Chapter 1 - After the Ashes

“A god can be killed, as Prism’s sacrifice reminds us of every day. When Prism is to be born again, rest assured that he will die again. I only hope the next time that our world won’t have to bleed alongside him.” - King Aegean Lapisant, The Making and the Unmaking. 

The consequence of Prism’s death lay strewn across the field. At least a thousand corpses, his sister the princess surmised. Shadowhunter Lapisant strolled through the field of gem dragon scales, which adorned the silent grave like hyacinth flowers. Her scales were not as white as they had once been, covered in fine berries of flesh as she passed. She grimaced, for though she crept carefully, she was not careful enough. 

She folded in her wings and kept her tail close to her side.  

“We’ll catch our own deaths out here. We must find him quickly.” Fossil set his jaw. When he did not parade himself around as her cousin, he played the role of a soldier. He was trained as one, if the few publicity stunts that all princes participated in counted. He winced, probably from the stench. She was certain that he was not used to the odor of death. Gem dragons loved to douse themselves in perfumes, rich scents of lavenders and roses that in no way could prepare one for a mass grave.

Don’t pretend that this is your domain, either. Shadowhunter reminded herself. Her father had been quite clear with his instruction: find the Sword of Shadows and leave. There was no time for loitering.

“I’m well aware of what a wyrm can do.” She cast her eyes out to the sea of corpses. The sword had not directly killed them. She was told that her people were spared this mercy, if such a death was the better of the two options. Only Prism had the Sword of Shadows run clean through, because only a god was worthy of its touch. After watching their god die, the gem dragons succumbed to the flames. The corpses were so burned beyond the point of recognition that little more than faint traces of their lives remained. It was their eyes that bothered her the most. Prism had those same wide eyes, her father told her. A look of surprise as if he could not believe he had been killed. A betrayal every gem dragon on that field must have felt; to have given the world a god and to be met with death. 

Just this once, she would ignore what her father said. She did not want to picture her brother’s corpse.  

“I was there, Shadow,” her cousin softly murmured.

It was not her first time hearing those words. 

“And yet you did not save him. Were you even fighting at all, or did you simply stand in the back and watch my brother be killed?” 

“That’s not fair. You know I would never idly wait around. I fought, just like everyone else.” 

Fossil’s voice floated on the wind, carried away with his thoughts. He had that distant look in his eyes, the one he got when anyone mentioned her brother’s death. He refused to speak of it. 

Rodargan soldiers swore fealty to the God of Light, and now that god was dead. She still pestered him about it, but he never answered, as if his oath forbade him to discuss it. She supposed she could give him some grace on the matter. It was not every day you saw your cousin, best friend, and god killed. Was he there with Prism at the very end? How did Fossil live with himself, knowing that he had ultimately failed to protect his charge? 

Shadowhunter found herself asking those questions as they made quick work of searching the bodies. Many were unrecognizable, their twisted forms the gnarled branches of trees, stretched thin into charred edges of brown and black. The fire dragons were noticeable from their unburnt bodies, lathered in thick and sharp rust-orange scales. They were of the mountains they hailed from, giant beasts stacked amongst the earth. She moved their massive bodies and dug out the remains of her people from underneath.

Fossil did what he could to help, though that largely consisted of keeping conversation. In his human form, he could scarcely lift a dragon’s head, much less the entire body. She was content with drowning her thoughts in his words, at least, if it meant she didn’t have to focus on finding her brother. 

“You think the fire dragons eat them?” Fossil asked. He stabbed his crystalline spear into the ground and jumped off a rock. She heard his leather boots on the hard ground and glanced his way to follow it. He hadn’t jumped off a rock; rather he had vaulted off one of the creatures. 

“I’m only saying, it’s odd they have fire in the first place, when they can just as easily kill us with their claws. It must serve a secondary purpose.”

“You’re starting to sound like my father,” she replied. The king had not been immune to the rumors. Whispers in the night, of wyrms with icy eyes and fiery breath. Exaggerated folk tales, she had said to her father. He didn’t listen. Like the rest of Lapisla, the king was enthralled by the return of fire dragons to the city and the stories of the wild they brought with them.  

“They’re dragons, no different from the rest of us,” she said. Yet, as she stood amongst her dead, she wondered if she believed it.

Firestorm won the battle with the Sword of Shadows, the only Divinity that could kill a god. How the oldest weapon of the gods had gotten into the hands of a fire dragon, of all creatures, she didn’t know. But there was no denying that darkness was drawn to itself. 

Fossil stopped in front of a corpse. The dead gem dragon looked younger in his human form. Unfortunate that he had been shifted when Prism was killed. Perhaps the terror caught in his eyes was the realization that he could not shift back. 

Behind the corpse, the trail twisted into a copse of trees against the cliff. 

