Emilia.

That voice resounded in the negative spaces of her mind, and Emilia was falling into an endless void with only that voice to catch her. “Who are you?” she whispered, though she couldn’t move her mouth.

Can you not guess?

She had stopped hearing the others a while ago. Now there was only she and this phantom visitor. Not her father. Not Alex. Not Lucian. Who, then?

In the blackness, a great orange eye opened, reptilian, with a narrowing black slit through the center. It beheld her soul; Emilia felt every lie she’d ever told, every wish she’d ever cast bubble up to the surface, and the harsh rays of some celestial light shined upon them. Even though she was bound to a bed, she wanted to drop to her knees.

Impossible.

“I’m hallucinating.”

Perhaps.

“You can’t be the Great Dragon.” The last few words trembled in her mind.

I can be many things. That is your name for me, perhaps.

Emilia was half-afraid and half-hopeful that she’d simply gone mad.

“Then…then how can I speak to you now? Why never before in my life?”

Your soul is merged with your dragon’s, and when I called your dragon to my Trial, she linked to me. You and I share a connection we could never have had otherwise.

“So you approve of this Emperor’s Trial?” She couldn’t help the heat in her words.

Not of what it has become. This Trial, this empire, has grown into a twisted version of what we once imagined. Even now, centuries after my physical death, I am ashamed of what I helped create. I would right these wrongs.

Emilia would have enjoyed a more in-depth philosophical and theological discussion right now, but she was about to brutally die. Her concerns had to be more practical.

“Can you take my chains away, then?”

Only you can save yourself, my lady. But I will help, if you allow it.

The draconic eye closed, and Emilia was swallowed up in an explosion of visions. She found herself gazing upon a vista of green rolling hills and cerulean skies. Through those skies, dragons cavorted in great number. Unsaddled. Riderless. Free. She watched as a pair descended to earth where a man on horseback awaited them. The dragons settled their wings, opened their mouths, and spoke to the man. They spoke, with glittering voices like a handful of coins.

The dragons were speaking. Emilia could barely believe it.

Fifteen hundred years ago, dragons were born into this world. With them came the dawn of order and chaos.

“Yes,” Emilia said numbly. She knew that the great families of old had sifted through the remains of a long-cooled volcanic eruption, and in those ashes they had discovered jewel-bright eggs. She knew those eggs had hatched, and dragons had come into the world, but she never knew that those creatures could speak.

For centuries the ways of man and dragon were neighborly, but separate. Until Cassius Oretani, the chaos lord, rose up to bring the other Etrusian lands under his sway.

Yes, Emilia had known all of this. Before her, the scene dissolved as if wiped away, and a new image formed in its place.

Five people, two women and three men, stood before an enormous dragon. They were on a large marble veranda open to the summer air. One of the men, dressed in robes of blue—Antoninus Sabel, Lucian’s greatest ancestor—strode forth to stand before the dragon.

This dragon—the Great Dragon—was a massive creature, over sixty feet in length. His scales were the color of burnished bronze, his eyes deep ochre, and his unfurled wings seemed to block out the sky itself.

Antoninus Sabel, soon to be the first Etrusian emperor, settled himself upon the Great Dragon’s back. The other men and women, the rulers of the other four great Houses (and Emilia could see her ancestor, Marcella Aurun, among them) bowed in unison to Antoninus and the Dragon.

When Oretani grew to be too much of a threat, the voice whispered, I told the other Houses to form as one army, led by one person. I chose Antoninus as my rider because he was the first to ask how he could help his people—he alone did not seek power. I have always thought the meek to have a keener understanding of human nature than most great men.

The scene shifted, and Emilia watched Antoninus and the Dragon soar through the air to fight Cassius Oretani. Emilia caught a quick glimpse of the famed chaos lord, a young man with long black hair and a crimson mouth, riding a dragon of the purest white.

Before Emilia’s eyes, Oretani took a sword to the stomach. He and his dragon spiraled downward.

The five families fought Oretani’s people to a standstill. They trapped them in their territory to the west, frozen in stasis for all time by the orderly magosi. When the battle was done, all of us agreed that, for the good of the world, the power of chaos must be bound.

“If they bound chaos, how am I a chaotic?” Emilia could not let this pass without an answer.

Think of chaos as water poured into a cracked earthenware jar. The majority of it is contained, but there are leaks. It is a good thing, too, for all of us that your chaotic kind still exist…because of what happened next.

Emilia now watched the scene shift to Antoninus, the other lords and ladies, and a horde of orange-robed orderlies clustered around a table. They appeared to be arguing as, perched around the enormous pavilion, the Great Dragon and several other dragons watched, their tails twitching, their wings settling.

We dragons helped create the binding spell. We were foolish to assume that there would be no consequences to locking away half of all magical ability. And we paid the price. When the spell was done, and chaos bound away, so too were the tongues of all dragonkind.

