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Katie hated the Creaking King.
That went without saying, but especially now—especially when only five years after a bloody, brutal defeat, the King had come back, like he was somehow determined to make her even more miserable about the loss of her brother than she already was.
Katie was twenty-four years old. Older than her brother, and that felt wrong.
Another final battle. This time, the King was still weak. Still a tree, not weaponizing the remainder of a necromancer with a bad habit of eating resin. Thank the Knight God. Katie and her friends were stronger than ever, united under one banner, and they could take him this time.
They had to.
The dungeon was long gone, leveled by explosions and steel. They were fighting on the ground where the Pale Kingdom ruins still stood, alongside what was practically a meadow of flowers planted by Scott. It would be a pain to see them wilt, to make Scott replant all of them again. Katie was unwilling to do that.
She had done a headcount before they charged to battle—everyone. This was the fourteen survivors of the Creaking King. And she was part of them, and they were going to kill him again, what ever it took.
The battle was as gruesome as the last time—the hearts were more obvious, in regular trees that sprouted in seconds. It was down to those with the fastest swings to kill the hearts, and Katie was not one of them, so she fought the King himself, keeping the enemies he spawned away from her companions.
The King got a lucky hit.
Katie was on the floor, too winded to defend herself, panicking too much to have the rational thought to at least pick up her sword an take as many down as she could. All she could think was, Oh God, I'm dying, and then, there was fire. Blue fire.
It encircled her in a tight ring, spreading outward and annihilating every foe that dared to enter its grasp. For just a moment, Katie was terrified for 4C and Scott, but the fire left them untouched despite nipping at their knees.
Katie was decidedly not a pyromancer.
She didn't even have magic despite her Draconic blood. Even though dragons were statistically more likely to possess natural fire magic, neither her or Nom had ever displayed signs of pyrokinesis. And that was fine! Katie would honestly be more concerned if she had fire magic out of nowhere, because suddenly having that power was a terrifying thought.
But none of that changed the fact that there was fire around her, seemingly protecting her and her people specifically.
For a moment, all anybody in the field could do was stare at the flames, at Katie in the center of them, but then their attention shifted as a croaking, curdling scream cut the thick silence in the air—the Creaking King's scream.
As all eyes flew to the bastard of a tree, they found a new target: an impossibility, someone who should not have been there, surely some apparition of shared insanity, because—
Because there was no way that was Nom, standing there over the ashes of the Creaking King. Ashes because he had dissipated when he died the first time or because the fire ate away the bark before anything else could happen to the body, Katie couldn't be sure.
But he definitely looked like Nom, if a little bit transparent.
Nom sheathed the sword in his hand, his face set in grim determination in a way Katie had seen many times before. His clothing was evidently new—a simple red button-up shirt, baggy brown pants tucked into black boots—and a simpler style for him, lacking in armor, but by far the most striking thing about him was the new coloring on his draconic features.
Instead of the typical blood-red Katie had seen for her entire life, Nom's scales were pure, stark white.
Katie had barely registered his appearance when she barreled directly into him, careless of the fire that let her pass through the flames entirely unbothered and unburned. She threw her arms around his shoulders and sobbed her little heart out, too grief-stricken to name the relief and love throwing through her body anything but the sickening, comforting feeling of her soul saying, there you are, I found you.
"There you are," Nom smiled from his place on the ground, tugging her closer. "You found me."