They stepped down into the basin. Ash puffed around their boots with each step. The air grew warmer, thickened.
Katsu wiped a bead of sweat from his brow. Odd – the morning had been biting cold.
A whisper skittered across the back of his mind. Not Leviathan's voice, but something older. A rasp like scales over stone.
—flesh…—
He froze. "Did you hear—"
Maedra shook her head. "The bones remember hunger," she said. "Ignore it. If you feed it attention, it will feed on you."
Easy for her to say. He'd been walking with a demon in his head for weeks; now he had to pretend a dragon's ghost wasn't licking his mind.
They wove between rib bones like walking through the ruins of a cathedral. The mist hugged their ankles. At the basin's heart, just below the dragon's left claw, a fissure yawned. Green light seeped from within, pulsing like a heartbeat.
Maedra stopped at its edge. "We leave the sunlight here," she said quietly. "From here on, use no flame. No bright spells. Anything that flickers draws the leeches."
"Leeches?" Katsu asked, unwillingly imagining creatures the size of his arm.
She nodded once. "Mana feeders. They cling to power like ticks. They will swarm to your aura if you let it flare."
Leviathan's amusement shifted to irritation. I do not share.
Katsu tugged his cloak tighter. "So how do we see?"
Maedra lifted her hand. Tiny orbs of pale blue light bloomed from between her fingers. Cold illumination – closer to moonlight than fire – spread across the fissure, revealing a stair carved into stone, leading down into the dragon's skeleton.
"Cave diving into a corpse," he muttered. "Great."
They descended.
The stairs spiraled along the inside of a massive rib, curling deeper into the bone. The walls glistened with crystals, veins of green and gold that pulsed faintly. Ancient scales, Leviathan whispered. Greed fossilized. Her tone had changed; less hungry now, more… respectful? No. Thoughtful.
He brushed his fingers against a crystal as he passed. It was warm. Thirst tugged at his mana, like the stone wanted to drink him. He jerked his hand away. The hunger whispered again, louder.
—power… feed…—
He gritted his teeth and kept walking. Maedra moved ahead of him, light in her steps despite the heavy air. There was a fluidity to her movements he'd noticed before. She belonged in places like this, where every sound echoed, where the past pressed in on you like weight. He… did not. He'd grown up in wide halls and snow‑covered courtyards. Underground felt wrong.
After what felt like forever, the staircase opened into a cavernous chamber. Katsu sucked in a breath.
They were inside the dragon's chest.
Ribs rose around them in a perfect dome, curving high overhead, draped in cascading stalactites formed from dried dragon blood. The floor was smooth bone, interrupted by knots of rock where organs once sat. In the center of the chamber, anchored between two ribs, hung a shard the size of a man.
It looked like glass. Its surface mirrored the pale blue light, reflecting fragmented images of the chamber. Veins of deep green threaded through it, pulsing in time with some distant, forgotten beat. It radiated cold.
Katsu took an involuntary step closer.
"What is it?" he whispered.
Maedra's voice echoed softly. "A Dragonheart shard. When a dragon dies, its core crystallizes. Most split into thousands of scales and scatter. This one… refused. It anchored itself. This shard holds the last promise of Shizune Nori."
He looked back at her sharply. "My mother left her promise inside a dragon? How was that even possible?"
Maedra's lips twitched, almost a smile. "She was Velthra. Rules bent around her."
The Leviathan stirred, colder now. She was always meddling.
"To claim it," Maedra continued, "you must touch it. Let it taste your mana. If you are truly the Heir, it will answer you. If you are not—"
"I get eaten?"
Her gaze didn't waver. "It will take from you until you are bones like these."
Katsu swallowed. Of course. Reach in and maybe die. Simple. He stared at the shard. His reflection stared back, distorted. He saw his pale hair, the streak of darker black his father had brushed back with calloused fingers; he saw his own eyes, too green by this world's standards; he saw the faint scar along his jaw from training. He didn't see Micah from Earth anymore. That startled him.
Leviathan's voice curled around his spine.
The heart holds greed, but it is also a mirror. Show it what you want, and it will give what it can. Show it your doubt, and it will devour.
He flexed his fingers again, feeling mana prickle beneath the skin. "Stay close," he muttered.
Where else would I go?
He stepped forward.
The shard seemed to hum louder as he approached. His breath fogged in the cold air. He reached out, hesitated.
Memories flashed—his father's dying words, Kairos' steady hand on his shoulder.
Virenth's warning about enemies, Mari's quiet loyalty, Maedra's calculating kiss.
An old life in another world.
Hands on a controller.
Nights staring at glowing screens.
Loneliness. Hope.
He pressed his palm to the Dragonheart.
Cold fire shot through his veins.
The shard was ice and lightning and hunger all at once.
Mana roared up to meet it, and for an instant, he felt himself split.
Half of him drawn toward the shard's greed, half pulled back by something older inside him.
The Leviathan roared.
Not aloud.
It wasn't a sound anyone else could hear. It was a surge that shook his bones, a wall of emerald envy slamming between him and the shard's pull.
