At first, it was difficult to block out everything else demanding Kaz’s attention. Each time he tried, his heart would pound, his head would throb, or his abused muscles would cramp. Surprisingly, it was when he focused again on his breathing that he was able to push the intrusive sensations away.

This time, however, instead of looking outside his body, trying to sense the elusive mana, he turned in. As his lungs swelled, his core grew larger in his mental vision, and each time he released a slow breath, he saw power pulse out, producing an amount of ki that should have been a flood, but was now barely more than the bare minimum needed to keep his body alive.

At last, Kaz found himself alone in the space within his mind and body. Even his sense of the dragon and the seed grew distant and tenuous, and a gleaming stone hovered in his mind’s eye. It was something like an ammolite, with deep, lambent rivers of blue mingling with golden streaks, ribbons of onyx, opalescent white, and delicate threads of red. With each cycle, these colors lit from within, fire behind clear diamond, and ki flowed out into Kaz’s limp and sagging channels.

It was beautiful, and mesmerizing, and so it took several such cycles for Kaz to notice the cracks. They were subtle - little more than traces superimposed on the crystalline surface - but once he saw them, he couldn’t look away. No ki passed through them, and where they intersected, minute fragments of the core were dark and silent.

Cautiously, Kaz reached out, stroking one of the fissures as if it was a pup who had fallen and needed comfort. An ache stabbed through him, and he thought he gasped, but otherwise there was no effect. The core remained, and the cycle continued.

Which left Kaz with a conundrum. Each time he had needed power, he had pushed his core to produce it. He thought that if he could do the same now, his channels would fill, the nodes in his chest and head would stabilize, and he would at least be able to control his body enough to leave the woshi’s lair.

But this cracked stone was clearly unstable. How fragile was it? Could he pull a little bit more from it without fracturing it, or would it crumble into a thousand splinters? If so, would he die? Thinking about the way the iron fuergar had succumbed after Kaz destroyed its core, he had to guess that a broken core was not something he could recover from.

But if one or both woshi returned and ate him? Well, he wouldn’t recover from that, either.

But, but, but… What would happen to Li if Kaz died? She was a dragon, but she was also a hatchling just a few days old, trapped in the depths of a mountain, far from the skies she yearned for. And what about Kaz himself?

He didn’t want to die.

He didn’t want to die, and this was a new notion for him. Not that he had ever desired death, but every kobold, especially the males, especially the Broken Knives, knew that death would be their inevitable end. Not only inevitable, but likely abrupt and painful, and far, far too soon.

This knowledge lay at the heart of everything. Death would come. A kobold’s life was brief and inexorable. Birth, obedience, and, ultimately, merciless, relentless, inescapable oblivion. What was the point of striving for anything else, when the attempt was doomed to fail, and would likely only hasten the end?

But Kaz’s predictable, inevitable life had now taken a very, very sharp turn, and he found that he didn’t want it to end.

Which brought him back to his cracked core. He could lie there, and hope. He could hope that his body would recover enough on its own that he would soon be able to rise and steal away. He could hope that his channels would refill enough to produce the same effect.

He could try to cut off his connection to Li or the seed, and see if that would give him enough leftover ki in each cycle to hasten any such recovery. Except that he couldn’t, wouldn’t, do that to the tiny dragon sleeping limply on his chest, and the seed only took the golden ki. While the amount it drained had seemed like a great deal the last time he looked, now he found that it was only a tiny trickle out of the whole, so he wouldn’t gain much by severing the link, even if he could.

Or, he could push anyway.

Push, and accept whatever happened. Pull, and see if any of the shards came loose. Tug, and see if the fractures grew. So long as the core didn’t simply shatter, surely he would be able to stop in time?

So he tried. In the loudly echoing silence, he urged his core to release more of its power.

Each time he had done this before, it had been in the heat of the moment. He needed power, and it came. There was always a price, as his body accustomed itself to its new state, achieved fresh balance, but perhaps this time he had already paid that price?

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He drew in a breath.

His core shuddered. Schisms of darkness formed between shards of light. The perfect, polished surface of the sphere expanded along these lines of demarcation.

He breathed out.

The gleaming surface of the core split. Ki spilled out, filling Kaz’s abdomen like blood. He spasmed, the howl that tried to rip out of him emerging as the barest whimper. His eyes flashed open, and he met Li’s horrified gaze.

And fell into it.

Fell and fell and fell, following the well-worn path of their mingled ki, until he reached her core. Her perfect, gleaming core. It shone in his mind’s eye, blazing with barely-restrained power, much as his own had once done. Gold, white, and effulgent black mingled in perfect harmony, thrumming with her heartbeat.

