I found myself laying on the cold ground, stone grinding into my spine like it held a personal grudge. The ceiling was rock and shadow. And somewhere outside, the wind screamed like something was dying. Or maybe just like the wind.

  The dragon's corpse was still there.

  It filled most of the cave… a heap of dead muscle and cooling scales, its massive body crumpled near the entrance like a puppet with cut strings. The color was draining out of it. That deep black fading to grey, the same way meat does when you leave it out too long. Steam rose from the wounds where heat met cold air, thin ribbons curling toward the ceiling before the wind tore them apart.

  The cave smelled like a slaughterhouse that someone had set on fire.

  Blood and burned meat and dragon bile, maybe, or whatever the worms had left behind when they'd finished eating it. The stench coated my tongue. I was going to taste this cave for days.

  I tried to move but was met with nothing but pain. My ribs, my arms, and my jaw… each part of me checking in with its own specific complaint. The places where bones had snapped. The muscles that had torn. The skin that had burned and blistered and cracked.

  But it was less than before. The agony had dulled to something I could breathe through. The worms had been busy while I was under. I could feel where they'd worked, the bones clicking when I shifted, that grinding sensation of pieces held in place by something that wasn't quite bone. Wounds sealed with flesh that was thin and new.

  Good enough to move. Maybe.

  I pushed myself up. Slowly. My arms shook. My vision went grey, spots eating inward, and I had to stop halfway and just breathe.

  When the world stopped trying to spin off its axis, I looked around.

  Zo was against the far wall. Just slumped there, her head lolled, arms limp, body arranged in that boneless way unconscious people lay. Burns crawled up her forearms and across the side of her face. Angry red welts that would scar if they healed at all. The dragon's fire had kissed her pretty good.

  But her chest rose and fell. Shallow. Steady. She was alive… that's what mattered. I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding. The relief hit harder than it should have… a release of tension I'd been carrying without realizing it. One less person I'd lose today.

  The troll was gone. I reached for it. That familiar weight in my Sacred Soul, that cold presence that had carried Sadie into the cave, that had thrown itself at a dragon's mouth for me. The connection should have been there… damaged, maybe, regenerating slowly, but .

  I was met with nothing. Just an empty space. Like reaching for a limb that had been amputated while I slept. I pushed harder. The worms rippled through my body, searching for the thread that bound me to my Regalia, hunting for any trace of that massive cold presence that had stood between me and death more times than I could count.

  Dead. Dismissed. Whatever the difference was when it came to bound summons. The dragon had torn it apart so completely that there was nothing left to recover. No spark. No seed. Just absence where something used to be.

  I turned toward where Sadie had fallen.

  The bloodstain was still there. A dark smear spreading across the stone, already going tacky in the cold. I could see the shape of it… the pool where she'd collapsed, the drag marks, the handprints where someone had clawed at the rock trying to crawl away from death. But her body was .

  I knew where she was. My sister—the fragment of my sister that had been hiding in my head, pretending to be a sarcastic worm because it was easier than the truth—had crawled into Sadie's dying body and walked out into the storm. To hunt our father. To make him pay.

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  And I'd just been lying on a dragon's corpse, too broken to say goodbye. Too useless to do anything except bleed and drool while she disappeared into the blizzard wearing someone else's skin.

  Brilliant last words, Fish. Really nailed that one.

  The storm kept screaming. Zo kept breathing. The dragon kept rotting in the cave's mouth. I sat against the wall and stared at nothing, letting the cold seep into my bones and the silence fill up the space where Mabel's voice used to be.

  I needed something to do. Something to focus on, that wasn't my sister walking away in a stolen corpse. Something that wasn't the empty space in my Sacred Soul where the troll used to wait. Something that wasn't the bloodstain on the floor or the burns on Zo's face or the thousand ways this day had gone wrong.

  I reached inward. Felt for the new core sitting behind my sternum. It was there. Warm and solid. Pulsing with each breath, feeding power to the worms that orbited it in slow spirals. The dragon's power, compressed and converted and made mine.

