The monster dragged Kaz down the passage before it turned sharply, readjusted its grip on his arm, and began to slither down a slimy, narrow crevice. Jagged rocks tried to catch and pull at Kaz’s flesh, but they did no more damage than the sharp teeth that clung tenaciously to his arm.

Kaz pushed more power into the flickering golden sheath covering his arm and, more thinly, his body, struggling to maintain focus as he pulled hard on his core. Ki flowed out like thick strands of firemoss oil, twisting and winding together with the dragon’s ki as it spun through his cycle. If he allowed the energy he was feeding to the fragile armor to waver, the woshi’s powerful bite would crack it like an eggshell, and he could well lose the arm he was trying so desperately to protect.

A sharp pain stabbed through him. Not his own pain, but the dragon’s. The twists of the tunnel kept trying to scrape the small creature from his neck, and only its tightly-wrapped tail and the fierce grip of its claws in his fur were holding them together. If the passage grew narrower, or Kaz ran out of strength before the end, he had no doubt they would be separated, and the little dragon wasn’t ready to face the darkness alone.

Closing his eyes, Kaz struggled to expand his image of ‘self’ to include the dragonling. As if it could understand what he was trying to do, Li clutched at the image, outlining the mental picture of a blue kobold in gold, and placing an equally golden dragon on his shoulder. If the situation hadn’t been so desperate, the picture they formed might have made Kaz laugh. The kobold’s fur grew to ridiculous lengths, as did its nose, while the dragonling’s teeth and wings stretched to an impossible size.

The next time the woshi turned, a particularly pointed protuberance grated along Li’s side, but while the dragon could feel the sharp pressure against its flesh, it was only that - pressure. Encouraged, the two reached toward each other in a simultaneous mental embrace, twining their ki and their images into a momentary whole.

The world fell away. Scrapes, bumps, bruises, and even the pinpoint pricks of dozens of teeth pressing into Kaz’s arm… they all disappeared. For a single, timeless pause, hovering in the space between the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next, Kaz and the dragon simply existed.

Then, with a fierce shake, the woshi threw Kaz into water. His body tumbled, limp and empty, until, with a thrumming rush of fury, the water subsumed him. His eyes flew open, catching glimpses of silvery bubbles lit by the dim light of glow-worms. Small, darting, slithering things danced through the bubbles, toothy maws gaping wide as they swam toward him.

It was a breeding pool. They were surrounded by hundreds of little monsters - most of them no larger than Kaz’s hand - which could reduce their prey to nothing but bones and a spreading cloud of blood in seconds.

Kaz had hoped that he would be able to reach his knife and damage the adult woshi enough to convince it to let him flee. That vague plan was gone now, though. He could feel his power draining far faster under dozens of small impacts than it had while he was being dragged to this place. His core burned in his belly as he pulled at his cycle, but his channels were simply too narrow to allow enough power to flow.

Kaz thrashed his way to the surface, following the rising path of vanishing silver bubbles. His arms and legs shoved at the toothy monstrosities that surrounded him, sliding against him through the strangely thick water. It was Li who held their image of self-with-shield, while Kaz struck out toward the stony shore.

Jaws the size of his head snapped at his hand as it reached out of the water, and a slimy tail whipped him back toward the depths. Clearly, the parent woshi had no interest in seeking out a new meal for its voracious young.

Kaz fell back, treading water as teeth tugged and pulled at his fur and skin. Pain grew, letting him know that his shield was growing thin. He could feel Li tremble against his neck.

Fly, he thought.

Negation.

Fly!

An image of the blue kobold-shape and the ferocious golden dragon separating, and then the blue became red and sank.

He shook his head, pushing a picture of his foolish, half-born plan through their bond, and the dragon quivered. Shook. But tiny talons loosened, the tail uncurled, and damp wings worked, just enough to lift Li away from Kaz and up, toward the glittering luminescence of the glow-worm colony that spread across the ceiling high overhead.

Kaz exploded.

Every speck of power, every ounce of mana, every thread of ki; he pushed it all out of his body at once. There was no finesse to it, no direction. It felt like he was tearing off his own skin from the inside out, like he was too large to be contained inside the fragile vessel of his body.

Water thundered away from him. Black ki churned in wild, utterly irrational patterns, and baby woshi were torn to shreds by the concussion. Water flooded the rocky outcropping Kaz had tried to catch a moment before, and when it touched the cold, slick skin of the adult monster, the creature danced back, pale tail swirling and thrashing through too-dark water. As waves continued to lap at its webbed feet, it finally turned and fled.

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Kaz felt himself begin to sink. He was empty. Far, far too empty. A rhythmic pulsing throbbed between his eyes, and it took four or five beats to realize that it was his own heartbeat.

Slow.

Too slow.

Sharp pinpricks dug into his scalp, right between his ears, and little teeth bit at his forehead. The image of golden dragon and blue kobold merged again, and Kaz realized that Li was trying to drag him back to shore.

