“Rimeclaw made a bargain!” she shouted, hurling the crackling mass back at Skylash.
Somewhere inside her, a wildness broke loose—feral, fanged, unafraid—beastblood rising in a roar of vengeance she couldn’t have stopped even if she’d tried.
“I am not Rimeclaw,”Skylash seethed.“I am not fallen. I am not collared. And I will never be so broken as to seek penance through the likes of you.”
Fury writhed beneath Serenna’s skin. “You need us as much as we need you! You can try to scorch that truth out of the sky, but it won’t change what we both already know.”
Skylash flashed her fangs, violet light burning her pupils. Serenna halted midair, facing her squarely, refusing to yield.
Before the dragon could strike her again, she added, “I’ll see your mate freed and I’ll claim those Unbound eggs as yours. And if I have to accept your gift to do it…” Her nails dug crescent moons into her palms. “Then so be it.”
Serenna left the rest unsaid. Skylash’s pride burned too fiercely to bear reminders of the chains Serenna had shattered, and she wouldn’t risk fracturing this fragile moment by naming the debt aloud. When war rose on the horizon, she could only hope the dragon remembered who had returned her to the sky.
So Serenna held, wings trembling, allowing the silence to stretch.
Without warning, Skylash swept in close. Sparks didn’t fly from her jaws this time, only a breath of magic. Power exhaled in a rolling surge that enveloped Serenna whole, unmaking and remaking all at once.
Her body seized, wings snapping wide in reflex. She hung suspended in the storm’s grip, a single thread snared between sky and earth. Heat followed, subtle at first, a tingling creep along her leathery membranes that whispered its way through her blood.
Then the true strike came as magic burned and consumed.
Color bled from her wings like ink drowned in rain, until they darkened into violet dusk. Cinderax’s ember—steady for so long beneath her sternum—flickered, guttered…and died, a final wisp of warmth dissipating like smoke.
The hollow it left behind seared with a new current, a charge lancing through marrow and sinew until Serenna’s limbs thrummed with storm. The claws on her wings stretched, scattering sparks like a spray of stars.
“Prove yourself worthy of my gift,”Skylash growled, sweeping a final arc before rising higher.“Free the clutch.Seek the tempest’s eye—Zephyrfang’s breath, Stormstrike’s fury. The legacy Veyrix and I forged before the chains. Our scalebound hid one of the Aelfyn’s cursed relics there in the seas. Reclaim it. Bring it to the Aetherveil.”
Sparks whirled in her pupils as her gaze fixed on Serenna.“Until this so-called ‘bargain’ is fulfilled…”Her voice thinned to a hiss.“I strike for no one.”
With a crack of pressure and thunder, Skylash vanished, streaking upward in a blur of light. A ribbon of lightning lingered where she’d been, pulsing with an afterglow.
Breath scraping through her lungs, Serenna hovered in the silence left behind. Her limbs shook, but she was alive.
Still flying.
She exhaled slowly and flexed her fingers. Erratic sparks leapt between them, wild and unfamiliar.
She’d come hoping to reason with Skylash, not to carry her storm. And she’d gained more than the dragon’s gift—the location where Veyrix lay chained. But first the winds called her to the restless blue of the Cerulean Sea, where the Maelstrom churned.
Serenna lifted her gaze as the bruised clouds above her began to tear apart, light fracturing across the Maw in tentative shards. The storm that had ruled these skies for a thousand years was breaking at last.
Just as she turned her sight to the wreckage in the Blackreach below, a voice slammed into her skull.
Vesryn’s.
“Serenna—stars, answer me. Fenn’s down. I—”
Pain followed. Not hers—theirs.
Agony cleaved through her chest, bursting behind her ribs, ringing in her skull.
Her wings faltered as both bonds flared at once, blazing through her mind. She’d been too consumed by Skylash to sense it until now, and the delayed blow nearly buckled her.
For a heartbeat, everything stilled except the roaring in her ears.
“He’s bleeding. I can’t stop it. Jassyn’s not answering. I can’t—”
Vesryn’s voice cracked, despair splintering the words.