“He was too young.” Fossil’s voice wavered. This is his element, not mine. If a soldier could lose confidence, then she did not want to know what awaited them.

“You don’t have to come,” her cousin said. “I can recover Prism’s body myself.” 

“And go home without you? He’ll know. ‘This is part of the job,’ he said. ‘If you are to be queen you must look your dead in the eyes. A king can make mistakes, but he must be able to face them.’” She shook her head. Whether she liked the words or not, her father was right. 

“It isn’t part of the job description to see your brother like this.” 

“My father would never mislead me.”

“I don’t like how he speaks to you, Shadow.” Her cousin frowned. “You know, you don’t have to be queen.” 

“A Lapisant must sit the throne, now more than ever.” And that Lapisant will be me. She could not tell him this, of course. Now that her brother was dead, he had an equal, if not greater, claim to the throne than her. 

“I have to do this.” She settled on her words carefully. “I have to see him.” 

Fossil nodded. He paused, as if he had more to say, but must have thought better of it and continued down the path. If this was the last road Prism had taken before he died, he hadn’t wanted to be found. 

But Prism had to be found, because there was more her father had said to her. “Find me the Sword of Shadows, and I will name you my heir.” 

Fossil clung steadily to the roots that kept the path together, his body showed no fear as the ocean swelled a hundred feet below. 

“We’re close, I can feel it.” 

“Feel what, exactly?” 

The prince stopped. He didn’t face her; perhaps he was uneasy after all. 

“Him.” Fossil’s face was grim. “I may not be able to shift, but I do not need a dragon’s eyes to see that.” 

He raised a shaky finger up to the trail of blood. 

***

They found her brother’s body amongst a bed of crimson painted weeds. Prism made for a remarkable corpse, his scales shining as brightly as the day he was born and his eyes still moist with tears. There was a singular blemish on his body, dead center on his chest and unnoticeable except to the familiar eye. It was his scar, reopened and festering with new blood, but still that same slab-streak of ink that had always been there. Such a small wound from such a large sword. 

A sword that wasn’t there. 

“Oh Prism.” She bowed down to greet him. Gently, she prodded his cheeks with her snout as if he would wake. His dead eyes were cold. They gave her no response. 

“He’s gone, Shadow.” Fossil’s face was a stone mask as if he had swallowed his grief. The voice of a soldier dawned his lips. A soldier who had failed. 

We do not have time to mourn him, she knew. Not when the weapon was in the hands of the enemy. She tried to copy her cousin’s mask. This was what it would mean to be queen. A separation from her emotions. A purge of the darkness from her body. If her father and cousin could do it so well, why couldn’t she?

“Did the fire dragons take it?” Her words caught in her throat. 

Fossil brushed his fingers on the dead grass, searching for tracks. The air was still, and the grove of trees hardly shuddered as if the copse stood lost in time. 

“Take what?’ He knelt to close Prism’s eyes and strained to lift her brother. She helped her cousin turn Prism onto his stomach, such that he could have been sleeping.  

“The Sword of Shadows. Did the fire dragons take it?” 

He shrugged. “That is the least of our concerns.” 

“Where would it have gone?” she asked, but he didn’t answer. By the look on his face, he didn’t know, either. 

Fossil was supposed to help me. She looked down at her brother. His face was smooth: deep marble skin and tufts of scales as soft and white as fallen snow. We were going to bring you home. And she was going to be queen. 

“We’ll have to come back with a larger group. A coffin must be built so the people don’t see him like this.” Fossil sniffed. He rubbed his nose and then his eyes. 

They would take their god back with them, propping him up on more statues until Lapisla was a sea of Prism. Her brother. Her calm, quiet, sweet brother. 

“We’ll bury him here.” The words surprised her. This, surely, was not what her father wanted. 

And yet, as she stared at her brother, she knew he would have wanted nothing more than to remain undisturbed in this secluded grave. 

No one else will disturb you. 

The real work began when they returned empty handed. For now, she contented herself with digging a shallow grave. She scooped dirt until her claws began to bleed and lowered her brother into the hole. It wasn’t a tomb fit for a god, but she knew he would have liked it. By the time the last of his face disappeared beneath the dirt, the sun had vanished too. It was then, when the last of the light left the Earth, that Prism Lapisant had finally been put to rest. 

Instead of words, thick crystalline rose in her throat. She breathed it into a headstone and carved five words: 

Here Lies Prism, My Brother. 

Her throat was raw. There were no words for the death of a god. 

***

The world was as silent as Prism’s grave when they returned to the fields. She squinted, concentrating on a pillar of light just beyond the horizon. It was dark out. The only lights should have been the stars. 

“A fire dragon,” Fossil whispered. He clutched his spear tightly; beads of sweat made it slip out of his grasp every couple seconds. 

“We’re dead without our magic. It’ll rip us to shreds.” 

“What do you propose, then?” His voice rose. 

