I backed toward the edge, stones crumbling under my heels. "Good."
His laugh was soft, paternal, condescending. "Oh, my dear. You think you understand what we're doing here. You think we're the villains in some simple story. But the Dragon Lords are not gods. They're parasites, feeding on humanity's potential, keeping us as pets and playthings. The Unnamed offers freedom."
"Penny was sixteen." My voice cracked on her name. "What freedom did you offer her?"
"A necessary sacrifice for the greater good. Her potential will help wake something magnificent, something that will remake the world into what it should be. You could be part of that, Wren. You're special—we've known that since we found you. Your bonding potential is beyond anything we've measured. You could survive the ritual, serve The Unnamed directly. Think of the power, the purpose—"
"I'd rather die."
I meant it. The words came out flat, certain, final.
His expression hardened. "That can be arranged. But you're too valuable to waste on something as mundane as death. Take her."
The shadow-creatures surged forward.
I turned and looked down at the drop. Three hundred feet onto jagged rocks. A death that would be mine, chosen, final. Not screaming in their ritual chamber. Not reduced to mist in a jar. Mine.
I thought of Penny. Of Merit. Of the twelve girls whose names I'd whispered in the dark.
I jumped.
Wind screamed past my ears, and for three heartbeats, I was flying. Not falling—flying. Arms spread, body arched, embracing the empty air like a lover. The sun painted the world gold, and far below, the rocks waited with patient hunger.
I closed my eyes. Better not to see the end coming. Better to die in darkness than watch the ground rush up to meet me.
Then talons closed around me.
Massive, impossibly gentle, each claw longer than my entire body. They caught me mid-fall with such precision that I barely felt the impact, just sudden pressure and warmth and the complete reversal of momentum. My eyes flew open to see silver scales that weren't quite solid—they shifted like storm clouds, like mist given form, beautiful and terrible and impossible.
A dragon. An actual dragon had caught me.
He was enormous, serpentine, his body rippling through the air with supernatural grace. His scales caught the morning light and threw it back in prismatic patterns. Where his claws touched my skin, I felt electricity—not painful, but alive, crackling with potential that made every nerve ending sing.
Then the world exploded.
Magic detonated between us with the force of a lightning strike. Light erupted from where his scales met my skin—storm-gray and silver, arcing between us in patterns that looked like cloud formations, like wind made visible. My body blazed with sensation that wasn't quite pain, wasn't quite pleasure, but something far more fundamental. Like being unmade and remade in the same instant.
Marks bloomed across my skin. I watched them spread from my shoulders down my arms—delicate cloud patterns in gray and silver that moved like living things. They were beautiful, intricate, and they pulsed with warmth that chased away three weeks of cold stone and colder fear.
The dragon roared—a sound that shook mountains, that made the cultists on the cliff above cover their ears and fall to their knees. Through the overwhelming sensation, I felt something else: him.
A vast presence touching my mind, full of wind and storm and ancient, aching loneliness. He was shocked, jubilant, disbelieving. He'd been empty so long he'd forgotten what fullness felt like.
He was here, with me, and I’d never felt anything like before in my life.
Chapter 2
Thelandscapebelowtransformedas we flew. Volcanic devastation gave way to actual life—patches of green clinging to hillsides, streams that caught sunlight like ribbons of mercury. Then clouds swallowed us whole, and for several heartbeats we existed in a world of white nothing, just the steady rhythm of his wings and the electric thrum where our skin touched.
We burst through the cloud layer into impossible blue, and there it was, the sanctuary from the stories: Drift-Cloud Monastery.
It rose from a mountain peak like something grown rather than built, all white marble and crystal that caught the morning sun and threw it back in patterns that made my eyes water. Towers connected by graceful bridges seemed to float in the perpetual cloud bank that wreathed the peak. Some parts appeared solid, architectural, real. Others looked like crystallized mist, as if someone had frozen clouds mid-formation and decided to live in them.
He circled once, giving me time to take it in—or maybe giving himself time to prepare for what came next. Then he descended toward a landing platform at the highest tower, a disc of white marble veined with what looked like trapped lightning.
The moment his claws touched stone, the change began. His form collapsed inward with a sound like wind through hollow spaces, scales becoming skin, vastness condensing to merely tall. One moment I was held by a dragon, the next I stood on shaking legs while a man steadied me with hands that still carried traces of scales at the wrists.
Storm-gray eyes searched my face with desperate intensity. He was beautiful in that otherworldly way that made you forget to breathe—silver-white hair that moved in a breeze I couldn't feel, features sharp enough to cut, lips that looked cruel until you noticed how they trembled at the corners.