  I reached for it mentally. Just needing something concrete to look at and words appeared before me.

  [STATUS]

  Name: Fischer Magni

  Race: Human (Sacred)

  Origin: Ossuary Tyrant, Grade 4

  Skills: Worm Manipulation, Worm Shaping: Weapons & Armor, Gluttonous Worm, Regeneration

  Attributes: Bone Scales

  The words floated in my vision like they meant something.

  I was stronger than I'd been this morning… on paper, anyway. I'd eaten a dragon, absorbed its power, formed a core that most Sacred would kill their families to possess.

  The universe looked at what I'd sacrificed—a friend, a Regalia, my sister —and decided this was fair compensation. Here's your participation trophy for not dying. Here's your gold star for watching everyone around you get chewed up while you lay on a corpse and drooled.

  I dismissed the status. Focused on my hands instead.

  The worms stirred beneath my skin. They were denser than before. More responsive. Like they'd been upgraded along with the rest of me, tuned to a frequency I was still learning to hear. I willed them to form.

  They obeyed.

  A gauntlet spread across my right hand—threading through muscle, over bone, hardening into solid matter. But the surface was different. Not smooth like before. Rough. Ridged.

  I turned my hand in the dim light and watched the pattern catch what little light filtered through the cave mouth.

  The worms had learned something from what they'd consumed. Had taken the dragon's armor and made it their own. That's what Bone Scales meant… it wasn’t just protection, but adaptation. The dragon had tried to burn me alive, had crushed me against a cliff face, and had done everything in its power to end me.

  And now I was wearing pieces of it like a trophy. I should have felt something. Pride, maybe. Satisfaction. The grim pleasure of having survived something that should have killed me.

  I waited for any of that to show up. Nothing did. Just the cold and the silence and the weight of everything I'd lost to get here. I dismissed the gauntlet. The worms retreated, sliding back beneath my skin, and my hand looked normal again. Pale. Human and unchanged.

  Funny how that worked.

  Zo’s head moved. It was just a twitch, a small motion that could have been nothing. Her lips parted and she muttered something too quiet to hear. A name, maybe. Or just the brain trying to boot up after the trauma she had received, running through its startup sequence one broken piece at a time.

  Her eyes fluttered but didn't open. Then she went still again, back under… back to wherever the unconscious go while their bodies put themselves back together.

  I crawled over to her. Slowly. Each movement sending fresh complaints through my not-quite-healed body. The stone was cold under my palms, slick with condensation from the storm outside. I left smears of something dark behind me—blood or dirt or both, impossible to tell in this light.

  I pressed two fingers to her neck. Found the pulse. There. Steady. Strong enough.

  Her breathing was regular and consistent. The burns were bad—worse up close, the skin was blistered and weeping in places, raw red welts that would hurt like hell when she woke up—but they weren’t fatal. Her Origin had kept her alive through the dragon's fire. It would keep her alive through this too.

  She'd need time. Rest. Medical attention I couldn't provide in a cave on the side of a frozen mountain with nothing but a dead dragon for company. But she'd live.

  That was one thing that hadn't gone to shit today. One small victory in a day full of losses. I sat down beside her. Let my back rest against the cave wall, the stone was cold through what remained of my clothes. My teeth wanted to chatter. My body wanted to shake. I didn't have the energy to let them.

  Outside, the storm showed no sign of stopping. The wind shrieked and the ice rattled and the sky stayed that same grey it had been for hours. It could have been morning. It could have been midnight. Fuck… it could have been next week, for all I knew.

  I closed my eyes and let the silence press in. No Mabel making snide comments about my life choices. No troll standing guard at the entrance, its cold presence had been a comfort I hadn't appreciated until it was gone. No Sadie bleeding out against the far wall, needing help I couldn't give.

  Just me. the dragon's cooling corpse and Zo's shallow breathing.