Fire dragons were equipped for war by nature of their existence. They had two kinds of fire, liquid and gaseous, which wreathed their breath like tongues of Hell. It was the molten fire that worried her. That was how they liked to kill you. They lodged their claws into your throat and gave you their sweet nectar, cooking you alive from the inside out. 

“We’ll fly, right now, and we won’t look back,” she decided. 

“And let them have the final say? Let them gloat over our dead?” Fossil growled. For a moment, his draconic form looked like it would burst from underneath his skin. It wasn’t unusual for a shifted dragon to forget the boundaries between two forms in moments of heightened emotion. Even so, gem dragons did not naturally shift. 

“You can’t fight it like that, Fossil.” It was easy to hold him back, being that he was, well, human. 

“Think of what they did to Prism,” he said, still staring at the column of fire in the distance. Its form sharpened into a great mountain of a dragon. Its scales screeched and moaned as that mountain moved. The flicker of its form, like a flame in the wind, took a concrete shape as it stalked closer. 

Did it smell them? Could it hear them? Perhaps it could even see them, though the cover of night was as thick as Obsidian’s wings. All she saw were those moving rocks, and the faint lick of light leeching into the sky. 

“Fossil, we need to leave now.” He ran behind a boulder, which he seemed to think he could use as a shield. She scurried to join him. 

“Gem dragons.” The mountain shook with laughter. “Such easy prey without your magic. I almost feel bad.

“I will make it a quick death! Let it not be thought that Candecean son of Ardeo is without mercy! Tremble beneath the might of darkness and open your eyes to the truth. The svadrash was a blessing from the God of Shadows, and now you will be given the gift that Prism recieved.” 

“Keep his name out of your mouth!” Fossil roared. “It is not worthy to grace your lips.” 

“Face me,” the voice in the darkness said. 

“You would dare fight the Blood of the First Bled when we have the sword? I suggest you leave, unless you want to be cut to shreds.” The prince spoke with the cadence of a king, but his words held no weight to them. 

We rule over faith, Shadowhunter thought. Right now, that is not power. Indeed, without their Light, they could not fight back.  

“How fitting that a gem dragon would use lies against me.” She heard a whoooooosh and the world burned as a ring of fire surrounded them. In the searing light she lifted her head and saw its icy eyes. They were too cold to melt. 

“White scales, violet gems.” The great creature snorted. “You are indeed Blood of the First Bled, Shadowhunter Lapisant.” It swiveled its massive head; scale scraped against scale. Underneath, the fire weaved through its skin like veins. She twisted her head back.  

“Where is your Divinity?” The fire dragon raised its head; the heat within it rumbled as it rose. The only god watching the two gem dragons was Death. 

Was this the last thing Prism saw? The velvet tongues of flames wrapping around him? From behind the boulder, the princess smelled the brimstone on the dragon’s breath. The creature sank its claws into the stone, a grinding sound of metal on rock. Fossil should not have asked that question. It seemed there was little a fire dragon dared not to do. Now our blood will stain this earth, as Prism’s blood came before. Quite fitting, she thought, that even in her death she would still be in her brother’s shadow. 

A queen is strong. But she did not feel strong. She closed her eyes and took in quick breaths. All she could think was that she was going to die. 

The world exploded into a flash of Light. Another spoil of war slumped to the ground, one dead fire dragon in a sea of dozens. The field grew silent, a glass pond empty in a dark night. That ripple of Light brought others. She heard Fossil’s rapid breathing against her chest. The grass swayed ever-so-gently, and the stars peeked out from behind stiff clouds. Whooooo. An owl burst into song and the night spilled noise. 

Tanzar’s face blocked out the sky. His Caesealium-blue eyes stared down at her from atop the boulder. 

“Well, it’s bloody about time.” Fossil’s voice cracked. 

The saint betrayed no emotion behind those ancient eyes. He could have been another statue of Prism, as motionless as the ones that guarded the city. 

“You two have been gone the entire day. The king was worried.”

“Is this uncle’s way of saying thanks, by saving us from the danger he put us in?” She was glad to see her cousin sharp as ever. He would never have the tongue of a soldier, but he did recover like one. 

“If it pleases you, Fossil, I’d rather not kill any more fire dragons tonight. You are free to admonish the king on your own time. I’m leaving now, whether you’re coming or not. I’ve done my job here and I’m late for supper.” Tanzar opened his wings and shot into the sky. 

“You hear that? He’s late for his fucking supper.” The prince scoffed. He climbed on top of her back, and they followed the saint home into the diamond-speckled heavens.

About the Author

Victor is a fourth year undergraduate student studying English Creative Writing and Mathematics. He writes about dragons, fantasy worlds, and the intersection between religion and identity. He aspires to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing where he can continue his craft. 

Instagram: @_victor_garza_

Cover design made using Canva design tools.