Chapter 120: THE SOLARI BLAZE DANCER

For a moment there was no hound in the shelter at all.

Just the fire. A gold column of fire, roaring up where Cinder had been, throwing heat that bent the air over the stone.

Aiden looked into it and couldn’t find her. No shape. No outline. Nothing but the blaze finishing whatever it was doing.

Come back. Whatever you are now, come back.

Don’t leave me with nothing after everything we went through.

Then Cinder stepped out of the fire.

One foreleg emerged first. Longer than before. Then the other.

Her shoulders rose from the blaze. She was taller now, with longer forelegs and her weight shifted back over her hind legs.

Her chest followed, then the rest of her body. More fire than flesh now. Her coat was no longer something that glowed. It was burning.

Her neck rose from the blaze.

Then her head.

Her muzzle was longer, her jaw heavier, and her orange eyes burned through the flames around her face.

The flares along her spine had become a mane that ran from her skull down her neck and along her spine, rising and falling behind her like a living flame.

Not blown. Not guttering. Dancing. Reaching. Alive.

She took a step.

A trail of fire followed her through the air, hanging behind her for a moment before breaking apart.

Cinder raised her head and howled.

The howl hit the shelter as a wave of heat. The stone shook. The last frost vanished from the walls.

She lowered her head again.

The fire moved across her body with every breath.

The frost didn’t retreat from her. It was gone. Burned out of the air between one breath and the next.

What filled the shelter instead was the smell of the grove. Hot iron and old ash.

Beautiful.

Aiden knelt on the warm glass and looked up at her.

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[ TIER EVOLUTION COMPLETE ]

Beast: Cinder

Affinity: Solar

Tier: 2 → 3

Lineage: C (unchanged)

Form: Solarflare Hound → Solari Blaze Dancer

Lifespan Invested: 15 Years

Lifespan Returned: +60 Years

Trait Inherited: INFERNO RESISTANCE

[ CURRENT LIFESPAN: 90 Years ]

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Then the return hit him.

Sixty years poured through the bond at once, into him. His lifespan tripled in an instant.

It put him flat on his back.

The shake that had never truly left his hands vanished. The loose skin at the corners of his eyes tightened. The numbness the Frost Wolf had left in his forearm filled back in, warm, from elbow to fingers.

He lay on the glass, breathing the mountain’s burning air more easily than he ever had.

Ninety years.

I climbed up here ready to die for her if I had to. I’m walking down with three times the lifespan I came with.

He got an elbow under himself.

The white streak in his hair fell over his eyes. Still there. He could feel it against his forehead.

Fine. Keep that one. I earned it.

And something new had settled into his body.

Cinder was six feet away, burning hot enough to melt stone. Aiden’s face wasn’t even warm.

He held a hand toward her. Her fire touched his skin and did nothing to it at all.

Inferno Resistance. That’s what that box meant.

Cinder shuddered, then took a quick step back.

Aiden closed his hand in the heat, a smile curving his lips.

I’m not burning. I can stand beside you now.

She approached, stopping after each step to verify he was truly safe.

Then she sprang in front of him. Her growl was higher-pitched than before, somewhere between a hound’s growl and a large bird’s call.

He didn’t have time to think about how different it was.

Cinder was glaring at the Frost Wolf.

It hadn’t run.

It should have. Aiden could see why it couldn’t. Golden motes floated around it, drifting close to its body where the cold had once kept them away.

It had spent the whole night drawing cold from the Ice Heart, fighting Cinder’s heat, and finally poured everything it had into that last wave. Now there was nothing left for it to draw on.

The Ice Heart behind it was as spent as the wolf.

You brought a pit’s worth of cold to a mountain that breathes fire.

You lost the moment she started burning my fifteen years. You just don’t know it yet.

The Frost Wolf came anyway. Wounded, half-starved, doing the one thing it had ever been trained to do. Go at the warm thing. Put the warm thing out.

Cinder didn’t move.

The Frost Wolf reached her.

It tried to draw the heat from her body.

Nothing happened.

Then the cold around its body began to move.

Frost lifted from its fur in thin streams, pulled toward Cinder. The wolf staggered as the cold left it.

Cinder’s fire caught it.

The frost vanished before it reached her.

More came out of the wolf. Then more.

The Ice Heart behind it gave nothing.

Aiden watched the last of its cold leave its body. The absence that had followed them from the clay-belt to the Peaks got dragged into her mane and burned out of the air.

Every fire-walk in the basin. Every hour of counter-training. Gone in the time it took Aiden to breathe out.

The Frost Wolf was still across from them.

