Breach has never been one to think twice about exploring. She has spent her entire life flying the coop to explore every inch of Beqanna. Her mother has never stopped her either. Sochi has loved watching her daughter take to the skies, to the oceans, to the earth. Watching her learn the various forms that her body can take and the many ways that she can explore. Watching her master the gift of shapeshifting.

Today though there is something other than wanderlust that simmers in her blood.

It has been weeks since she has since Yadigar. Weeks since she has been able to uncover the path that her friend had taken and the worry begins to scratch at her incessantly. It is a worry that she cannot ease. A fear that makes her veins run cold when she wakes and realizes yet another day has passed.

It drives her to the kingdom in the form of a hawk, taking to the skies and scanning below in hopes of finding the dragon wandering his homeland. What she finds instead is something that looks similar, so similar in fact that she can only deduce that it must be someone related. His father, perhaps?

She dives down and shifts when she is close to the ground, standing and shaking her neck to release the tension that she has been holding there. “Hello?” she calls before she hears the snapping of his teeth. The sound startles her, but she is too much the child of Risk and Sochi to feel anything but anger at the threat.

“I’ll keep whatever distance I want,” she replies coolly, her dual-colored eyes growing hot. She straightens for a second, her tail twitching although it barely reaches above her hocks. “I’m looking for my friend Yadigar,” she studies the monstrous’ creatures face, looking for recognition to strike.

“Do you know where he is?”

I want to swim until we both begin to feel the weightlessness sink in

She knows so little of fear. Neither of her parents raised her to know its face, to know the taste of it, and she doesn’t feel it now. She feels war drums in the back of her head, something hot and indignant in the back of her throat as the monster approaches her. If only she knew how her mother had reacted when she had faced off against this very thing. Perhaps she would have the strength or the cunning to shift and not just watch him with a guarded glare, her dual-colored eyes shielded, her mouth steely.

Breach lifts her chin a little as he walks closer. “I’m not sure I want to work with someone like you,” and it sounds braver than she feels, more resolute. She straightens her shoulders and all of the creatures that she knows so intimately flee her when she sees the sparks in the back of his mouth. Because there is no creature she knows that would not be set ablaze at the first sign of a spark.

There is nothing she knows to shift into that would protect her from that.

So instead she remains as her self, pale and blue, and she doesn’t let him see her fidget. He presses against her face with his scaled clicks and touches. She hisses a little, the sound angry. “I would give anything if I thought it would help,” she peels her lips back a little and her teeth have shifted into those of the large cats. It is not much, but it is something, and the touch of predator makes her feel more herself.

“But I have a feeling you won’t ask for something that will help.”

A flick of her tail as she looks where eyes should be.

“So my answer is no.”

I want to swim until we both begin to feel the weightlessness sink in

Death comes quickly. Quicker than she would have expected.

She doesn’t shudder when he snaps. When the fire touches her. When he lunges. Her mother would be proud, she thinks, of how brave she is when she looks down the barrel of the gun. She shifts into a tiger then because it is the most comforting form that she knows. She swipes and bites, does everything that she can to mark him even though she knows it’s a losing fight—it was always a losing fight.

But she doesn’t beg when he has her pinned.

She doesn’t whimper when his claws are to her throat.

Instead she arches and hisses, blood streaming down her face—staining her coat. “I hope he drags you screaming into hell,” she manages through her gritted teeth. “I hope his is the last face you ever see.”

It’s the final thing she says before her first death.

She feels her leg disconnect from her body in a haze, as her vision goes red and then blurry. She feels her body come apart and she floats above herself, as the veil between life and death stretches, snaps.

When he skitters away, leaving the boy in charge of disassembling her body, she is barely holding onto the connection to her body. She watches in a way that she will never remember. Watches as her first body lies broken and strewn across the ground, her blood feeding the earth underneath.

In the moment, death feels infinite, overwhelming, eternal.

It would be easy to sink into it. To never come back into this body of pain, to never let the weight of the agony sling across her shoulders, but there is a fluttering of something on the edge of her consciousness.

Yadigar.

She thinks of him in death and her eyes flutter open.

Born anew.

I want to swim until we both begin to feel the weightlessness sink in