“—all wyverns were ordered to shift to human form!” Gabe’s mother’s voice cut across the hall from the entry.
The warning scraped down my nerves. My wyvern inside me stirred at the wordshift—a flinch, a coil—then went still with a low, instinctive dread.
Stay small. Stay unseen. Survive.
I tried to shake myself free, to pull out of the fear that had me paralyzed.
Move, Niz. Move.
Feathers brushed my shoulder; someone’s wingtip clipped my sleeve and I startled, heart punching uselessly at my ribs. Kieran’s presence steadied me, warm at my side, but the fear had already cinched tight, a trap sprung around muscle and thought.
My mind raced to every reason this was happening. Every warning that had been passed down. Every line of text I had studied like a religious tome. The old stories weren’t just history. They were memories—etched into the bones of my people, carried forward through silence and hiding and the fear that, one day, the Dominion would return to finish what it started.
And now it had.
Strong hands suddenly hooked beneath my arms.Ronan.
The jolt of my feet lifting from the ground ripped a breath from my chest—sharp and unsteady—and the floor that had anchored me vanished as my body was hauled upward.
“Don’t shift.” Ronan’s voice pressed in close to my ear, low and steady in that way he used when chaos was seconds from breaking loose. “We don’t want them seeing a wyvern.”
Thatwelanded somewhere deeper than the panic could reach. Just enough to knock something loose. To remind me I wasn’t completely alone in my fear and that I still had all of them.
He didn’t wait for permission to push forward.
Ronan’s wings surged once, then again, and the ruined Placement Hall dropped away beneath us. I felt the rush of air slice past as we cleared the shattered ceiling. My legs dangled beneath me, useless, as Ronan carried me through the sky with steady strength.
The wind hit hard against my face, pulling at my clothes and burning in my lungs, but the sharpness of it gave me something real to hold onto. Below us, Alfemir blurred into motion—rooftops, battlements, streets filled with soldiers and angels alike. The city was fully awake now, responding to the presence of something that had no business lording over it.
Ronan’s arms were locked beneath mine, his grip steady. His wings beat with precision, a steady rhythm that cut through the panic like it wasn’t allowed to stay. I hung from him, completely in his grip, but my trust in him was absolute and kept me grounded.
Being carried like this was humiliating, but it worked.
“Breathe,” Ronan said again, calm, even. “You’re fine. Eyes up.”
Each wingbeat forced my breath back into my lungs. Each exhale reminded me I was still alive. I latched onto that rhythm like a lifeline and let it drag me out of the worst of it.
After a long moment, I lifted my head, the movement stiff and slow, every muscle reluctant. But the moment my eyes found the sky ahead, the breath I’d just reclaimed vanished all over again.
The castle rose into view, carved from the same pale stone I’d walked beneath only hours ago—but now it looked different. Smaller somehow. Fragile in a way it had never seemed before.
Above it, casting its shadow across the entire eastern side of the structure, was a figure I knew only from history books and passed-down warnings.
The Dominion wasn’t just large—he wasimpossible.
Wings stretched wide enough to span the full length of the outer walls, each one layered in white so pale it looked untouched by ash or earth. Light didn’t just fall over those feathers—it refracted around them, like it had to ask permission to touch him. Every beat of Ronan’s wings carried us closer, but I didn’t need a better view to feel the danger we were in.
Even from a distance, the Dominion’s armor drank in the daylight like it didn’t belong to this world, a jagged silhouette of gold. He towered over the castle as if it were nothing more than a plaything. Four angels tall, at least. Maybe more.
Every detail from the preserved texts sharpened into perfect clarity. The scale. The stillness. The silence that pressed against the air like a held breath waiting to collapse.
I had never seen a Dominion before. But the fear curling through my chest wasn’t just mine—it was generations deep.
I clenched my hands into fists and tried to breathe through the chill pressing in beneath my ribs. I couldn’t afford to freeze again. Not with Kieran just behind me. Not with the others already shifting into formation ahead.
Pull it together.
I set my jaw against the throb of panic and kept my eyes on that impossible white span of wings.
