Shade had tracked men before. He’d tracked deserters with mud on their boots and lies on their tongues. He’d tracked smugglers who thought a river could wash guilt off the way it washed blood out of cloth.

  This was different. This trail didn’t feel like a man running.

  It felt like a man being purposeful. Shade had known he was being led.

  Emery had stopped trying to hide it two nights ago.

  The trail had shifted then. Gone were the sloppy tells, the half-masked tracks and hurried camps. In their place were signs meant to be seen: a scuffed heel here, a broken branch there, the faint shimmer of teleport residue left just long enough for another Draggoon to notice.

  A challenge. Shade followed anyway. He told himself it was because Emery was one of his own. Because you didn’t abandon a Draggoon just because the trail went bad. Because Rush needed answers.

  That was all true. It was also true that some part of him already knew how this ended. He saw the evidence of the camp the others had made when they traveled toward the town. He also saw, how the man he hunted now was right there and did nothing. He hoped that hesitation meant he hadn't betrayed them. He also knew deep down, he may have been told not to engage.

  They met just before dawn, where the land dipped into a shallow ravine choked with frost-bitten grass and scrub. Emery stood with his back to a dead oak, posture loose, hands empty, expression almost… relieved.

  “You’re late,” Emery said.

  Shade didn’t lower his weapons. “You wanted me here.”

  Emery smiled faintly. “I needed you.”

  That was the first wrong thing. The second was the collar. He didn't even try to hide it. Shade wondered if it was a message or a warning. Regardless, it sat against Emery’s throat like a mockery of jewelry, runes carved too deep and too sharp, drinking in the dawn light instead of reflecting it. Shade felt his dragon blessing recoil at the sight, heat coiling tight behind his ribs.

  “Who did that to you,” Shade demanded.

  Emery tilted his head. “You already know.”

  Lore.

  The name sat between them like a blade.

  “You could have come to Rush,” Shade said. “He could’ve burned it out. Burned her out.”

  Emery’s smile twitched. “Could he.”

  Shade stepped closer. “He would have tried.”

  That was when the trap sprang.

  The ground beneath Shade’s boots shimmered, runes flaring up from soil and stone alike. Emery moved fast, too fast, hands snapping out as magic surged. The collar lit, and Shade felt pressure slam into his skull, a cage trying to form around his thoughts.

  Emery’s voice cut sharp. “Don’t fight it.”

  Shade roared and broke free. Fire tore out of him in a violent arc, shredding the runes before they could close. He slammed into Emery, driving him back hard enough to crack bark as the dead oak split behind him.

  They fought. Not like friends. Not like brothers.

  Like weapons pointed at each other by hands neither of them trusted anymore.

  Emery moved wrong. Too precise. Too rehearsed. Like someone else was pulling strings and letting him borrow his body. Shade tried his best to not kill his friend, to block, to weaken, to pin and by teeth and scale, to subdue the man.

  Shade landed a blow that should have ended it. Emery vanished instead. Shade's knife hilt only struck the wood of the dead oak. He had a heartbeat before he was thrown back over to where the rune circle was carved into the ground. He rolled with the landing and came up on one knee and looked up just in time to grasp Emery's wrists before grabbed at him again. His blessing surged within him and he began to overpower Emery. Shade saw the moment his expression showed his confidence waning. He tried to push Shade away. He was trying to get away.

  He felt it then, the shift before teleporting.

  Shade didn’t hesitate. Shade’s hand clamped around the collar, fingers digging under the metal, yanking Emery toward him like a man pulling a drowning friend back to shore.

  The world lurched. Space folded. And Shade went with him.

  They reappeared not ten steps away, half-falling, half-slamming into the ground. Dirt exploded under their weight. Emery thrashed like a fish on a hook, trying to shake Shade free, trying to tear himself loose so the next jump could happen without baggage.

  Shade didn’t let go.

  “Stop,” Shade growled into his ear. “Fight it.”

  Emery laughed, and it wasn’t joy. It was strain.

  “I am,” he hissed. Shade could see the pain it brought for him to say it.

  He tried again. Teleport snapped.

  Shade felt it in his teeth, that pressure-change, that moment where the world goes thin like a skin stretched too tight.

  They appeared on a slope. The landing was wrong. Emery’s foot slipped on loose gravel. Shade’s shoulder hit him hard. They hit the ground hard, rolled, slammed again.

  Down. Down. Stone. Dirt. Thorns.

  Shade tucked instinctively, keeping his grip on the collar, trying to keep Emery’s head from splitting open on the rocks.

  They hit a tree. Not gently.

  Emery’s back slammed into it with a sound like a breath punched out of a chest. His skull cracked against bark. His eyes went wide and for one stunned heartbeat the wrongness in them flickered.