Sluggishly, he moved one arm, then the other. His feet kicked, but the weight of his wet fur was too much, and he had to close his eyes as water flooded into them. Only his nose still protruded above the surface of the water, and that only because the little dragon still clung to it, dragging him up with fierce, desperate beats of her wings.

The surprise of that sudden, simple understanding forced a final surge of energy through Kaz’s feeble body. His hand lifted. Grasped. And found a lip of stone to cling to. Li pushed her ki harder, and Kaz only now realized that she had been supporting him with her strength ever since she returned to him. She, too, was nearly drained, and when they both slipped from the water like pups freshly pushed from their mother’s womb, they collapsed together in a puddle of slime and the rising mist of mana.

=+=+=+=

When Kaz opened his eyes again, his first emotion was surprise. It was mainly surprise that he was alive, but there was also a more subdued surprise that he was warm. His fur was dry, though it crackled with old slime when he shifted, groaning. A disgruntled hiss rose from his chest, and he tilted his head to look down.

Li lay curled on top of him, her delicate golden head raised so she could glare at him with deep, accusing eyes. She lifted one wing, then the other, stretching them as she clung, clearly not yet ready to move.

Beneath her, inside Kaz’s chest, lay the source of the warmth. A pool of power spun lazily, its edges hazy and incohesive. Ki flowed sluggishly through his channels, which also seemed strangely translucent. The walls of the channels were too thin, allowing his power to seep out into his tissues instead of containing the ki properly.

Ever so slowly, Kaz lifted a shaking hand and laid it flat against the inflamed skin of his chest. Li grumbled, allowing him the motion, but quickly laid her head back down again, glimmering gaze watching him through half-lidded eyes.

Kaz’s skin felt like he had been dropped in a patch of burning firemoss. Flakes of dried blood, crusted slime, and broken strands of fur ground between his trembling fingers as he rubbed them together. The resultant dust drifted down onto Li’s soft scales, and she shifted again, glaring.

“Sorry, sorry,” he mumbled, trying to sit up. He felt his muscles contract, but they had no strength, and all he succeeded in doing was sending spasms of pain through his entire body.

Blinking against the pain, he looked down, meeting Li’s gaze again. “Wha’ happened?”

Not surprisingly, the dragon didn’t answer, simply closing her eyes and curling back into herself. Helpless, he watched the gentle rise and fall of her ribcage, his own grip on consciousness already starting to fade again.

No!

Sleeping unprotected in the lair of a woshi would be a short tunnel to death. The adult might have run off when he killed its young, but it was only one of the pair required to produce those young, and the other woshi could return at any time. Its reaction to discovering its den defiled and its offspring floating chunks of meat in the breeding pool was unlikely to be good.

Turning his focus inward, Kaz examined the wreck of his body. Besides his thin and oozing channels, the flow of ki in his head was rough and disordered. The swirl of power in his chest drew in too much, and let out too little. Only a thin trickle of ki reached his head, where it met a nearly-equal amount of Li’s ki.

The dragon seemed to be in better shape than Kaz, since she hadn’t attempted to blow herself up like a pocket of explosive gas. If anything, her channels were a little stronger, and her cycle spun a little faster, further destroying the fragile balance of power that had formed between them.

Tentatively, Kaz tried to block part of the flow of ki into the new node of power whirling in his chest, hoping to keep it from pulling in more than its share. He had a feeling that if he could repair the wobbly cycle between his eyes, he would also regain some control over his body.

His heart stuttered. Stopped.

The dragon’s eyes flashed open, and she lifted her wings, beating at Kaz’s body as her power surged desperately through their bond, forcing his heart to start beating again. He felt the wings impact bruises, and thought that this was far from the first time the small creature had done this.

How many times had he died? How many times had she pummeled him with her body and her power until he woke again? No wonder she was tired.

Kaz rolled his hand to the side, cradling the dragon’s narrow head in his palm as it dropped limply to his chest. Silently, he sent gratitude over the link, and got back a sense of reluctant forbearance. His lips twitched.

So, he had to feed this new power node, but it was greedy. His channels were raw and sagging, their walls pierced in a thousand places by fresh capillaries that further drained away the insufficient ki flowing from his core. Which meant that he needed to either figure out how to use the fog of mana that the humans seemed to be able to condense from thin air, or force his core to give him more ki.

Kaz thought about the gray cloud of power Raff used, and the more differentiated strands of ki the others spun out of their cycle. How did they do it? It was in the air, so was it like breathing? Could he suck it in like his lungs pulled in air?

Closing his eyes again, he let his body go limp. Shoulders flat against the ground, he breathed. He drew in a breath through his nose, then slowly pushed it out through his mouth, just as Lianhua had taught him. A flood of smells hit him; the acrid scent of the pool, coppery notes of blood, the first tinge of rot.

Li laughed at him. Her body wiggled against his chest, rolling with her amusement, and when he peeked down at her, gold-tinged white light glowed in the depths of her swirling eyes. Sheer merriment boiled down their link, and Kaz snorted with the infectious sense of it, even though it was clearly directed at him.

“Not… human,” he said, and she let out one final snort of amused agreement before returning to her interrupted nap.

So instead, Kaz focused on his core.