The enormous metal doors swung open with a groan so loud it felt less like a sound and more like an announcement — as though the tower itself was declaring to all of Fonta that someone had come to take up residence within its walls. I winced at the noise. We had been attempting some measure of discretion. In hindsight, travelling after dark might have been the wiser choice.
Though I couldn't say with any confidence that I would have been in a fit state to travel by nightfall. The twitching in my hands had been growing steadier by the hour. The faster I could find a place to settle and let the transformation run its course, the better.
The interior of the tower was a stark contrast to its outward presence. Where the outside projected age and authority, the inside had simply aged — and not gracefully. The stone walls had turned grey and green beneath coatings of moss and several varieties of fungus, and dark patches of mould crept along the lower sections where the humidity had settled into the stone over generations of disuse. A handful of narrow windows were cut into the walls at intervals, admitting long slants of afternoon light, but the sunshine barely made a dent in the damp. The air inside was cool and heavy, carrying the particular smell of enclosed stone and slow decay.
Along one wall, a staircase had been carved directly from the stone itself, spiralling upward in a slow curve that followed the tower's interior. Parts of it had broken away — entire sections of steps simply gone, leaving gaps that made the staircase more of an obstacle than a path.
But looking up from the floor, the tower's true scale revealed itself fully. From the outside, it had seemed to reach toward the heavens. From inside, that impression dissolved, and in its place was something more honest and more human — the visible limit of what hands and ambition could accomplish. And yet, even stripped of its grandeur, the space was immense. Colossal in a way that settled in the chest rather than the eyes. It was more than large enough for a dragon to inhabit. That was the point of coming here, after all.
The floor had been partially cleared at some point, though not recently. A heap of debris had been pushed into one corner — rusted metal pieces, rotted lengths of old timber, fragments of what might once have been furniture. Looking at the remnants, it became apparent that the tower had not always been a hollow shell. There had been floors here once, wooden ones, built at intervals along the interior walls. What the tower had been used for remained a mystery. Whatever history it held had long since gone quiet.
We set about cleaning the place without discussion, working side by side to make it into something that could serve as a temporary shelter. With my hands in their current state — twitching at unpredictable moments and refusing to cooperate fully with anything I asked of them — I was limited in what I could manage. Arvid said nothing about it. He simply did the larger share of the work without making it something to remark upon, carrying debris out, sweeping accumulated grime from the floor, arranging the space until it held some rough resemblance to livability.
By the time we finished, his soldiers had returned from Fonta with the meat he had sent them to purchase. Arvid built a fire beside one of the lower windows where the smoke could escape, and began roasting seasoned cuts of meat over it with the quiet efficiency of a man who had probably prepared field meals in worse conditions than this.
The smell that rose from the fire was extraordinary. Rich and savoury, laced with whatever seasoning had been rubbed into the meat, it drifted through the tower's damp air and reduced me immediately to something resembling an animal waiting to be fed. I was salivating before the meat had finished cooking, and I was not particularly proud of it.
When Arvid offered me the first piece — a leg glistening from the fire, crackling at the edges — I took it without ceremony. It was too hot by any reasonable measure. I didn't feel it. I ate with none of the restraint I would ordinarily have shown, tearing through the meat with single-minded focus, barely pausing between bites.
Arvid settled beside me with a lamb limb of his own and ate his early dinner without comment, companionable and unhurried.
Then the knock came.
It struck the metal door with a hurried urgency that carried even across the space of the tower — sharp, insistent, unmistakable. Arvid set down his food and rose without haste, crossing the floor toward the door as the voice outside began calling for him.
"Your Majesty—"
He stepped outside, pulling the door mostly closed behind him — considerate enough not to interrupt my meal, or perhaps simply practical enough not to conduct imperial business inside a crumbling tower. I set down my own food and let my hearing do the work he had been thoughtful enough to attempt to spare me.
The messenger's voice was ragged with urgency and exertion.
"The elf escaped, Your Majesty. He broke free and released every prisoner in the dungeon — then set fire to the back palace. It's chaos. We couldn't contain it in time."
A pause. Then Arvid's exhale, slow and deliberate, the kind that belonged to a man choosing patience over the response that came first.
"I have been away for four hours," he said, his voice carrying the particular exhaustion of someone who had expected this and found no satisfaction in having expected it. "Four hours. How did he get out of those shackles?"
The messenger hesitated.
"Out with it," Arvid said.
"The dungeon manager, Your Majesty. He released him. He claims that Maradi Genasera had ordered him to do so — threatened to expose some irregularity in his appointment if he refused. He believed he would not be caught." The messenger paused. "He left a personal item behind at the cell. That's how we identified him. He's been arrested. Maradi Genasera has also been taken into custody."
I sat with that for a moment.
Maradi Genasera. That sharp, contemptuous woman — she had known about the elf. Not only known, but acted. Had coordinated. The arrogance she wore so openly, the disdain she had never bothered to conceal — had any of it been genuine? Or had it been a performance, carefully maintained, designed to ensure that no one looked at her too closely or expected too much of her?
If her entire persona had been constructed to manipulate those around her, then the implications were considerably larger than a dungeon break. What was she after? Who else was part of this?
The questions accumulated quickly and answered nothing.
"Give me a moment," Arvid said outside. The door opened again, and he came back in.
He looked at me. I looked at him.
"There's a situation in Arpa," he began.
"Go," I said, before he could continue. "I'll wait here for you."
As I said it, I shifted my skirt slightly, adjusting the fabric to cover my feet. The twitching had reached them now. My toes were moving on their own — small, involuntary movements, as though something beneath the surface was testing the boundaries of my skin, pressing against it from the inside. I didn't want him to see that.
It wouldn't be much longer now.
Arvid crossed the space between us and stopped in front of me. The expression that settled on his face was softer than the one he had been wearing a moment ago — the composed, calculating look of the emperor set aside, something quieter taking its place. He kissed my forehead gently. Then he took my face in both his hands, tilting it up so that I was looking directly into his ash-grey eyes.
"I'll be back before you know it," he said.
He kissed my forehead once more — light as a breath — and then he was moving, the urgency of the situation reasserting itself in his stride as he walked to the door.
"Let's get this over with," I heard him say as he stepped outside, his voice low, directed more at himself than anyone else.
I repeated the words silently after he was gone. They fit me just as well.
The sound of the carriage wheels on gravel faded gradually, and then there was only the quiet of the tower — the drip of moisture somewhere in the stone, the faint movement of air through the narrow windows, the creak of old walls holding their shape out of long habit.
I let the silence settle.
It wasn't that I didn't trust Arvid. That had never been the question. It was that I knew him — knew how he watched, and how he carried what he witnessed. If he had stayed, he would have watched me suffer through every stage of this, and he would have held it all inside himself without showing any of it, and it would have cost him. This was not a burden I was willing to distribute. The harrowing of it, whatever it turned out to be, was mine to carry alone. That felt right. It felt important.
I reached inward, toward the place where Aiona's presence had taken up permanent residence somewhere behind my own thoughts, and spoke to her the way I had learned to — direct and quiet.
"Is there any way to accelerate the dragonification process?"
A beat of silence.
Then Aiona's voice rose up, thoughtful and unhurried, as it always was when the question was one she had been expecting.