“Mom?” Serenya’s voice broke on the word, small and lost in a way that caused Vaelrik’s dragon to snarl with protective fury. “You’re dead.”
The curse inside him recognized the trick immediately. Shadow-plague didn’t resurrect the dead; it wore grief like a weapon.
The creature smiled with a face that shouldn’t exist, shouldn’t be possible, shouldn’t be standing in this room wearing corruption like a second skin. The plague knew exactly how to make Serenya vulnerable.
Her body went still. The mimic lunged.
Serenya didn’t move. But Vaelrik did.
He fully shifted mid-stride despite the cramped space—scales rippling across muscle, claws tearing through shadow-touched air, and wings scraping against stone walls. His roar shook debris from the ceiling as his claws grabbed the mimic and his shadowfire erupted in a violent burst that reduced the abomination to collapsing ash and void.
When he shifted back to his human form, Serenya’s hands shook despite her efforts to hide them. She tried to school her expression into something resembling composure, but he felt every tremor of emotion through their mate bond.
He stepped closer—not touching, but close enough that she would know he planned to stand between her and anything that dared use her grief as a weapon.
“You’re upset,” he said quietly, his voice rough with residual transformation.
“I’m fine.”
He wanted to argue but a soft sound drew his attention—children peering out from behind an overturned shelf in the corner of the room, eyes wide with the particular mixture of terror and fascination that only the very young could manage. Normally they would flee from him, screaming about the monster their mothers warned them about in bedtime stories.
Instead, a soot-covered girl with pale blonde hair crawled toward him. She wrapped her tiny arms around his leg with the fearless trust that only children possessed.
Vaelrik went stone-still. He had never been touched by a child. Her hum vibrated against his leg, and the shadows lingering in the corridor actually softened, retreating from her melody like predators recognizing something they couldn’t devour.
He was protection to her. Somehow, impossibly, he was safety instead of threat.
Serenya stepped forward, still pale but steady once more. She laid her hand lightly on his shoulder—a grounding touch, the first she had offered freely since their binding. Warmth pulsed through their connection, soothing his raging shadowfire into something resembling peace.
“We should check the rest of the servants’ wing,” Vaelrik said, his voice carrying controlled authority, trying to hide his emotions. The child still clung to his leg, but he gently disengaged her grip with surprising tenderness. “Make sure there’s nothing else lurking in the shadows.”
Serenya nodded, wiping soot from her cheek with the back of her hand. Her green eyes still held traces of haunted grief from the mimic’s cruel mimicry, but her jaw was set with renewed determination. “Lead the way.”
He allowed the partial shift to ripple through him—not the full transformation that would bring down walls, but enough to let shadowfire gather beneath his skin like liquid obsidian.His canine teeth lengthened into fangs, claws extended from his fingertips, and his eyes blazed with ember-red intensity.
They moved deeper into the wing together, their footsteps echoing off basalt walls. Fog still clung to the corners, thick and unnatural, but it recoiled from Serenya’s presence like a living thing recognizing its natural predator. Her lumen sigils flared to life along her arms, white-gold radiance cutting through the corruption-tainted air with surgical precision.
A tendril of shadow lashed out from an alcove ahead—Vaelrik’s shadowfire erupted in response, violet-black flame consuming the writhing darkness before it could fully form. Beside him, Serenya’s magic wove geometric patterns that guided his fire with impossible accuracy, her light carving safe corridors for his destructive power.
They fought as one. Not because the shackle demanded it. Not because the Council had ordered it. Because something deeper than duty or obligation had awakened between them—the primal recognition of perfect balance. Light and shadow. Creation and destruction. Two halves of a whole that had found each other across centuries of separation.
Mine,his dragon whispered with savage satisfaction.She chooses to stand with us.
Another shadow-creature began to coalesce near the far wall, its form humanoid but wrong in all the essential ways. Serenya’s sigils sliced through its core before it could fully manifest, and Vaelrik’s flame finished what her light had begun. Ash scattered across the floor like fallen snow.
The last whisper of Gloamrot collapsed into nothingness, leaving only the acrid scent of burned corruption and the soft afterglow of their combined magic. Vaelrik allowed the partial shift to recede, his claws retracting as his breathing steadied. The shadowfire settled beneath his ribs like a contented predator, sated by the hunt.
Footsteps thundered down the corridor—Citadel guards arriving with their usual impeccable timing. They stumbled to a halt at the sight of destruction, their eyes widening as they took in the scorched walls, the scattered ash, and most tellingly, Serenya standing beside him like his equal rather than his prisoner.
She met their stares with defiant composure, wiping another streak of soot from her cheek. Her eyes were haunted, exhausted from the emotional toll of facing her mother’s twisted image, but they still burned with that fierce, relentless light that had first captured his attention in the Council chamber.
For the first time in centuries, he felt less like a weapon forged for the Council’s use and more like a man protecting what mattered most to him.
His mate.
ELEVEN
SERENYA
