Under the Dragon Moon

Prologue

“Your love is a cruel beast, Beloved.”

He stood close enough for their chests to touch with every ragged breath she took. His fingers, cold and shaking and blackened with death, tripped over her cheekbone in a soft caress, tucking her hair behind her ear as if nothing was amiss. As if this morning was the same as every other they’d had. As if they weren’t both falling apart at the seams.

Could he hear her heart beating, she wondered? Could he feel where his own throbbed in harmony to it—crammed into the space between her ribs, pressed against hers like children in the womb? He’d given it away so easily—his heart. Pulled it straight from his chest, a writhing core of nothing and everything all at once. Possibility and creation within the dark pitch of it—magic capable of wonderful and terrible things. 

He’d molded it with a smile on his lips, crushed and condensed it into a small stone of bloodied scarlet. From the morning sunlight he’d crafted a chain of gold and a spiral setting from which he hung around her throat. It glittered in the light of her flames.

Devoutly he’d pressed his lips where it rested between her breasts. Trailed his tongue over the swell of them, a line of wet heat up her throat and sharp teeth upon her chin where he whispered his vows between her lips and swore to forever be hers.

Your love is a cruel beast, he said now, eyes the same shade of the heartstone she desperately clung to, glittering with sunlit tears. 

“And yours is a selfish one.”

Heavens, even now he was beautiful, dying and wasting away as he was. Made up of nothing but shadow and emptiness, backlit by the gentle rise of the morning sun. She could still make out the shape of him. The flow of his long hair as it faded into wisps on the wind, only occasionally showing the point of his ears. The sharp slope of his nose and cut of his jaw, the way his shoulders slumped as he hunched over her.

 “I would tear myself apart for you, over and over and over”—he pressed their foreheads together, one hand clutching hers to his chest as if begging her to return the heart he’d gifted so freely all those years ago—“but magic demands balance, and the betrayal against it demands consequence.”

A sob burst from her lips and she pressed into the weight of him, sure that if she tried hard enough she could join them both together completely. Her body—a prison of ugly, sour regret—and his soul—faint and slipping away with every passing moment.

 He held her closer still, the chill of him seeping into her scorched bones—a warning and a promise wrapped in one. “I told you before that you cannot mess with magic you do not understand, and for that punishment must be laid upon us both. That is the way of it. Nothing can be taken without something given in return.”

“I gave everything—“

“And you received exactly what you asked for. Perhaps it did not look as you thought it might, but magic gave what it was asked.”

“Then why demand punishment if the trade is already done?”

The edges of him grew thin as the sun began to rise above the horizon, light peeking through his scarlet eyes like a candle through a stained glass lantern. “Because you stole something that was not yours to steal.”

He cradled her cheeks in his hands, barely there now as the skies grew brighter and the last of him threatened to fade away.

“My heart will always be yours, my flame. You will destroy me over and over again, and I will love you regardless. That is my curse—my punishment. Until the day my heart is returned to where it belongs, I will be in endless suffering for your love.” He pressed a kiss to her eyelids, then to her cheeks, then her nose. “But for you my dear I give the last of me, and it will be all that you have left.”

“What—” 

He pressed a hand between her shoulder blades—no, between her wings—and panic seared through her veins. She jerked back, trying to struggle from his grip but he held her still. Her wings burned with a horrid pain, a scream building behind her teeth and spilling forth like a thunderous storm. The flames sputtered and faded away to embers, her feathers curling and splitting before the wind cast the ashen remains away.

Unable to bear the weight of the agony, she collapsed in a heap.

“You will not live as you once have. This life will be the only one you have left, for it is what you’ve taken from me.” His fingers were nothing more than wind now, pushing hair from her face as he knelt before her. She could no longer see him clearly, the slope of his nose and curve of his jaw fading into smoke. “You will live as I lived. Never aging, never dying, constantly searching for something to fill a gaping hole. Should death find his way to you, you will not avoid him as you once might have. You will have no extra tries, no new lives. Only this one. Do you understand?”

“My wings—” she choked, clawing into her shoulders, grasping at whatever remained and finding only a measly handful of red feathers. The weight she’d known her whole life was gone and she felt unbalanced. Unwhole.

“You took that which made me whole, though it was not yours to take. So I shall give what is left of it to you, and take that which makes you whole in return.”

“Please—”

“I love you, my heart. I will wait for you at the horizon’s end, if you choose to find your way back to me.” He pressed a final kiss to her lips—barely there, no more than a whispered caress—before the wind carried the last of him away.