When one falls in dreams, one always awakens before the impact. Not this time. Wintrow’s awakening was the impact. Vivacia’s love and devotion to him collided with his anguished knowledge of what she was. His thoughts were a mirror held to her corpse face. Once she had looked into it, she could not look aside. He was trapped in that contemplation with her, and felt himself pulled down deeper and deeper into her despair. He plunged into the abyss with her.

She was not Vivacia, not really. She had never been anything except the stolen life of a dragon. Her pseudolife was fastened on to the remnants of the dragon’s death. She had no real right to exist. Rain Wild workers had split open the cocoon of the metamorphosing dragon. The germ of its life had been flung out, to perish squirming on a cold stone floor, while the threads of memory and knowledge that had enclosed it were dragged off and cut up into planks to build liveships.

Life struggles to continue, at any cost. A windstorm flings a tree down to the forest floor; saplings rise from its trunk. A tiny seed amongst pebbles and sand will still seize a droplet of moisture and send up a defiant shoot of green. Immersed in salt water, bombarded with the memories and emotions of the humans that bestrode her, the fibers of memory in her planks had sought to align themselves into some kind of order. They had accepted the name given to her; they had striven to make sense of what they experienced now. Eventually, Vivacia had awakened. But the proud ship and her glorious figurehead were not truly part of the Vestrit family. No. Hers was a life stolen. She was half a being, less than half, a makeshift creature cobbled together out of human wills and buried dragon memories, sexless, deathless and, in the long run, meaningless. A slave. They had used the stolen memories of a dragon to create a great wooden slave for themselves.

The scream that tore out of Vivacia ripped Wintrow into full consciousness. He rolled over and fell to the floor, landing heavily on his knees beside his bunk. In the small room, Etta jerked awake with a start from where she’d kept watch over him. “Wintrow!” she cried in horror as he heaved himself to his feet. “Wait! No, you are not well. Lie down, come back!” Her words followed him as he staggered out the door and toward the foredeck. He heard noises from the captain’s stateroom, Kennit shouting for his crutch and a light, “Etta, damn you, where are you when I need you?” but Wintrow did not pause for that either. He limped naked save for a sheet, the night air burning against his healing flesh. Startled crewmen on the night watch called out to one another. One seized a lantern and followed him. Wintrow paid him no mind. He took the steps to the foredeck in two strides that tore his healing skin and flung himself forward until he half-hung over the railing.

“Vivacia!” he cried. “Please. It was not your fault; it was never your fault. Vivacia!”

The figurehead tore at herself. Her great wooden fingers tangled in her lush black curls and strove to snatch them out of her head. Her fingernails raked her cheeks and dug at her eyes. “Not me!” she cried to the night sky. “Never me at all! Oh, Great Sa, what an obscene jest I am, what an abomination in your sight! Let me go, then! Let me be dead!”

Gankis had followed Wintrow. “What troubles you, boy? What ails the ship?” the old pirate demanded, but Wintrow saw only the ship. The yellow lantern light revealed a horror. As swiftly as Vivacia’s nails cut furrows in her perfect cheeks, the fibrous flesh closed up behind them. The hair she tore from her scalp flowed into her hands, was absorbed, and her mane remained thick and glossy as before. Wintrow stared in horror at this cycle of destruction and rebirth. “Vivacia!” he cried again, and flung his being into hers, seeking to comfort, to calm.

The dragon was waiting there. She rebuffed him as effortlessly as she wrapped and held Vivacia in her embrace. Hers was the spirit that defied the ship’s desire to die. No. Not after all the years of repression, not all the ages of silence and stillness. I will not be dead. If this be the only life we can have, then we shall have it. Be still, little slave. Share this life with me, or know none at all!

Wintrow was transfixed. In a place he could only reach with his mind, a terrible confrontation was taking place. The dragon struggled for life as the ship tried to deny it to both of them. He felt his own small self as a rag seized by two terriers. He was pulled between them, torn in their grip as each tried to claim his loyalty and carry his mind with hers. Vivacia caught him up in her love and despair. She knew him so well; he knew her so well, how could his heart differ from hers? She dragged him with her; they teetered on the edge of a willing leap into death. Oblivion beckoned alluringly. It was, she convinced him, the only solution. What else was there for them? This endless sense of wrong, this horrible burden of stolen life; would he choose that?