  His pupils refocused. His face changed. Emery blinked, dazed, and Shade saw him. The real him. For a single thin moment.

  Shade’s voice went harsh, urgent. “Emery. Speak.” He pinned him anyway. “Emery. Look at me.”

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  For a terrifying second, there was nothing behind Emery’s eyes.

  Then something cleared. “Shut up,” Emery rasped. “And listen.”

  Shade froze. Emery’s breathing hitched as if every breath cost him something. “She’s… always there. Even when she lets me think I’m alone.”

  Shade swallowed. “We can take you back. Rush—”

  “No,” Emery said softly. “It’s been decades, Shade. Even if he burned it all out… I’m not sure what would be left.”

  Shade’s grip tightened. “You don’t know that.”

  Emery smiled, small and sad. “I do.”

  Shade reached up and tore at the collar, dragon-fire surging into his hands. The metal screamed as it split, runes cracking apart like bone. The runes fought back and burned, but he endured, he had to. He had to save Emery. The collar fell away into the dirt and Shade looked down at him waiting.

  Emery shuddered. For one blessed second, he breathed easier.

  “That helps,” Emery whispered. “It makes it easier to resist. But not forever.”

  Shade felt sick. “Then stay with me. I can restrain you, I can get you to Rush."

  Emery’s eyes sharpened with sudden fear. “Don’t.”

  And it was Emery speaking. Fighting. The word sounded like a man digging his nails into the edge of a cliff.

  Shade’s stomach dropped. He looked at the broken collar in the grass and understood with sick clarity: the collar wasn’t the leash.

  It was just a handle. Emery’s eyes watered. His body shook. He pressed his head against the tree like he could shove the voice out through bark.

  “She’s… in my head,” he choked.

  Shade’s hand tightened on Emery’s shoulder, steadying him. “Lore.”

  Emery nodded once, frantic. “She already… had hooks.” His voice cracked. “The collar… just made it easy. Made it cleaner. Made it faster.”

  Shade’s dragon wanted to tear the world apart. Shade forced it down.

  Emery squeezed his eyes shut like a man praying to a god he didn’t believe in anymore. “I can feel… her watching.”

  Shade went still. “Right now?”

  Emery’s laugh turned into a broken sound. “Yes.”

  Shade’s gaze snapped to the treeline, to the empty air, to the sunlit rocks. There was nothing there. And that meant nothing.

  Emery inhaled shakily. “Carlbrin,” he whispered. “She’s in Carlbrin.”

  Shade’s throat went dry.

  Emery swallowed blood. “She knows the convoy made it. She knows you’re following. She knows…” His eyes opened, briefly lucid again, and Shade saw terror there. Not fear of death. Fear of what his hands might do before death arrived. “She knows I’m ruined, she knows I failed to capture you.” Emery whispered.

  Shade’s voice went low and lethal. “Tell me everything you can. Right now.”

  Emery’s breathing sped. He fought for words like he was fighting for air.

  “The collar… curbed the gift.” He pressed a shaking hand to his chest. “Not removed. Twisted. Like… like putting a muzzle on a dragon and teaching it to bite only who she points at.”

  Shade’s jaw flexed.

  Emery’s gaze darted. “I still have my gift. That’s how I know the dragon didn’t abandon me.” His voice wavered. “I can still… push back. Sometimes. I can… stall her.”

  Shade listened, every part of him sharpening.

  Emery’s lips trembled. “But it doesn’t matter. Not forever.”

  His body jerked, fingers clawing at the earth as something inside him fought back.

  “Don’t make me watch myself hurt you,” Emery begged. “Or her.”

  Shade’s chest burned. “Kairi.”

  Emery nodded. “She’s what this is about. She wants the Phoenix. I was the door.”

  Shade shook his head. “Then help me close it.”

  Emery’s gaze softened. “I'm dangerous Shade. I can just port beside her and disappear. You know what I can do. Now take all my moral ideas out of that. What can I do?"

  Shade gritted his teeth. " We can burn her out. Maybe Kairi can heal after Rush—"

  He swallowed hard and cut Shade off. “I can’t do it myself. It’s a command. But you can.”

  Shade stared at him silent for a while. “You want me to kill you.”

  “I want you to stop me,” Emery said. “Before she uses me to take her. Before I become the reason Rush loses everything.”

  Shade’s vision blurred. “Rush could—”

  Emery smiled again. “You always were the hopeful one.”

  Something surged inside Emery. His hand twitched toward Shade’s throat. Shade caught and pinned him back down again and felt the rage in him growing.

  “Do it,” Emery whispered urgently. “Now.”