Her presence flooded his mind, wrapping around his own mana, coiling possessively.
Mine.
The shard shuddered. Light flared, green turning to white, then back again. For a heartbeat, Katsu saw something in the reflection. A woman with long silver hair standing on a frozen lake. A sword at her side, a demon rising behind her. Her eyes—his eyes—met his.
Shizune? he thought, breath caught.
Then the vision blinked out.
The shard pulsed once, hard enough to make his teeth clack. Then it went still beneath his hand, cold but no longer biting.
It felt… familiar. Like holding Mari's hand as a child. Like gripping his father's wrist when learning to spar. Like the Leviathan's coil when she chose him.
Maedra let out a breath he hadn't realized she was holding. "It accepted you."
"How can you tell?"
"Because we're not ash," she said drily. "And because… look."
Katsu looked down. Tendrils of light crawled up his arm from where his palm touched the shard, tracing veins, forming twisting marks along his skin. They were faint, more suggestion than tattoo, shaped like interlocking scales. They burned for a moment, then cooled. When he lifted his hand, they faded to a pale shimmer.
"That," Maedra said, "is a key."
"A key to what?"
"Your mother's vault," Leviathan whispered, almost fond. Out loud, Maedra echoed the words. "A vault beneath Orador. Only someone bearing that mark can open it."
Katsu stared at his arm. "So I get this and then we go… to the place I just accused you of taking me to?"
"It will be different," Maedra replied. "You will not be a visitor. You will be a claimant."
He let out a laugh that was more air than amusement. "And all I had to do was fondle a dragon's heart."
"Fondle?" Leviathan purred. Her amusement returned. You always did have a way with sacred relics.
Before he could retort, a low vibration rolled through the chamber. Dust drifted from the ribs above. The ground shivered again, more insistent. A faraway scrape echoed through the bone halls.
Maedra went still. "The leeches."
As if summoned by the sound, shadows detached from the walls. They were small at first—blotches of glistening black crawling toward them across bone and rock. Then dozens more. Hundreds. They covered the floor like a living carpet, each one a slug‑like creature with too many teeth and no eyes, drawn to the residue of mana they'd disturbed.
"Move," Maedra said, hand already reaching for the knife at her belt. "Do not let them latch. If they do, cut them off."
She sprinted back toward the tunnel. Katsu cursed, snatched the shard with his free hand and tucked it under his cloak. Cold bit through the fabric. He spun and followed. The leeches flowed faster, drawn by the surge of mana he'd released. One flung itself at his leg, mouth open.
"Katsu!" Leviathan barked.
He acted without thinking. Mana flared—not green, but a cold, clear blue. Water burst from his palm, a whip of liquid slicing the leech cleanly in half. The pieces writhed for a second, then dissolved into black ash.
The movement sent another ripple of mana through the air. More leeches hissed, mouths widening.
"This is why," he muttered, racing after Maedra. "No magic, she says, oh, by the way, everything here wants to drink you."
She didn't answer, focused on the climb. The stairs seemed longer than before. Leeches poured from cracks, from hollows in the bone. Katsu slashed water, then knives when the water dwindled. One latched onto his boot, its teeth biting through leather. Pain flared.
He grit his teeth and drove his dagger down, prying it off. It popped free with a wet sound, leaving a patch of smoking leather. Another landed on his shoulder. He ripped it away with a curse, feeling its teeth tear skin.
"Out!" Maedra shouted, voice echoing up the shaft. "Go, go, go!"
Light broke above them—the cold blue glow of Maedra's guiding spheres. Katsu pushed up the last steps. As soon as he cleared the fissure, he hurled himself onto the ash. Maedra followed, slashing at a line of leeches writhing toward them. She drew a circle in the ash with her knife, muttering under her breath. Sigils flared around the fissure. The leeches at its mouth shrieked, recoiling as if burned. Those still inside the stairs twisted and fell back, unable to pass the boundary.
The world went still.
Katsu lay panting on the ground, heart hammering, arm stinging from shallow bites. The shard beneath his cloak thrummed softly against his ribs. He looked at Maedra. Her dark braid was loose, a few strands of hair clinging to the sweat on her face. She met his gaze and, for the first time since he'd met her, smiled.
"You did well," she said simply.
He laughed despite himself, breathless and shaky. "What, because I'm not leech food?"
"Because you listened when it mattered," she replied. "And because the dragon's heart didn't kill you."
Leviathan hummed approval. For once, we agree.
He rolled onto his back and stared up at the skeleton arching overhead. Clouds slid past beyond the broken ribs, slow and indifferent. Somewhere out there, Riven was circling the basin with a Behemoth. Somewhere beyond that, Kairos and Virenth read reports and counted enemies. Somewhere far south, an Academy pretended the north was tame.
He flexed his fingers. The faint scale pattern on his arm shimmered in the light.
"All right," he said. "Let's go rob my mother's vault."
Maedra's smile widened by a fraction.
"Welcome to the north, heir of Velthra."
And far below them, deep within the dragon's bones, something ancient.
Older than Greed, older than Envy.
Opened a single, slitted eye.