Emilia watched as the Great Dragon and the others jerked as if shot through by lightning. They began to lash their tails, to bite at one another, to roar and flap into the sky in a disorganized mass. Antoninus and the others were startled and watched in seeming horror.

“Then why didn’t they undo the spell?” Emilia asked. She felt as ill as if she were watching a murder.

Because if a meek man receives power without first developing a stout heart, he can become a natural tyrant.

Emilia was forced to watch Antoninus beckon the Great Dragon down as though the noble beast were a dog. When the Dragon obeyed, he who’d been the savior of order and the lives of how many millions of people, the first emperor petted him like an animal. Antoninus smiled.

Emilia couldn’t look anymore. Blackness rushed back over her, and she mentally sobbed in relief.

“So dragons are prisoners? Including Chara?” Emilia felt raw throughout her body—what little she could still feel, anyway. Chara, her best companion, the creature she’d tickled and kissed and whose scales she’d brushed…was that creature her slave? The thought nearly broke the tenuous thread of her sanity.

But you, and only you, Emilia of the Aurun, may set them free. Free them, and free yourself. Will you make that choice?

“What do I do?” Dimly, Emilia realized that she was no longer questioning the hows and the whys of this insane miracle. Perhaps Camilla, monstrous as she was, had been right about one thing: logic was the enemy of faith. Later, Emilia would find that thought disturbing, but right now she clung to that faith—her only hope.

A chaotic dragon rider must break the spell. Any chaotic may break a binding spell, but only one whose soul is connected with a dragon may break this one.

“I don’t understand.”

Think of the binding as a great invisible chain stretched across the entire world. To render a chain useless, you must only destroy a single link.

Emilia understood.

“If I can break the binding on my own dragon…,” she began.

Then the spell will shatter in every dragon’s mind, and chaos will be unleashed once more.

At that, Emilia paused. She would give her life to save Chara, but…what she had done could never be forgiven.

“Isn’t it better if chaos never comes back? What if the Oretani return?”

Chaos is as natural as order. One should not exist without the other.

No mention of Oretani.

“But I’ve only ever hurt people.”

There is life in chaos as much as there is death. There is the potential for needed change. And…you may save lives.

The others. They would be put to death as well. Lucian. Vespir. Even Ajax. She could not…she could not allow it. So what if she’d been born bad? She had not chosen it, but she could choose how to shape her future. If she had one. If she chose one for herself.

And for Chara.

“What do I do?”

Reach out for your dragon. Feel the link in her mind, and break it.

Might as well tell her to dance the color mauve. But Emilia recalled what Vespir had told Ajax about locking in on some sort of Red. Emilia breathed and tried to do as the other girl had instructed. She cleared her mind and imagined her invisible hand reaching out through the iron bars and the stone walls. She pictured flying through the air, her spirit light as a sigh, and she imagined Chara rising up to meet her in this darkness.

Emilia could have sworn that her dragon actually appeared, milky white, ruby eyes shining with inner fire. Emilia reached out her invisible hand. She could feel the thin, silken sensation of dragon scales. This was Chara, her soul. Her beloved friend, condemned to a lifetime of servitude and silence.

No one should ever condemn a woman to stay quiet.

Shaking with the effort, Emilia imagined her hand passing into the dome of the dragon’s skull. Emilia’s breathing grew haggard; there was something resisting her, some pressure shoving against her hand. It tasted like iron on her tongue, this lock. This spell. Emilia gasped and cried out in pain.

Break it. Break it.

Emilia heeded the voice and pressed back harder. Her mind felt liable to snap with the pain. Perhaps…she changed her mind. It was not a lock, but a silken purse with the top sewn shut. Much easier to open. She began to pick at the thread binding that precious jewel. Her muscles, her mind, her will burned against this impossible spell. Too weak. She was too weak.

And then, her chaos prickled at the back of her neck and hummed at the tips of her fingers. With a deep breath, Emilia let the chaos slide down her arms, over her knuckles, kept it small as it approached the spell in her dragon’s brain. Give the power too much freedom, and Emilia knew she’d crush Chara’s skull from this distance.

Slowly, carefully, the chaos ate at those threads, and Emilia pictured the purse unravel and fall away. She felt something pop, something invisible that shocked her and shook her stomach and tickled her ribs. A white-hot explosion of noise like the howling wind cascaded over Emilia, rushing into her soul.

“Emilia!”

The voice that called her now was feminine and sweet, familiar as her own breath. The voice—her Chara, her dragon—called for Emilia again and again as chaos exploded over the world, rippling through flesh and bone and stone and steel. Emilia’s back arched, and she gasped as the blood and flesh inside of her sparked with power.

Chara was free.

And so was Emilia.