Page 68 of Fae Tithe

Each finger was tipped with a flat obsidian claw. Her eye traced the outline of her hand and arm. They were ashen grey, and the veins beneath her skin had been replaced by lines of glowing amber.

“It hurts,” Helena whimpered.

It will, the voice repeated. The deep bass rattled the bones in her body.

“Where am I?” she asked, peering up into the smoky scarlet sky.

Muspelheim.

“What is Muspelheim?” Helena asked.

Muspelheim is this cursed place. I was trapped and sent here long ago. The Seelie Kings kept me here so they could siphon my magic.

“Who are you?”

I am Atlas.

“Atlas?” Helena asked. She knew that name. She raked her memory for it, vaguely recalling a festival puppet show she had seen in her youth, based on the tales from early Seelieland history. “Atlas… isn’t he… the Last Dragon?”

The mountainous figure lowered his scaled, serpentine neck through the smoke. His head lined up with her slouched body as she strained to stay upright. Each of his eyes was the full height of Helena’s body. They glowed like the sun, each dissected by a long black pupil.

The Dragon’s muzzle was vaguely wolf-shaped, with two large teardrop-shaped nostrils at its end. Atlas’s breath blew the hair that had escaped from Helena’s bun around her face. He briefly opened his gargantuan maw in a yawn, revealing canine fangs longer than her arms.

Helena ogled the crown of horns at the back of his massive head. Two, set back from his eyes, were particularly long. They swept back from his face and upward, impaling the scarlet sky above. The colour of the Dragon’s scales reminded Helena of obsidian and matched the new colour of the fingernails on her left hand. A faint amber glow radiated from the joins between each large black scale.

Atlas huffed heavily through his nostrils, blowing his hot breath against her skin. Hair slipped loose from Helena’s ruined bun.

Last? I would describe myself as ‘lost’.

“Lost?” Helena’s face met the glowing suns that made up his eyes. “What do you mean, ‘lost’?”

I was two summers past my fledgling age and undertaking migration for the first time. I was blown off course while flying through an awful storm and ended up in what you now call Seelieland.

He was so young when he got lost. Helena grunted as another throb of pain radiated up her arm. “How long have you been here?”

Since I refused to do Theo’s bidding. When I did not wish to aid him in subjugating the faeries further, he used his own and his slaves’ magic to bind me to his line and send me here.

Helena could not help herself. She felt a stab of pity for the Dragon. Rose had said, more than once, that she had a bleeding heart for waifs and strays. He had been the equivalent of a young man leaving home for the first time when he had been lost and then sent to Muspelheim.

“Why are you so set on keeping me here with you?”

Do you not want to return? A low growl emanated from the Dragon’s throat. I saved you and kept you here. Do you not want to go back to your offspring and Siren mate?

“Of course I do!” she exclaimed. Helena’s brow furrowed, stinging her blistered forehead. “Wait, how do you know about them?”

Atlas rumbled in his broad chest. She suspected the Dragon was laughing. Because I am in your mind now and I have fragments of the most important memories. You must stay here with me so I may go back with you.

“What?” she asked.

Helena could not process what was being said. Despite her limited education, she considered herself a reasonably smart person. Her mind was addled from the pain and her reality being rapidly upended.

How would that work? What is he talking about? Another throb up her arm scattered her thoughts further, making her hiss through her teeth.

When the Seelie King burnt you... Atlas said, angling his giant head and huffing through his nostrils onto her grey arm. ...it gave me the opportunity to flee the bindings that connected me to Theo’s descendant. Rian used enough of my magic that I could slip out of him and into you. I could anchor my mind in yours and protect you from the curse he forged with a combination of his own and my magic. When your body died on Midgard, my anchor in your mind was lost, but I could not let you go. I pulled on that tie between us and brought you here.

“Your anchor was in my mind? So, you were planning on coming back, but only in my head? What is Midgard?” Helena’s head spun. She scowled at the Dragon again. How dare he? This is my body. My head.

The Dragon puffed loudly through his nostrils. It is your head, that is correct. My mind could pass through my Flame into you. Midgard is the world we are from, Helena. Atlas rumbled with laughter again. At least, that is where my ancestors settled when they left Vanaheim.