Chapter 5: Regret

The roar was gone.

So was the fire in his veins, the wings, the legs, the dagger. All that remained was silence and the copper stink of blood.

Marci stood motionless in the center of the platform. Bodies lay in awkward heaps invaders mostly, armor cracked, eyes open to the canopy. His master still pinned by four blades, face slack. 

Kael sprawled near the edge, chest rising shallow. Lira curled around her throat wound. Torin unmoving but breathing. 

Fyumi Fyumi propped against a trunk, hand pressed to her side, someone already kneeling beside her with bandages.

Alive.

All of them alive.

He should have felt relief. Instead, nausea rolled through him.

He looked down at his hands. They trembled. Blood his, theirs, everyone's caked under his nails, streaked up his forearms. The dagger had vanished, but he could still feel its weight, the way it sang when it cut.

He killed them all.

Enemies. Bandits. Invaders who came to burn and take.

But they had been breathing once. Laughing, maybe. Planning. One lay near the railing, young barely older than him fingers still curled around a broken amulet. A sister's? A lover's? Marci stared at it until his vision blurred.

They were people.

And he had ended them like they were nothing.

A sob tore out of him quiet, choked. He dropped to his knees again, forehead to the planks, blood smearing his hair.

Master.

The image burned behind his eyes: the old man standing alone against ninety, buying time, buying lives. Four swords. 

No last words. No chance to say goodbye, or thank you, or I'm sorry I was late, I'm sorry I doubted, I'm sorry I couldn't be stronger.

"I failed you," Marci whispered to the corpse. "You taught me Breath is control... and I had none."

Wind moved through the branches, indifferent.

Voices rose guards arriving, healers calling, survivors being carried. Fyumi's weak voice: "Marci... where's Marci?"

He flinched. Couldn't look. Couldn't face her eyes, the gratitude he didn't earn.

They lived because of him.

They almost died because of him.

The platform felt too small, the redwoods too tall. Everything pressed in.

He stood slowly, legs unsteady.

No more.

He couldn't stay here, breathing the same air as the people he'd almost lost, the people he'd saved by becoming a monster.

He walked.

Past the bodies. Past the blood. Toward the outer spiral path that led higher, into the thinner branches where few went. No note. No goodbye. Just steps.

The canopy swallowed him.

Behind, voices called his name fainter, fainter.

He didn't turn back.

Somewhere deep inside, the Dragon Spirit stirred again just a whisper of wings, a flicker of legs.

He crushed it down.

Not yet.

Not until he could control it.

Not until the cost stopped being everything he loved.