  "NO!" He yelled and was trying to think of how to do this. Knock him out, blindfold him. Tie their wrists together so if he tried to jump he have to take him. He finally looked back to Emery who was just looking up at him.

  "If you take me in there and Rush can't burn me out. She'll make me hurt her. She'll make me do unspeakable things to her. She has told me exactly what to do. Not to kill her, to destroy her." he said it steady and Shade listened.

  He took a low breath. "Shade, kill me."

  “Tell Rush,” Emery whispered. “Tell him I tried. Tell him… I’m sorry.”

  Shade’s vision blurred around the edges. He blinked hard and it didn’t help.

  Emery swallowed. “And tell the Princess…”

  He couldn’t finish. His mouth opened, then his eyes went wrong again, and Shade saw the moment the hook yanked.

  Emery’s hand lifted. Teleport started.

  Shade moved. Fast. No hesitation. No ceremony. No time for poetry. His blade flashed once, clean and final, driven by mercy and rage braided together so tight they became one cord.

  Emery went still.

  For a heartbeat Shade knelt there, hand pressed to Emery’s chest as if he could hold the life in by force.

  He couldn’t. The dragon-mark on Emery’s arm was still dark. Still chosen.

  Shade’s breath hitched. He bowed his head until his forehead almost touched Emery’s.

  “I’m sorry,” Shade whispered, and the words tasted like ash.

  For a long moment he just knelt there in the brittle winter grass, one hand still on Emery’s shoulder as if grip alone could keep a soul from slipping loose. The ravine held its breath. The wind dragged over stone and scrub like it was afraid to make noise. His blade still warm in his hand, the world ringing in that hollow way it did after something irrevocable. The grass stirred. Birds resumed, cautiously, as if testing whether the danger had truly passed.

  Shade exhaled and forced himself to move.

  He closed Emery’s eyes with his thumb, gentle as a benediction. The wrongness was gone now. Whatever Lore had hooked into him had fled with the last spark of life, leaving behind only a man who had tried to be loyal and failed in the most human way possible.

  “I won’t leave you for scavengers,” Shade murmured. “You deserved better than that.”

  He dragged Emery’s body out of the open, farther up the slope where the ground softened beneath a stand of young trees. The work was slow. His shoulder burned. His ribs protested. He ignored them. Pain was a fair price.

  He dug with his hands at first, then with a broken branch, then with a flat stone when his fingers went numb. Dirt worked its way under his nails. Sweat stung his eyes. He didn’t stop.

  When the grave was deep enough, Shade paused and stripped Emery of the collar fragments still scattered in the grass. He gathered every piece. Even broken, they felt wrong in his palm. Hungry.

  Those did not go into the earth. He sat there for a moment, his arms trembled from the effort of digging. He focused and tried to steady his hands, but they shook regardless of his intentions. He listened to the sounds around them. The bird calls, the rustle of the wind and just the simple silence between him and his sins.

  He laid Emery down carefully, straightened his limbs, folded his hands at his chest the way the dragon-priests had taught them when they were boys pretending to be warriors. Shade hesitated, then reached up and removed the small cord Emery wore around his neck, the one bearing the dragon sigil etched into bone.

  He pressed it briefly to his lips.

  “For the fire that chose you,” he whispered. “And the man who answered.”

  Then he placed it back against Emery’s heart.

  Shade covered him with soil, packing it down firm, methodical.

  Soil. pack. Soil. Pack.

  When he finished, he stacked stones over the grave in a low cairn so animals wouldn’t disturb it. At the top, he set a single shard of the broken collar.

  Not as a marker of shame. As a warning.

  Shade stood there, hands on his knees, breath heavy. He bowed his head once. No long prayer. No speech. Emery wouldn’t have wanted ceremony. He would have wanted action.

  “I’ll tell Rush,” Shade said quietly. “I’ll tell him you fought. I’ll tell him you chose us in the end.”

  He straightened, wiped his hands on his trousers, and looked back toward the road.

  The weight had not lifted. If anything, it had settled deeper. Because now Shade knew something worse than death existed.

  Control without consent. Loyalty turned into a weapon.

  He picked up the broken collar pieces and wrapped them in cloth, binding them tight. Evidence. Proof. A sickness that needed to be shown, not described.

  Then Shade turned and started running. Not because he was panicking. Because Carlbrin needed to be warned.

  And because somewhere ahead of him were men he loved who still believed walls meant safety.

  So he ran, using the shadows to let him move faster and his thoughts circled back to his list.

  Draggoons:

  Himself

  Emery

  Garrett

  Cameron, unknown.

  Ash Guard:

  Rook, Handicapped

  Enelia

  Krezin

  Rest in the embrace of flames and teeth my friends.