. The electrical charge cycling through her scales had settled from the frantic pace of the chase, running now at something closer to a resting rhythm, slow arcs of blue light tracing from her neck down through her torso and along the length of her tail. The crystalline spines at the tail's end were folded, not fanned.
