Dragon's Dawn: First Light (Book 1)

Chapter 3: Reynar, The Jade Demon Slayer

Chapter Three: Reynar, The Jade Demon Slayer

Some people you seek out. Others, you find your way back to — the way water finds the sea, without needing to think about the route.

Reynar Tokyoheim was the second kind.

The streets of Shuratown were doing what they always did, which was to say: everything, simultaneously, without apparent coordination, and somehow producing a result that was lively rather than chaotic. Vendors called across to one another. Children moved between adult legs with the fluid confidence of people who have never once been the largest thing in any room. The smell of salt from the harbor mixed with frying food from the market stalls in a combination that was, objectively, not harmonious, and that Max had long ago stopped noticing because it was simply what home smelled like.

Skyye, beside him, was not not noticing it. She was looking at everything — the layered stone buildings stepping up the hillside, the network of piers visible between gaps in the market stalls, the size of it, the density of it, the sheer volume of people occupying space in every direction.

Max caught her expression.

"Something on your mind?"

She blinked back. "No — nothing. It's just. It never stops surprising me. How much bigger this place is than Guerrinville."

"You get used to it."

"You say that like it's obvious."

"It is obvious. I grew up here."

Skyye gave him the look of someone who is not finding this particular line of reasoning as compelling as the person delivering it seems to think it is.

He shrugged and kept walking.

The truth was, they weren't in any particular hurry. That was its own kind of strange — the morning had contained a demon army, a zeppelin, a narrow escape from an island, and the discovery that all of them could apparently fly, and now here they were, walking through a market with the ambling pace of people who had nowhere they urgently needed to be. The urgency had burned itself out somewhere over the water, replaced by the particular exhaustion that comes after a crisis — the kind that feels almost like peace, because peace and exhaustion both want you to slow down, and in the short term it's difficult to tell them apart.

They'd stop at a few stalls. They'd move on. Reynar wasn't going anywhere.

It was Mist who noticed Skyye had gone quiet.

She moved alongside her without making a performance of it — just drifted over and matched her pace, the way you do with someone you've decided to pay attention to.

"Something wrong? You seem a bit down."

Skyye smiled — the kind that was sincere about the gratitude and honest about the sadness beneath it. "I'm just worried about my family. We got away. But did they? Did the people on the island? I haven't heard anything since we left, and I..." She trailed off, and then picked it back up. "I don't know if they're safe."

Mist was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, it was without the false confidence of someone trying to make a problem smaller than it is.

"I think they're safe. I genuinely do. But I also know that me saying so doesn't make it certain." A pause. "What I do think is that we have to trust that Elohim is watching over them. That He hasn't forgotten them just because we can't see them."

Skyye glanced sideways at her. "Elohim," she repeated.

"You don't believe in Him."

"I don't... know what I believe. I never really thought about it much." She hesitated. "No offense."