That heartbeat hastened, even as Kaz’s staggered and threatened to stall. He wondered dimly if she was beating him with her wings again. He saw brilliant flashes of ki flood by, draining her, leaving channels that had begun to replenish once again parched and barren.

It was beautiful.

Beautiful and perfect.

Kaz reached out and closed his hand around the core. Mental fingers flexed, and it stilled within his grip. It tickled, like the delicate wings of an adult jiyun against his skin.

He tugged, and it drew closer, shuddering. It was flawless, its surface smooth as polished obsidian, and he ran his thumb over it, raising it so he could examine it more closely.

His mouth opened. His tongue lolled. It smelled… so good.

Could he eat it? If he did, would it heal him? Save him? This thing, this unblemished sphere, was it the answer he sought?

Terror battered at his mind.

Li’s terror.

It was Li’s core he held, quivering in his grasp. Li’s core that he longed to eat, to devour with ultimate abandon. If he did this, he might save himself, but at the absolute greatest cost.

And he would not.

He was not a monster, no matter what the humans believed. He was no mindless beast, to feed on the life source of his friend.

Kaz’s fingers convulsed, clenching and then releasing Li’s core. It seemed to dim for a moment, hanging in the shadows between them, and then Kaz was swept away, drawn back into the cycle of ki that flowed between their bodies.

Back to his own core. It was a broken and battered thing compared to the ideal he had just seen. Its surface was rough with a thousand tiny divots. Diminutive splinters slipped from it with each turning of his cycle, constantly driving it toward its final dissolution.

But now he had nothing left to lose. Reaching out, he grasped his own core just as he had Li’s. He felt sharp edges dig into whatever he was using as his hand, slicing into it until it grew slippery with something that was far more essential than simple blood. And still he held on.

And the cracks filled. Like some nacreous fluid, power gelled around the shards and splinters that threatened to eject into his eidolic flesh. It was the gray of mingled mana, not the bright colors of ki, and it seemed to swallow light, rather than release it, but it stopped the horrific splintering of Kaz’s core.

What was left was a mockery of what it once had been. Crystalline shards protruded through matte gray seams, releasing ki into his channels in a sloppy swirl of color. But the amount that was released was as a torrent compared to a trickle. Each shard had its own surface, and each surface produced its own stream of ki, draining off into Kaz’s channels and filling them like fuergar bladders growing plump with water.

The tumescent flood surged through the thin, stretched channels, and Kaz’s body twisted in a paroxysm of agony. Ki oozed and wept into his tissues, burning and filling him far beyond his capacity to accept such a sudden influx.

It was the new pool in his chest that saved him. That and Li, and, to a lesser extent, the seed. The pool filled like an overflow pond, swirling and sloshing as it accepted every hint of ki that was shunted its way. And Li shunted every bit that she could.

Kaz felt her focus, and a shaky, fragile image formed; a blue kobold with torn and flimsy channels. Delicate golden sheaths appeared around those channels, reinforcing and redirecting each surge of his cycle. Kaz latched onto it, smoothing the uneven figure, and creating openings when part of the gilt coating threatened to block one of the newly-widened channels that led into his limbs and organs. He felt his left arm go numb, then wake as he corrected a mistake, and then an absolute silence more profound than any he’d ever experienced surrounded him before he figured out how to repair the flow to his ears.

Meanwhile, Li and the seed both took in more of Kaz’s energy than ever before. The thread that tied Kaz’s flawed core to the seed swelled and grew to double, then triple its size. Golden ki poured down it, vanishing into the depths, though for the first time Kaz thought he could see some faint accumulation forming in the bottom of the once-infinite pit.

To Kaz’s suddenly-sensitive ears, Li’s hiss of pain was a piercing blow. The dragon curled and writhed in place on his chest. Her channels, too, stretched, but not to the translucent fragility of his own. Still, she trembled and hissed, pushing out the overflow almost as quickly as it streamed in. Her cycle remained orderly, however, and it was this stabilizing factor that allowed them both to find some peace at last.

The two stilled, Kaz lying on the hard, wet stone, with Li, limp and shaking, draped across his chest, far from her usual graceful coil. Their breath and hearts synchronized, Kaz’s damaged and overwhelmed body pouring ki into Li’s perfect, rhythmic cycle.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Ki flows up, splitting from the wide channel flowing up along Kaz’s spine, half pouring into the still-foggy well of power in his chest, while the other half splits into three. One gilt portion travels to the seed. One part to Li. One last part to Kaz’s head, where at last it becomes a steady, spinning swirl when Li’s ki rejoins it there.

Down again. Down to the core, which shudders, silvery chimes ringing out as splinters tremble against one another, held together by something that was never meant to exist.

Finally, Kaz opened his eyes.