I expected to feel a backlash from releasing the most powerful working I—or possibly any single magic user, ever—has created.

  Instead I just feel tired.

  Like that was all I had left in me.

  I should move. Get off this stone floor where I have lain for so long.

  But that one movement took so much out of me, my burst of wrath after years of calm drifting spent.

  Then I remember the dragon, low in power and facing a cohort of priests.

  And I try.

  My senses are scrambled—I've gotten used to sensing magic across the entire tidal island, connected to the mainland of the Empire of Kameya by only a strip of land that is most often underwater. The different scope is an adjustment—but just as I manage to sit up, I hear pounding footsteps.

  They stop right on the other side of the stone before me.

  Where once upon a time, priests walled me in, to pressure me into doing what they wanted.

  That had not gone well for them.

  No priests remain here, so now I can break the wall and let myself out.

  Just as soon as I can move again.

  But then a hoarse voice asks, "Yora?"

  I know this voice. I know this magic, low as it is.

  The dragon.

  He doesn't sound lost like I feel; he sounds desperate.

  I swallow convulsively, trying to wet my throat. Cough. Try again. "I'm here."

  The dragon sucks in a breath in astonishment.

  Then he says firmly, "I'm taking down this wall. Can you back away?"

  "Not quickly. But you don't have to."

  "Yes," the dragon says, "I do."

  I open my mouth to argue—he's already so low in magic, and he's long since done enough, my one anchor to the world outside—but then the stone—the stone—begins to heat.

  If the fire burns hot enough, anything can burn.

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  Fortunately the walls that surround me are not ones that support the temple. The ancient grout melts first, and the hot stones start falling away as the dragon pushes his way inside.

  And I see him, for the first time since that day our eyes met across a crowd.

  As beautiful as ever.

  He looks just the same—the same slight build, the same wild blue hair, the flawless pale skin that practically glows.

  Those icy eyes, though—

  This time, he's looking on me with wonder.

  "You're alive," the dragon says.

  I blink. "You knew that. You talked to me."

  "I was never sure if you could hear," he admits quietly. "And it is still different, to have believed something for five hundred years, and to finally see proof."

  My eyes widen. "Five hundred?"

  I knew I wasn't fully aware of the passage of time, but...

  I'm five hundred years old.

  What must the world look like now? How much has changed—

  And how much hasn't?

  How much has been in stasis like me?

  The dragon opens his mouth, but then a shadow crosses his expression. "I don't have time to explain," he says like it physically pains him. "There are priests coming for me—"

  "I know. That's why I opened the temple. You needed sanctuary—"

  Now he looks stricken. "For me?"

  I feel slow and stupid. This dragon and I have never actually met, I realize, and what felt so obvious to me in my trance seems somehow ridiculous faced with an actual person. But—

  "They can't have you," I tell him.

  The dragon stares at me.

  And then arrives at a decision.

  "No," he says. "They can't have you."

  He takes off a pack, puts it in front of me.

  "I wish we had more time," he says, "but this will get you started." The dragon struggles for a moment and finally says softly, "Be well."

  And then he's gone, back down the hall of the temple, his footsteps retreating fast.

  I'm so stunned by the suddenness that it takes me a minute to react.

  In my defense, it has apparently been five hundred years since I reacted to anything, so maybe I can be forgiven for a delayed reaction time, but on the other hand I don't have time for it.

  Gods damn it. He really thinks he needs to defend me from the priests, and now he's still going to get himself killed.

  I haven't had to make decisions in—literally an age, apparently, let alone quick ones.

  But wrath, my old friend, is always with me.

  The dragon was supposed to shelter here, damn it all. Use the temple architecture to lay ambushes to take the priests on one at a time, separated and weakened.

  If I had actually managed to get my wits together in time to tell him that, maybe it would have mattered.

  Now I will have to move to handle it, because he is not dying for me.

  The priests are almost here; my senses are starting to reconcile how they expanded during my trance.

  I don't have much time.

  Move, Wrath.

  My hand that clenched before, I move again, using the movement to create a pattern to pass my power through.

  One thing I will say for meditating for hundreds of years is that there is now zero mental strain to run a kata. Those paths in my mind are well-worn.

  My fist glows magenta.

  Then that glow gradually moves up my arm as I begin to move my fingers, then across my shoulder up to my head as I turn it, gently testing the motion, then down the other side, flowing down my torso and through my legs until my feet tingle with the power reigniting me.

  My muscles aren't decayed from being in magical stasis; I simply haven't needed to move them, separated as my mind was from my body in order to hold the Quiet steady. Now I have to reforge that connection, remind myself how.

  Deliberately, I rise to my feet.

  I pick up the dragon's pack. There might be something important to him in it, and if he does hide and the priests come to search they shouldn't get to have it.

  I look at the wall that once encased me in a living tomb.

  At the giant hole a dragon I've never met made in it for me to walk through.

  And I step through it.