The heart was beating when I came down the stairs.
It always was. Slowly—once every eleven seconds, if you had the patience to count, and I'd had three months of patience forced on me—but steadily, inside the containment field in the middle of my laboratory, the way it had beaten for however many thousand years before Tiamat had put it in my hands.
Bahamut the Eternal. A dragon who had stood at the top of Radiant-rank when humans were still arguing about whether fire was an element. What was left of him was the size of my torso, wrapped in scales that shifted slowly through every colour I had a name for and a few I didn't. When it pulsed, the air in the room pulsed with it, and the coffee in my mug trembled.
Stella was upstairs at her morning lessons. Reika was in the city. I had four hours.
I set the mug down on the bench and looked at the heart for a while.
