Esther’s spectral lips curve into what should be a gentle smile, but nothing ever looks truly gentle on a Salem matriarch. Maybe that’s what decades of blood do to a face. Gods know I’m likely already wearing versions of her expression.
“Forever is rarely accurate when it comes to the mind, child,” she replies. “Memories are stubborn things. They lurk beneath the surface, waiting for a trigger to resurrect them.” Her cold fingers hover near the glass. “The detachment would be... sufficient. Long enough to complete what must be done.”
My breath comes sharp, scraping against lungs that might as well be lined with ice. The bitter truth settles in: I'm about to carve away parts of myself at the command of a woman whose blood runs in my veins but whose intentions I’ve learned to question.
“Let us begin,” she says, and her spectral fingers drift pastthe crying child, past the dead bird. They stop on a memory that makes my breath catch.
My father. He’s smiling, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he adjusts my nine-year-old hands on the hilt of the training dagger. The memory is warm, solid, a cornerstone of who I am. And one of the few I have of him before he disappeared.
“No,” I whisper, the sound swallowed by the void. “Not that one.”
“Love makes a blade hesitate,” Esther says, her voice devoid of any warmth the memory holds. “It makes a wielder weak.”
I watch her hovering there, this woman who could look at her own son—my father—with such clinical detachment. Theodore Salem's mother had perfected the art of excising emotions like tumors, cutting away anything that might burden her pursuit of survival and power… that much is clear.
And she wants me to become just like her.
Esther’s fingers move with unnerving calm as they near the image of my father’s smile. I flinch, my deepest instinct wanting to slap her hand away.
Then a voice cuts through the gray void, solid and real and utterly impossible.
“Emotion doesn’t necessarily make you weak.”
I spin around.
Dayn’s somehow standing there, barely ten feet away, arms casual at his sides. He looks exactly as he did in Merlin’s chamber—dark fatigues, imposing frame, eyes like burning amber. Real. Like he just simply walked in.
Esther’s spectral form stiffens, her irritation almost a palpable wave of cold. “You have no place here, Draxion. This is a Salem trial. A sacred space.”
“Your granddaughter’s soul is at stake,” Dayn says, his voice calm yet with an undercurrent of danger. He takes a step forward,his gaze cold, analytical. “I’m merely here to offer a contrary opinion to your… rather biased lecture.”
He turns his gaze to the bookshelf, to the memories trapped in glass. “You speak of sacrifice, of cutting away weakness. I understand the logic. Your coven has survived for centuries by being ruthless, by prioritizing the whole over the individual.” His eyes meet mine for a fraction of a second, and something I can’t name flickers inside them. “But this path you’re coercing her down, this summoning?—”
“Save the lecture,” Esther snaps. “She will be the conduit for a power that will save us all. A power you dragons fear.”
“I don’t fear power,” Dayn says, his voice dropping. “I fear zealots who wield it without understanding the cost.”
He stalks another step forward, closing the distance between them.
“Why don’t you tell me, Esther Salem,” he continues, “why are you so afraid of an alternative? Why are you so blindly devoted to the Ides, to a power that demands she mutilate her own soul to use it? What happened to make you believe that utter annihilation is the only path to salvation?”
Esther’s form flickers, her composure cracking. “This isn’t ‘utter annihilation,’” she hisses, the sound like a razor in the quiet. “Tapping into the Ides’ power is merely the natural evolution of our kind. It will strengthen us, grow us, drive us to new heights...” She gives a scornful laugh. “And you speak of salvation? You know nothing of salvation.Youare the annihilation. You and your hoard, who burned our world before, and now dare to question our methods for saving what’s left… Sostep aside.We are out of time.”
The gray void around us seems to shudder with her anger, and the next thing I know, her arm is flaring out and she strikes at the bookshelf. A wave of spectral frost, black and shot throughwith silver, lances out from her hand, aimed squarely at the memory of my father.
Dayn moves with impossible speed. He’s in front of the memory before the frost can touch it, one hand raised. A shield of solid gold light springs into existence, blocking the attack and also absorbing it. The black frost vanishes into the gold, leaving not even a wisp.
“Don’t touch her memories.” Dayn’s voice drops into a dark, molten growl that slides straight down my spine. The air wavers around him, shimmering over the sculpted planes of his shoulders, the slow, controlled rise of his chest, the unmistakable command in his posture—a burning, deadly promise of defiance against my grandmother’s deathly frost.
Esther lets out a sound of pure fury. She abandons subtlety, her spectral form dissolving into a vortex of swirling, silver energy. “Get out of this space, dragon, I warn you one last time: this is not your territory.”
When Dayn doesn’t budge, her energy rushes at him, a silent storm of ancestral rage and power. He stands his ground, a bulwark of golden light, and the two forces collide with a soundless explosion that makes the very fabric of this non-place ripple.
I stagger back, gasping.How is he doing this?This isn’t a physical plane. This is a place of soul and memory, spirit and pure darkblood will, the deepest sanctum of Salem magic. He shouldn’t be here at all, let alone wielding a spiritual power that can clash with an actual spirit on her own terms.
It’s not dragon magic; it’s something else entirely.
And he’s definitely not a guest in this trial. He’s a… belligerent, gate-crashing god.
