—What… is it, really?

Once is a fluke, a leaf on the wind. Twice means something’s helping me, like a hidden hand at my chest.

Either it acts upon my heart, or it sits within my heart, a blade under silk.

The difference is absolute, cold as moonlight on steel.

If it’s someone in the shadows, they aid me in a blink—and could end me in the same breath.

"Dragonbreath Sense!"

A weighty roar rolled at my side, like thunder under stone. Alarm bells shrieked inside my chest. My legs sprang, and I vanished from that spot.

In the next heartbeat, half-red flame and half-ice crashed down, painting where I’d stood with scorch and frost.

A step late, and that strange strike would’ve crowned my skull, a hammer of winter and fire.

The voice cracked like a whip. "Don’t drift off in battle! That’s disrespect to us!"

I lifted my gaze, and saw a strange dragon—two heads, four limbs, a silhouette like twin peaks under stormlight.

It didn’t fit the Dragonfolk’s common image, not at all.

If not for the patchwork of scales, glinting like wet river tiles, Alicia wouldn’t have called it a dragon.

My shout skipped across the air like a tossed pebble. "Hey, big guy, what’s your deal?"

"Shut it! We’re not ‘big guy’. We bear the noble name, Ying."

It was the head with magma-laced skin that roared it, a tongue of flame licking past its teeth.

Pure blue eyes, inverse to that fiery hide, speared Alicia like icicles.

Calling them “big guy” had stoked his temper like a bellows.

Sensing the storm in his temper, Alicia didn’t hesitate. She switched, calling him Ying.

"Then… Mr. Ying…"

"It’s Miss!"

This time the other head barked—the one with tiny ice-clumps studding her face, like frost blossoms.

Her voice carried a cool, mature lilt, a blade wrapped in silk.

It was the mirror opposite of the red head’s gruff, uncle’s rumble.

Before Alicia could reshape the words “Miss Ying,” the red head lunged like a quarrelsome hound and bit the blue one.

Even across the gap, she heard ice crack—crunch—as the frost on the blue head’s skin shattered.

With teeth sunk in, the red head garbled, "’S obviously a mister!"

He managed to talk while biting her neck, words bubbling like steam—how, Alicia had no idea.

The blue head looked utterly unbothered, calm as a moonlit lake.

She watched him gnaw at her neck, eyes crinkling with the helpless smile one gives a pouting child.

Alicia’s thoughts tangled like vines.

Two minds in one body—one as childish as a sparrow, one as steady as a hearth.

It defied common sense, and her head spun like a top.

After a stretch of gnawing, the blue head finally stepped in, snow-cool, to end his foolish bite.

"Let go. Don’t act cute in front of an enemy—where’s your Dragonfolk pride, your battle banner?"

They truly lived inside each other; she held the key to his locks.

One sentence, and the red head’s jaws unclasped like a loosened trap.

As his bite released, the pits he’d carved in her icy skin smoothed in a blink, like ripples settling.

In an instant, no trace of teeth remained.

—So the blue head’s regeneration runs high?

By their opposite temperaments, does that make the red head slow to mend?

No, no. They’re one body, one river. How could healing split like twin streams?

"Hey, red-haired girl," the blue head called, voice like sleet on bamboo. "Stop spacing out and mind yourself.

That tiny girl over there—our boss already went to her.

Right now, there’s no one left to pull you from the fire."

—Tiny girl? …Ling?!

Alicia’s gaze whipped around like a startled sparrow. There—Ling, far off, looking this way.

Behind her loomed the old dragon, a shadow with hawk talons. His claw streaked for the back of Ling’s head.

"Ling!"

The warning flew like a bell, but sound and spell both arrived too late.

Alicia watched, breath knotted, as the old dragon’s claw swatted Ling, sending her skimming through the air like a torn leaf.

Without a flicker of doubt, her ribbon lifted, a crimson serpent cutting the air.

Red mana, fiercer than that earlier Great Fireball, pooled at her palm like a storming ember sea.

"—Flame King’s Wave!"

A pillar of heat roared from her hand, a sun-lance that turned the surrounding air to wavering haze.

"Icebound Wall!"

An ice wall heaved up from the earth, a glacier slab that caught the flame’s charge head-on.

By rights it should’ve melted in a breath, but it held, cold as mountain bone.

Only at the point of impact did droplets bead and hiss, like rain on a brazier.

She knew her flame couldn’t break that wall; the truth sat heavy as a stone.

Inside, she cursed herself for reaching for fire again, a bad habit that tangles her mind like knotted thread after a rush.

It needs fixing. Not now.

"You really mean to fight me, huh?"

It was a question shaped like a statement, a reed bending to an obvious wind.

These two weren’t here to spar for fun.

Just as Alicia thought, both heads bowed their backs; scales lifted like a field of knives.

Sunlight ran over them in bright shards, sharp enough to cut the eye.

"Naturally. Why else would we be here?"

The tall figure pulsed with alternating red and blue, like storm-lit aurora.

The shorter figure—Alicia—raised her hand. A red glow bloomed at her wrist, a forge-light that outburned theirs.