The frost-wyrm's corpse still twitched under me, muscles firing in even though the brain had been soup for the better part of a minute. I sat on its corpse and scraped gore from my face with the heel of my palm, but the stuff was half-frozen already, pink ice flaking off my cheekbones.

  My worms pulled free of its opened belly in wet ropes, white and fat with feeding, retracting back under my skin where they settled with a satisfaction I could feel in my own gut. The worm-blade was still buried in the wyrm's skull.

  I'd driven it down through the top of the head when the bastard reared up on me. The tundra around us looked like something had torn it apart from below—which, to be fair, was about right. Churned frozen mud in long cuts where the wyrm had burst up through the frost, scattered scales the color of dirty ice, their blood already going dark and crystallizing in the cold. My boots had frozen to the wyrm's hide where I sat, and I had to rock my heels to crack them free.

  Behind me, Zo's axe came down with a sound like splitting greywood. She was up to her elbows in the second wyrm. The smaller one, the one that had come up after its mate and gotten half its body sheared apart before it could close its mouth. She worked the blade in deep, twisting, both hands on the shaft. Looking for the soul core.

  "Find anything?" I called back.

  "Give me a damn second."

  I gave her a damn second. Used it to survey the open ground.

  Two frost-wyrms. The big one under me, maybe fifteen meters nose to tail, white scales gone grey in death. The smaller one behind me, opened up from throat to midsection, Zo's work, steaming in the cold afternoon air. Beyond them, the Hearthlands stretched flat and empty in every direction… a few boulders humped up from the frozen ground, distant smudges of treeline. Grey sky pressing down on everything.

  No cover. No walls. Just flat, frozen wastes all the way to the horizon.

  I wiped my hands on my thighs and managed to get most of the pink off. Heroic. Real hero shit, sitting on a dead worm and scraping its insides out of your eyebrows. The songs would be something…

  There was another crack from behind me, then a wet sucking sound.

  "Got it," Zo said.

  It had been days since the cave where the dragon died. I'd stopped counting the exact number somewhere around nine, when the difference between day eight and day nine stopped mattering and the only thing that mattered was how far west the sun set and whether we'd find shelter before dark.

  A lot had changed. And hadn't. The sky was the same flat grey. The wind still cut through everything. The ground still froze at night and stayed frozen through the day, and my boots still ached from walking on it. But the things under my skin were different, and the woman walking beside me was different, and the way we moved through this world had changed in ways I was only starting to understand.

  We kept to the Hearthlands, heading roughly west, using rocky outcroppings and old barrows—stone burial mounds half-sunk into the tundra—for shelter when night came. Twice we'd cut south to the edges of the Greywood where the pine canopy broke the wind and the undergrowth offered something to burn.

  Zo's recovery from the dragon burns had been ugly. The skin on her left arm and shoulder had gone black to yellow to a wet pink that wept through whatever we wrapped it in. She'd gritted her teeth through the worst of it, which was the first three days, when the blisters split every time she moved and the smell of cooked skin hung around us both no matter how much cold air blew through. I'd offered to let the worms clean the dead tissue. She'd told me I could go fuck myself with the worms.

  But once she healed, she came back stronger. The Sacred energy from the dragon fight had settled into her, and I could see it in the way she moved, she was faster, and had a lot more force behind each swing.

  My own growth was a different animal. The dragon's power had changed things—the worm core, the Bone Scales that had thickened my worms into calcified ropes of off-white chitin—but my body getting stronger was the least of it. Raw power wasn't what kept you breathing.

  The real change was up here. In my thinking.

  On open ground with no walls, no tunnels, no convenient rockfalls to funnel a fight. I'd had to learn to build my own. The worms were the answer, but using them took a kind of creativity I hadn't needed before. And somewhere in the process of figuring that out, the silence had gotten louder.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Mabel—Rell—whatever name she'd worn, her voice was gone. The worms obeyed. They moved where I told them, struck when I wanted, fed when I allowed it. Clean, quiet obedience. There were no more sarcastic observations about my form. No unsolicited opinions on the intelligence of charging headfirst into a creature three times my size. Just... quiet. The wind, and the crunch of my boots, and the low hum of worms under my skin doing what they were told.

  I missed it. Her. The snark and the warmth underneath it, the way she'd made the horror of what I was… feel like… well less of a horror. I told myself it didn't matter, that the power worked the same either way. But the silence where her voice used to be was louder than the wind, and some nights by the fire I caught myself waiting for a comment that wasn't coming.

