The last body crumpled just as Kal and Vesryn reached the tunnel, their advance stilling as silence reclaimed the chamber.
It had all unfolded in heartbeats, too fast for either to draw a blade.
Aesar wiped the glaives clean against a fallen’s cloak before sliding them home, retreating to hover just beneath Lykor’s skin.
Sensing the evacuation portals had sealed, Lykor swept his gaze back toward the cavern. Most of the others were gone—Daeryn, Zaeryn, those they pulled from the dark. Only a few wraith and rangers lingered now.
But the stillness wasn’t peace.
His pulse refused to steady. Beastblood hummed, every instinct on alert. Air scraped against his throat as pressure built in his skull. The ache rang like the hush before an avalanche, braced on the brink of a fall.
Then the mountainlurched.
Stone heaved beneath his boots, pitching Lykor sideways as the tunnel groaned. The walls bowed, stone flexing in ways it was never meant to move.
His wings erupted, scales cascading down his arms. He hadn’t willed the shift. The last time his beastblood had stepped in like this was when Rimeclaw appeared…
His eyes jerked to Kal and Vesryn, both already in druid form. Vesryn’s wings snapped wide in a blaze of fire, jade eyes flashing draconic in the dark.
Lykor’s heart thundered in his chest as tremors shook the stone. Ice veined across his arms, sheathing his claws in frost. His beastblood surged and locked every muscle, shoving his frame into readiness.
The mountain shuddered to a halt, mist billowing in a fog. Vesryn lifted a hand, unfurling a globe of silver light deeper down the tunnel.
Each breath grew shallower as Lykor tracked the advancing glow, the certainty settling in his chest that they were no longer alone. The gloom recoiled from the light, the mist parting like a curtain.
The illumination struck something.
A shimmer.
Then a pattern.
Lykor’s heart stalled, the next beat held hostage.
Scales.
Obsidian-black.
An eye peeled open, the wet membrane sliding back to reveal a glassy pupil, crystalline and lit from within.
Like Rimeclaw’s.
A dragon shackled by a Heart of Stars.
The beast’s roar detonated through the mountain. Stone convulsed, fractures racing wild across the walls. Roots that hadn’t existed moments earlier ripped free like snapped ligaments, moss shearing from the ceiling in clinging sheets.
Stone buckled beneath Lykor’s boots as the tunnel reshaped itself around them. The corridor narrowed like closing jaws, rock grinding inward—sealing off retreat, trapping them with what waited ahead.
Vesryn’s shout cleaved the chaos, his illumination flaring outward. For a single breath, the tunnel burned like a forge, light slamming into shadow and casting the dragon into full view.
This beast was no sleek storm-cutter like Skylash. No glacial titan crowned in ice like Rimeclaw. Not even like Cinderax, forged in a volcano’s heart.
This creature was something else.
Creeping fungus mottled its obsidian hide. Ruin crouched before them—squat, swollen, pressed nearly wall to wall. A behemoth born of earth and silence, its loamy stench clogging every breath.
Its tail coiled around it like a fallen column, the end knotted into a brutal mass of root-fused bone—built for breaking whatever stood too close.
Viridian wings lay clamped tight against a spine ridged in blackened armor. Its blunt skull hung low, neck draggingearthward, eyes dull with the stagnant patience of something that had endured centuries in the dark.
