*Day 41 - The Confrontation with Malakor*
Malakor's fire wasn't dragon fire. It was dragon fire filtered through human agony, corrupted by Distiller craft, and weaponized by a son's desperate need to matter to his father.
It hit Ora like the memory of being born—overwhelming, primal, wrong.
She flew backward, Sussurro and Urlo spinning from her hands. The corrupted dragonflame didn't burn her skin—her corruption protected against that. It burned her *essence*, attacking the stolen dragon magic Vash'nil's signature had left in the world's weave.
*This is how I die,* she thought with strange calm. *Killed by a broken boy wearing a dragon's stolen soul.*
Malakor advanced, his form shifting between human and something else. Wings that weren't quite wings. Scales that weren't quite scales. Eyes that burned with stolen divinity.
"You feel it, don't you?" His voice was three voices—boy, dragon, void. "The resonance. We're the same, you and I. Weapons forged from loss. Except father chose me. You chose yourself. Which is worse?"
He raised his hand for the killing blow. Dragon-light gathered, compressed, became something that could unmake rather than simply destroy.
That's when the toy in her pack began to sing.
Not audibly. The Heartwood *remembered*. It remembered being a tree. It remembered being carved by loving hands. It remembered being held by a child who believed dragons were friends, not nightmares. And most importantly, it remembered the specific magical signature of the dragon whelp whose essence Malakor had stolen—because all dragon magic left traces, and Heartwood absorbed everything.
The toy grew hot against her back. Not burning hot—protective hot. Like a parent's hand on a fevered forehead.
Malakor's blast hit the invisible shield of nullification and... dissolved. Not blocked or deflected. Simply ceased. The Heartwood drank the stolen dragon signature like desert sand drinks rain, recognizing it, cataloguing it, negating it.
"What?" Malakor staggered. "That's not possible. Nothing can stop—"
Ora's hand found the toy in her pack. Such a small thing. Broken wing and all. The kind of toy she might have carved for Lyra, if she'd known how. If there'd been time. If the world had been different.
"Your dragon magic," she said, understanding flooding through her. "It's not yours. It's stolen. And stolen magic has a signature. A specific one."
She pulled out the toy. In the light of Malakor's corrupted fire, it looked even cruder. Amateur work. One wing definitely wrong. But it glowed now with absorbed power, Heartwood doing what Heartwood did—remembering and nullifying.
"That's... that's a toy." Malakor's voice cracked, became just the boy for a moment. "A child's toy."
"Yes." Ora stepped forward, the toy held before her like the world's most unlikely shield. "A toy carved with love. Held with innocence. The opposite of everything we are."
Malakor tried another blast. The Heartwood absorbed it eagerly. With each absorption, the toy grew warmer, and Ora felt something she hadn't felt in weeks—the absence of cold. For these moments, while holding the toy, she was human temperature again. Warm. Alive.
"This isn't fair," Malakor whispered, and now he was just a broken young man facing his own reflection. "I trained for years. I suffered. I was remade. And you stop me with a TOY?"
"The world isn't fair." Ora was close enough to touch him now. "If it was, your father would love you without you having to become a weapon. If it was fair, my sister would be alive. If it was fair, this toy would be in the hands of the child it belongs to, not being used as a shield in a war they'll never understand."
She pressed the toy against Malakor's chest, right where the dragon essence was strongest.
The effect was immediate. The stolen dragon magic, recognizing its own signature in the Heartwood's memory, tried to return home. But home didn't exist—Vash'nil was somewhere else, still being harvested. So the magic just... dissipated. Leaked out of Malakor like water from a broken cup.
He screamed. Not in pain but in loss. The dragon strength, the dragon fire, the dragon pride—all of it leaving, leaving him just human. Just a boy who'd disappointed his father. Just another casualty of other people's wars.
He fell to his knees. "Kill me."
"No."
"I'm useless now. Father will—" He choked on tears that might have been his first real tears in years. "I'm nothing without the dragon essence."
"Then be nothing." Ora put the toy back in her pack, feeling the cold return to her bones. "Nothing is better than being someone else's weapon."
She turned to leave, then stopped. "Your father will come for you. To harvest what's left. To punish you for failing. You can run, hide, maybe survive. Or..."
"Or?"
"Or you can come with me. Help me stop him. Not as a dragon-weapon. Just as Malakor. Just as someone else he broke."
Behind them, the Distiller fortress burned with wrong-colored fire. The toy dragon in her pack had cooled now, but she could still feel it—a small warmth against her spine. A reminder that innocence, even broken innocence, could still save the corrupted.
Sometimes the smallest things cast the longest shadows.
Sometimes a child's toy could stop a war.
Sometimes.
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