  I was the one who dictated the fight now. I would set worm traps in the ground, spears angled to catch a charge, mounds of worms that would burst outwards and devour unsuspecting aggressors, I began using my ranged worms like spears to make up for the loss of… By the time the thing got close enough to us, they were limping, and bleeding or dismembered.

  Zo was still our closer. She crossed the gap with that new speed, caught the first hit on her shoulder or whatever piece of her could take it, and put the beast down. Her axe w as like an executioners, close and final.

  The drakes and the wyverns and whatever else stumbled into us…

  But there were costs in everything we did. Zo's left hand still trembled when she gripped too hard, nerve damage from the burns that hadn't fully healed. We both ate too little and slept too lightly and carried the weight of people who weren't walking beside us anymore. Sadie. Rafe. Sophie. I didn't say their names out loud. Neither did Zo.

  The goal of reaching Horn's Rest, the Dragoon waystation, the place we'd been pointed toward by every scrap of information we'd scraped together. It didn't feel as impossible as it had leaving the cave.

  I pulled the worm-blade free of the wyrm's skull with a twist and a wet crunch, the thing's jaw dropped open on broken hinges,its teeth the length of my forearm clicking together as the muscles finally gave up. Thick fluid ran down the blade and the worms in its edge drank greedily, little pulses of satisfaction running back through my arm into my chest.

  I flicked the worst of the slop off and held the blade up. The bone's edge had held. The calcified worms that made up its structure had hardened further over the past days, and there was a frost to the edge now—something it was pulling from the drake kills, cold leaching into the weapon. I could feel it when I gripped the hilt, a chill that numbed my fingers slightly even through the bone-scale gauntlet.

  I drove the blade point-first into the frozen ground and crouched beside the wyrm's body.

  "All right," I muttered. "Dinner time."

  The worms came out through my palms and forearms, spreading across the wyrm's back in branching white lines, burrowing through scale and fat and into the meat beneath. I could feel what they felt—cold tissue, dense muscle fibers, the slow trickle of essence still bleeding out of the dead flesh. They fed, and I fed through them, and the power filtered back in increments. Strengthening the bone plates along my chest and shoulders. Thickening the scales under my skin. Adding mass to the worm reserves coiled around my spinal cord.

  It wasn't fast. It wasn't clean. Feeding never was… the wyrm deflated in patches where the worms hollowed it out, skin sagging inward over empty cavities. I crouched there beside the corpse and tried not to think about how natural it was starting to feel.

  Zo’s boots crunched on frozen ground and she settled herself a few feet away. I heard the waterskin's stopper pop, the sound of her drinking, and then quiet. She was watching. She always watched when I fed.

  "You’re getting faster," she said.

  I didn't look up. "They’re just hungrier, maybe."

  The last of the usable essence drained out and the worms pulled away, sliding back under my skin in fat satisfied knots. I stood up. My knees cracked. My lower back ached from crouching and the cold had crept into my joints while I wasn't paying attention.

  The wyrm was a collapsed sack of scale and bone. Wind moved across the tundra and caught the edge of a loose scale, flapping it like a broken shutter.

  Zo held out the waterskin. I walked over and took it, and drank until the metallic taste of wyrm blood in the back of my throat washed away.

  "We were lucky," Zo said, patting the pouch on her belt where she stored the Soul cores. "Got some good ones."

  “They’re mine.” She corked the waterskin, tucked it away. Her left hand shook slightly, fingers fighting the strap, and she clamped them still against her thigh. The burns had healed, but the nerves hadn't… at least not yet. "You just ate a wyrm. Don't be greedy."

  "I wouldn't dream of it."

  She looked at me. Flat. Measuring.

  "You've got blood on your neck," she said.

  I wiped at it. More pink ice.

  She grunted. Pulled her axe off her back, checked the edge by running her thumb across it—habit, something she did every time they stopped—and slotted it back into the harness.

  I pulled the worm-blade from the frozen ground, white and clean now, the worms in its edge having drunk every trace of fluid while it sat there. It was heavier than it used to be.

  The wind picked up. I turned my face into it and let it burn the last of the wyrm-smell off my skin. My left side ached. My knees ached. My hands ached from gripping and killing and feeding and gripping again, day after day, the cycle of violence that passed for living in this frozen hell.

  Zo was already walking away.

  I looked back at the two wyrm carcasses—one deflated, one split open, both steaming faintly in the cold—and then I followed her west across the flat, empty tundra toward a waystation that for all we knew was gone, built by people I'd never met, in a world that wanted to kill us every step of the way.

  My blade was cold in my hand. And the silence where Mabel's voice should have been was the loudest thing on the Hearthlands.