Jay Kristoff: The Last Stormdancer

Jun was dead. The prophecy a lie. There was no saving this place.

Why in the name of all would I doom myself and my own to linger here?

“ I challenge, ” I snarled.

Rahh blinked. Eyes narrowed.

“What you say?”

“I CHALLENGE!”

“Foolish. Females not challenge. Females not fight. Females not—”

I did not wait for him to finish. Did not wait for him to list yet another thing I could not should not would not do. Instead I roared, hackles flaring, wings spread, and charged into him with all my might. We collided like thunderheads, the crack of bone, the hiss of breath, a splash of blood. Lightning cracking at the edges of our feathers as we flew off the mountainside, a tumbling, snarling flurry. He tried to break away, roaring at me to stop, to hold, to think.

But I could not think. I could not feel. I could not breathe.

All I tasted was blood.

All I saw was red.

And all I knew was rage.

And here at last, we find our place, little monkey-child. Here, where we first stepped out upon the stage.

I plummeted from the sky, wind clawing at my eyes. Warm and scarlet painted thick upon my tongue. Wings pressed tight to my flanks, lighting crackling along my feathertips. Roaring, bellowing like the storm itself, impossible brightness cracking the skies, black clouds closing at my back. My talons locked with his. My friend. My foe. Our plumage dipped in crimson and fluttering in our wake as we flailed and bit and kicked. Descending.

Mountains loomed below us. Jagged peaks rising from the rolling mist of rain and ashen smoke, snow-clad teeth set to tear us to pieces. But still we struggled. Chained together by my rage, my hatred, unwilling to let him go. At the last, he broke away, kicking loose in a shower of blood. I spread my wings, felt the wind cup my feathers, distant pain from the wounds he had torn in me stealing my breath. He was ever my match. Even when we were cubs, the stripes at our haunches still muddy gray. Not my blood. But yet my brother.

And now, my enemy.

We leveled out, circled each other through the rain. He called to me, voice as loud as the storm, my blood in his mouth.

“Stop this, Koh. Stop this madness . ”

I growled reply between the thunder claps.

“Only three ways this will end.”

“ I am Khan here, ” he roared. “ Khan’s word is law. ”

“Then kill me.”

“Never.”

“Then die.”

I tore across the sky toward him, tempest at my back. All around us was chaos, the voices of our packmates raised, eyes watching the drama unfold. We collided like comets, like falling, burning stars. I dug my talons into his flesh, knuckle deep. He tore at my shoulder, blood brighter than the poisoned sun, and we became snarls and shrieks and roars, all a-tumble across the sky. Lightning rocked the clouds, gleaming in his eyes as we plummeted toward teeth of stone. His beak closing about my throat. Mine about his.

My friend. My enemy. My Khan.

“ Stop this! ” he growled.

“Not stay here. Not fight. Not lose you or myself or the ones growing within me.”

A silence, then. Long as years.

“… What?”

“Will not let us die here.”

“You lifebearer?”

“Your cubs, Rahh. Yours and mine.”

The stones rising to meet us. Open grinning mouths. Teeth of black rock, smiling as wide as the sky.

“ Wish to fight for the right to see them born still? ” I asked.

His eyes on mine.

“Die mewling inside cracked shell too thin to hold them?”

My eyes on his.

“Monkey-children not worth that.”

“ But I vowed, ” he said. “ Khan’s word is law. ”

Seconds from impact.

“ Then be not Khan, ” I said. “ And my word be law. ”

He spread his wings, snarling, momentum and gravity tearing at his joints. Pulling us back, away from death’s velocity and rolling, just as I had taught him when we young, flipping himself beneath me as we collided with the mountainside. The crunch of year-deep drifts of snow, the splintering crack of ice and stone beneath. The impact knocking all from our lungs, pressing me to him, blood and feathers and fur. And there on his back he lay, wings spread in the deep frost about us, throat exposed. At my mercy.

The pack gathered about us, soaring down from the Aerie above, astonished cries and fearful roars. The Khan, bested by a female? Never in our history had such a thing come to pass. What could it mean? What could it portend?

Understand, monkey-child; the title of Khan is never given. Always taken. Bought with murder. And for me to claim his title, I should have claimed Rahh’s life. He knew it to be so. My rule would be bought with his death. Such was our way.

But mine would be a new way.

“Enough death. Not for this. Not kill you, Rahh. Too few of us left. Too much lost already.”

My roar echoed on the stone around me, in the sky above me, my grandfather’s ghost hanging in the air beside me.

“Arashitora do not kill arashitora! No more. Khan’s word is law!”

Rahh dragged himself to his feet, bloodied and bruised, shaking the snow from his fur. Ragged breath boiling the air between us. Thunder echoing in rolling clouds as the others gathered on the stones about us, wide eyed, hackles raised as Rahh lowered head in deference.

“Khan’s word is law.”

I looked about my kin. Rage burning in my chest. Flame in my eyes.

“Not stay here. Fight no more. Why we help them, when they not help themselves? When they destroy all beautiful and pure?”

Rahh’s voice was low, and keen-edged.

“Certain this about them? Not about him?”

I growled long and low. The truth striking closer to my heart than he could know.

“This about us.”

I looked to my belly, to the lives I could already feel swelling inside there. To the two futures laid before them—one beneath this sweltering bloody sky in a land run through with poison and gleaming brass. The other, I did not know where. North perhaps, where the dragons fled. A different land. A different future. One at least where they might have a chance to breathe.

Rahh pressed his cheek to mine. Nodded slow.

“Us.”

We took her back to the land of her birth. The land of the Kitsune clan. The Lady Ami upon my shoulders, the last monkey-child ever to sit there. The island that had been our home laid out below, bloodred and turning slowly to rot. My eyes were ever on the land beneath. The smog creeping into the soft valleys. The beginnings of a decay; a blackening that even then was beginning to take seed, and in years to come, would grow so much worse.

But the Lady Ami’s eyes were on the horizon. The edge of the sky. What might be. What could still be. One hand pressed to the curve of her belly.

We found it where he said we would—at the edge of a murmuring forest, by the banks of a chuckling stream. A tiny house, a thatched roof, a crooked door. Beast skins hung on racks outside the walls. An old woman and an older man, both browned and wizened by the sun. The woman bent with years, almost blind. The man tall and wiry, still possessed of a hunter’s spirit, sweeping up his spear and watching me with wide and terrified eyes as I came in to land.

Lady Ami slipped off my shoulders, sank slowly to the ground. Though we could not speak, still she knew this was an ending. Tears in her eyes. Empty hands upturned toward me. Dragging what she could of a smile along bloodless, trembling lips.