Its breath came out clear. Nothing rolled off its hide. The black glass under its paws stayed black.

It tried to make more cold.

Aiden watched its sides work. Its head lowered. Its body tensed.

Nothing came.

Three weeks. You chased us for three weeks.

It’s finally over.

Cinder looked down at it.

The Frost Wolf lowered its head, too weak to raise it again.

Cinder’s lips pulled back from her teeth.

Aiden held his breath.

She stood over it, fire rolling from her mane.

Then her jaws closed.

She stared at it for a moment. The same way she’d stared at the Ice Heart under the city. No fear. No anger. Just recognition of something that had hurt her once and couldn’t hurt her anymore.

Then she turned her back on it.

The Frost Wolf stood one more moment. Then it turned and went down the slope into the dark, past Vane men trying to bandage it, away from all of it.

She refused to kill it.

Aiden closed his eyes. He would have killed it if he were in her place. His hand was clamped around the knife in his boot. He didn’t even know when he had grabbed it.

That’s for the best. We don’t need to push Harken to hate us by killing his beast when it can’t threaten her anymore.

"Back! Fall back!" The man with the good coat screamed.

The handlers broke.

"But the targets? We still have our weapons, our own beasts."

"Sir Vane won’t forgive us for his beast’s wounds. He’ll make us join it if it dies. Back to treat it. Now!" The leader glanced at Cinder as she walked out of the shelter, then ran faster than his men.

They’d climbed a mountain to capture Aiden. They’d watched their apex, the House’s masterwork, have its cold burned out of it and be left standing like an ordinary wolf.

And now a Tier Three Solari Blaze Dancer stood in the doorway they’d meant to come through.

Aiden watched the leader go and felt the only real chill he’d felt since the sixty years landed.

The handlers came to capture me. That one will recount a story about a wolf evolving in a shelter.

Go on. Confirm to Harken I can make a beast evolve.

And that hunting me comes with a price he doesn’t want to pay. At least not since we spared his Frost Wolf.

He’s not weakened. He’s not desperate enough to want me at any cost just to replace his beast.

He won’t hire Master Tamers to chase me down. At least not yet.

You don’t know what you did, but good girl for doing it.

He rubbed Cinder’s flank.

Across from him, Miasma lifted her spines from the path she had guarded. Men and beasts lay unconscious all around her.

Beside her, Nyx lifted its head. It had joined Miasma when Cinder’s heat became unbearable.

They both looked up at Aiden. At Cinder. Then rushed over to them.

"Are you two all right?"

He caught them in his arms, but neither looked at him.

Miasma was observing Cinder with her green, patient eyes. Nyx tilted its head, then put a paw in front of its pale eyes.

Cinder threw her head up, sending her mane of living fire dancing with a proud growl.

She gave Aiden an annoyed look and pushed her head into his stomach.

"I know." He caught her, laughing. "But those years were already yours. You got me scared when you refused. We would have all died if you didn’t burn them. And look."

He showed her his hands. They were steady.

"I’m fine now. Better than ever. And look at you. A Solari Blaze Dancer. I’ve never read about that species."

She lifted her head. She licked his hands and howled in relief.

Across from them, stones cracked.

The dragon shifted its weight.

The plates along its back clicked softly as it straightened, its eyes fixed on Cinder.

Down the slope, the handlers ran faster.

It didn’t attack. It looked at Cinder for several seconds.

Cinder stood her ground.

Then it made a sound. Low and long.

Aiden felt it in the stone under his boots more than he heard it. The same kind of note the white-gold Hound had made under the lightning tree.

He didn’t know what it meant. But he knew what the dragon was doing.

Seen you. I know what you are now.

Not today.

The dragon turned and climbed back up toward the core, in no hurry, carrying that news to whatever was coiled in the middle of the mountain.

Then it was just them, in a dead man’s shelter, watching the first grey light of a morning they had not expected to see.

The cat left the shelter and jumped onto Cinder’s shoulder. The fur at its paws was black, and its whiskers were slightly curled upward.

It looked down at Aiden with an expression he decided to read as: I did the hard part. You froze a bit.

"You did. I’ll write a song about it."

He leaned against Cinder’s shoulder and let his eyes shut for one moment.

And with his eyes closed, he saw the thing he decided not to mention.

The fire inside Cinder hadn’t settled.

Something was still moving inside her, pushing at the edges of what she’d just become. Like the evolution had two steps, but she only stood on the first.

He opened his eyes.

Cinder leaned against him, her fire burning softly enough that both Nyx and Miasma could touch it.

What are you becoming?

He didn’t have an answer. He was getting used to walking down mountains without one.