Dragonsight dulled the nausea just enough to keep his eyes from slamming shut against the spinning blue overhead. But the druid form carried its own cost, unraveling thought and fraying sanity thread by thread. Fully shifted, beastblood boiled beneath the strain, a wildness pacing just under the surface.
This wasn’t the dangerous slide of slipping loose from himself. That addictive drift he sometimes still craved, a weightless oblivion he’d once hunted in Stardust.
The shift was worse.
He wasn’t floating above his life at all—he was trapped inside it, nailed into sensation with no way to shake free, each breath shackling him to bone and flesh and unbearable clarity.
The beastblood uncoiled, reaching toward a moment where desire blurred his thoughts. A wave of heat surged in Jassyn’s chest, carrying with it a memory, sharp as a fang snagging cloth. Only it hadn’t been cloth.
It had been skin.
Hisskin.
Jassyn touched his throat, feeling the place he’d all but begged Lykor to bite. And Lykor had—answering with a growl, fingers digging possessive bruises into his hips.
Body trembling, fists tangled in Lykor’s hair, that wild force in Jassyn had roared for release. Lykor had never recoiled. He’d met Jassyn’s hunger. Matched it. Kissed him with the ferocity of war and devotion braided into one.
But Jassyn denied the beastblood’s instinct to lose himself entirely. They’d stopped short of anything more, because he wanted what lay beyond the frenzy—something claimed in full awareness.
The memory pulsed through him again with a pull that nearly stalled his wings. Jassyn veered off course, angling north on impulse alone. Back toward Asharyn, guided by the phantom heat still haunting his neck.
For a heartbeat he yielded, muscles coiling, every nerve screaming to return until a denial cracked through him, abrupt enough to wrench his wings back into line.
No.
Jassyn forced the command inward. Lykor had his own duty across the Wastes, bound for Alari’s mountains with Vesryn and their warriors. He’d be away from the desert, out of reach.
No comfort lived in that truth, but Jassyn swallowed hard and steered his eyes back toward the horizon, toward the storm looming in the distance.
The Maelstrom towered over the sea, a vast spiral of wind and lightning dragging clouds into its relentless orbit.
Jassyn had seen this storm before, closer than he ever wanted to remember. He recalled its strange pulse thrumming through his chest, Vesryn commanding him to channel its lightning on a forgotten coast.
He flexed his fingers, checking—again—that the gold ring still glinted on his hand. Masking Essence bought them a fragile promise of safety, enough to approach the storm unseen. One that felt thinner with every stroke of flight.
The talons at his wing tips clicked together in a restless rhythm. Jassyn blew out a sharp breath, bracing against the weight of responsibility that only seemed to tighten like a fist around his throat.
He dispelled his scales, letting the rush of cold air cut straight to exposed skin and grant a fleeting relief. In a burst of speed, he swept forward, wings slicing hard as he surged to rejoin the others.
Fenn held the lead with Serenna flying lower, Cinderax riding the drafts between them. When Jassyn soared closer, Serenna noticed first. She flashed him a quick grin, eyes slitted ocean blue, mirrors of the sea far below.
“Ready for the climb?” Jassyn called over the wind, glancing toward Fenn and Cinderax before locking his focus onto the storm’s violent crown. The Maelstrom’s wall rose like a circular cliff, a rotating barrier they’d have to ascend before breaching the eye.
When they all nodded, Jassyn steeled himself to rise, beating his wings faster against the sky. Each breath dragged sharper into his lungs as the air thinned into needles, stinging his skin. The altitude cinched around him, hostile and unyielding as the Maelstrom waited before them.
Delving into his shaman powers, currents ignited behind Jassyn’s eyes. Air twisted from the Maelstrom, clawing outward as the storm tried to shear his wings aside. Weaving through the gaps, he strung himself between eddies like threading lines on a loom. Each lunge pulled him higher, until he skimmed along the Maelstrom’s spiraling wall.
The storm dominated the sky before them, a monolith of motion. It coiled into a funnel of cloud, its core veined with lightning. Sparks forked to sea in erratic bursts, each strike a thunderclap of pressure that rattled Jassyn’s bones.
Light fractured along the storm’s edge as they climbed, the sun behind spilling through broken ranks of clouds in prismatic shards. Misty sea spray distorted the waters hundreds of feet below, yet a faint flash still caught Jassyn’s eye.
Sails.
His pulse lurched as white silhouettes surfaced through the haze, triangular ships skirting along the Maelstrom’s whirling bands, barely visible against the churning sea.
Jassyn snapped his gaze to the others, catching Fenn already gesturing. “We might have company.”
Serenna’s mouth tightened as she flung out her palm, bending currents around them to brace their wings. “Those could be the ships diverting the Maelstrom from the main fleet.”
