“Would you prefer it another way?”
Iason realized he wouldn’t. It seemed right that the continents took shape because a storm decided to delight in its existence. It made it better, somehow, that despite the wars and chaos that came on the heels of so many of humanity’s endeavors, the world they lived in was a product of elation.
Slowly, Leviathan started to do more than just kick up volcanoes and stir the seas. He rushed along the shoreline and watched plant life grow in his wake, observed the evolution of small creatures in the estuaries and shallows into whales and sharks and beings Iason had never seen before, some so massive they seemed the size of entire cities, others so small they were tossed about by the wind on the water.
“I forgot how much fun it was in the beginning,” Levi said, as Leviathan lay on his back in the water and watched spirits—the Old Ones, before they took any other form—dancing in the skies over what would one day become Mislia. “Perhaps I also started to forget what I was. You found me sleeping, the night we were bound. I won’t say I dislike sleeping, but I don’t know why I preferred it to this.”
“No one to share it with?” But it wasn’t just that. It was what Summer and Tanis had said. They needed balance, both of them. Iason laughed and reached for Levi again, pulling himself out of their shared power. Levi looked startled to find him drawing away so soon, and he gripped Iason by the arms, steadying him.
“Are you all right?”
“There’s a furrow in your brow, now,” Iason said, and swiped a thumb over it. “I think I understand it. It isn’t dull or endless silence. It’s not something you need to sleep off, or dread. Eternity’s too wondrous to experience alone, that’s all.” He grinned. “It’s simple, isn’t it? It’s been simple this whole time.”
“And you would want it?” Levi’s body shimmered, like moonlight catching whitecaps off the sea. “Eternity, and everything it means?”
Iason gripped Levi’s face in both hands and felt his body shifting under his fingertips. “I would like to see what it means to love you in a hundred years,” he said. “And a thousand, and a thousand more.”
“I would have you with me until the last sunset, wizard,” Levi said. Wings unfurled at his back, gilded with starlight, casting a shadow over the ocean. “I would like to bring you beyond it, into what happens after.”
“Then do it,” Iason said. He could feel the power building between them like an ocean swell, not yet breaking. “Take me, dragon. You can have me.”
He wasn’t holding Levi’s face anymore. He had his hands on Leviathan’s muzzle, a dragon so massive he could cover Mislia, beautiful and terrible. Iason looked up into Leviathan’s eyes. He was, like Leviathan had been at the start, on the cusp of being. He was a wizard who should have never survived to adulthood, a boy consumed by another man’s ambition, an assassin both defeated and saved by a neglected young girl. And he knew, like Leviathan, what had to come next.
“Remake me,” he said, letting go of Leviathan’s jaw. “Make me new.”
The wind howled over the ocean, swirling around Iason and filling Leviathan’s wings.
Leviathan struck, swift as a snake, and Iason Ellas was gone.
Out in the middle of the moonlit ocean, Leviathan rose into the air. He twisted, shedding droplets of water like rain, spiraling and undulating as he ascended until he was awash in light, a shadow against the moon. Light shone from his scales, shafts of it streaking across the sky, and it was so bright that people all over Iperios stopped and wondered why a second moon was shining over the sea. Beneath him, waves stirred and the wind roared, and a new shape emerged from the dazzling light that was Leviathan’s body. It writhed as it broke free, a glowing, snakelike figure, and an inhuman cry made the air shiver as wings unfurled from its back. A second dragon, his scales a violet so pale they were almost white, took shape over the ocean. Leviathan roared.
Iason, remade at last, roared back.
In that moment, as the dragon that was once a wizard chased Leviathan into the clouds, change swept over Iperios.
In the hills of Kallistos, flowers bloomed that no one had ever seen before. Coral reefs emerged on the shores of Thalassa, color returning to colonies that had gone white and fragile. A pile of stones in the quarries of Staria shook itself and walked, in human shape, into the darkness. Flocks of new bird species descended on trees and rooftops, and the depths of the ocean stirred as enormous shadows passed through, singing like whales.
A boy on a Mislian hillside cried out as spots of light appeared in the flowers he was picking for his mother. The lights swirled around him as the first Old Ones to be born in centuries streaked over the island.
The god of dreams sat up in bed and shook his lover awake, his face illuminated in the light of the moon from the window. Death paused and smiled before placing a card on a weathered game board, and his lover smiled back as he added another piece to the board. Desire laughed while his companion squinted at the moon.
Lying alone in a tomb in the desert, War opened their eyes.
And in Mislia, Sophie Bassett broke free of the crowd of people standing on the beach to watch the lights taking shape above the ocean, and she scrambled up the rocks toward a hill overlooking the water. As brave as she’d been all her life, as she stumbled through grass that grew to her waist in seconds and teemed with unknown flowers, she wasn’t the girl who had saved Iason. She was the child whose fathers had gone to sea and never came back, and she sobbed their names as she fought her way up the hill.
“Iason!” she cried, stumbling into the open at the summit. The dragons rose through the air, bathed in light, brighter than the moon. “Levi!”
Iason burst through the clouds. He hovered in the air, and it seemed as though Leviathan were suspended among the stars, ancient and powerful—and new. They were both remade, and as Leviathan danced around him, they twisted and reshaped themselves, reaching for each other with claw and tooth and wing. There was no reason to it, no pattern. They delighted in the chance to know each other again, to touch and feel. Iason shivered with a pleasure fiercer and hotter than anything he’d felt before, and for an instant they were neither dragon nor mortal but something else, something even they couldn’t define.
He could have stayed there forever, dancing with Leviathan in the stars.
But as they moved around each other, so close they seemed like one dragon, one man, Iason remembered the girl in Mislia, and Leviathan heard her call his name.
And the people of Mislia watched as two dragons flew down from the sky, spiraling and wheeling, deft as sparrows. They landed on the top of the hill where Sophie stood weeping, and when she reached out to them, they bent their heads.
And then they were just Iason and Levi again, and Levi was wrapping Sophie up in a one-armed hug while Iason tried to wipe the tears off her cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” Sophie said, as the new flowers bent in the breeze. “I thought—”
