A howling gust of chalk-colored wind slammed into the flagstones, tasting of pulverized bone and stale lightning. Wherever the gale scraped silk banners or polished stone, a rind of grey frost sprouted, creeping with vicious speed. The sky above the plaza peeled open like rotting fruit, exposing the churning maw of the wild gale beyond the city limits.
"Run, you idiot peacock!" Shavara hollered, bracing her boots against the dais steps as nobles trampled each other like fattened geese in a abattoir.
Down in the melee, a pale figure in ruined velvet stumbled forward instead of fleeing. Kethran Vael had lost his feathered bonnet, his hair plastered across his sweaty forehead in greasy streaks. He drew an ornamental rapier—a ridiculous strip of silver barely thicker than a bodkin—and struck an operatic duelist's pose in front of a creeping tide of grey mist.
"Shavara!" Kethran brayed, his voice cracking into a high falsetto. "Fear not, my delicate blossom! I shall redeem my honor! I shall hold back the deluge for—"
A drifting tendril of the pestilence touched his silk slipper.
Kethran’s heroic pose snapped instantly. The grey crust surged up his tailored breeches, calcifying the gold embroidery into rigid, matte chalk. His knees locked. The theatrical grimace on his face froze, mouth open in an absurd, oval squeak. Within moments, the former scion of the Vael fortune stiffened into a tastefully poised garden ornament, the rapier extended toward the clouds like a perch for pigeons.
From thirty paces away, Ninza sprinted past the new lawn fixture, hauling two satchels bulging with bearer bonds and jeweled snuffboxes. She slowed just long enough to slap a sticky auction receipt onto Kethran's solid-glass forehead.
"Starting bid three hundred coppers!" Ninza yelled over the tempest, offering Shavara a jaunty salute before ducking into an underground aqueduct.
"Appraisal was too generous," Shavara muttered, wiping stinging grit from her cheek. High above, the vault groaned. The barrier was peeling backward in great jagged sheets, raining needle-sharp hail onto the tiers below. The mechanical beasts Jendox had corrupted stalked the dying pavilion, their glass joints grinding with toxic sparks.
Beside her, Voshari did not laugh. He ripped away his scorched leather gauntlet with his teeth, spitting the shredded hide onto the marble.
Beneath, his forearm was an abomination of jagged amethyst veins and crawling mineral rot. The Glass-Blight had chewed deep into his tendon lines, glowing with erratic, virulent bile.
"Voshari, what are you doing?" Shavara barked, stepping toward him.
He knelt beside the fallen dragon's flank. The great construct lay slumped across the shattered balustrade, its internal furnace flickering low, the fractured heart-stone dimming under Jendox's malignant curse. The city needed an anchor stout enough to knit the sky back together, and their grand creation lay dying on the slab.
"The core requires a living conduit," Voshari said. His tone was infuriatingly level, the flat cadence of an artisan calculating ledger sums. "My marrow already carries the blight's resonance. If I drive the rot inward, the furnace can digest it. It will produce enough thermal thrust to hoist the beast into the breach."
"You'll turn into a paperweight, you stubborn mule! Look at your hand!"
"It buys the district an hour," he replied, his grey irises locked onto hers without a tremor. "Get the workers out. Take what gold remains in my safe. The combination is your grandmother's birth date, because you wouldn't stop pestering me about it three winters ago."
He shoved his bare, corrupted palm toward the raw magma cavity of the dragon's breast.
"Don't you dare play the tragic martyr on my clock, Voshari Fenn!" Shavara lunged. She didn't bother with tongs or protective runes. Her bare right hand slammed down directly over his scarred knuckles, pinning his flesh to the burning lip of the furnace.
Voshari let out a ragged grunt, trying to jerk his arm back. "Let go! The blight will drink you whole—"
"I spent two years marinating in this filth, you colossal idiot!" Her teeth bared in a feral grin, spit flying against the gale. "You think my blood forgot the taste?"
Where their skin pressed together, the world stopped moving.
The virulent purple crust on Voshari's flesh collided with the stubborn, deep-rooted immunity coiled within Shavara's veins. For two miserable years, she had carried the stagnant remnants of Jendox's slow-acting poison, forcing her system to adapt, calcify, and conquer. Now, touching Voshari’s unfiltered infection, that dormant biological defiance woke up hungry.
A searing, liquid radiance erupted between their palms. It was not the cold, dead grey of the storm, nor the murky poison of the blight. It was pure, molten amber, smelling of hot river sand and melted potash.
Voshari gasped, his head snapping back as the agonizing calcification retreated from his skin like kicked curs. The purple veins along his forearm dissolved, burned clean by the blinding wash of unified power. The raw, volcanic surge ripped straight through their joined hands and poured down into the dragon's fractured breast.
[VITRIC ENGINE ALIGNMENT: 100%]
[RESONANCE MERGE COMPLETE]
The dragon’s internal kiln didn't just ignite; it detonated with a golden roar that blew the toxic fog backward twenty yards. The split glyph on its breast melted smooth, fused shut by an alloy far stronger than original kiln-work.
"You absolute menace," Voshari murmured, his voice thick with raw awe as he looked down at his clean, unblemished skin, then up at her face. For once, his habitual stoicism vanished, exposing the desperate adoration he had hidden beneath years of forge smoke.
"Add five thousand sovereigns to my invoice for medical services," Shavara wheezed, her own vision swimming with yellow spots, though she squeezed his hand twice before letting go.
The glass beast rose.
Its segmented spine flexed, fifty feet of iridescent, fire-spun scales rattling like a thousand polished plates. With a deafening, harmonic shriek that shook the marble beneath their boots, the great beast kicked off the broken dais. Wings of spun silica caught the petrifying updraft, banking hard, rocketing toward the torn crown of the city dome to seal the sky.
Shavara exhaled, a triumphant laugh bubbling in her throat as she stepped toward the edge to watch their masterpiece soar.
"You always were an insolent little parasite, Shavara," a grandfatherly voice hissed behind her ear, cold and venomous.
Jendox lunged from the churning smoke, his face twisted in senile fury, driving a needle-pointed dagger of liquid quick-silver straight for her unguarded spine.