Lykor stilled.
The Heart of Stars, fogging with every broken exhale.
His pulse lurched as he raked his gaze across the stretch of sky. Pivoting hard, his heart thundered louder with every beat as he scanned for the others.
But the horizon shimmered with cruel indifference where Jassyn should’ve flown. Clear. Cloudless.
Lykor’s chest seized, breath locking so tight it refused to return.
They weren’t coming.
A colder thought crept beneath the rising dread. Jassyn might already be gone. Like Kal.
Numb, Lykor descended. Wind peeled past him as he dropped toward Asharyn, cradling the limp dragon. He landed in the courtyard, a plume of dust spiraling outward.
The jolt knocked Cinderax’s jaw slack. The Heart of Stars tumbled free, striking the sand with a muted thud.
Lykor’s knees hit the ground. Trembling, he lowered Cinderax.
Around them, druids had begun to gather. He didn’t see them. Only the collapsed dragon.
Cupping his hands, he summoned a shallow pool of water, barely enough to wet the cracked edges of the Cinderax’s snout.
His words came broken. Hoarse. But he had to know. “The others?”
Cinderax didn’t open his eyes as he drank, heaving breaths shuddering his wings. In a voice so faint it barely brushed Lykor’s mind, he answered.
“They were taken.”
CHAPTER 51
SERENNA
Serenna woke on her back to silence and stone.
A chill gnawed through her flight leathers, colder than the damp seeping from the scrubbed white walls. The air held no reek of rot, only sterilized rock scoured so clean it carried no scent at all.
She tried to rise.
Pain lanced behind her eyes, vision fracturing into shards of white. Limbs sluggish, she heaved herself to sit upright. Her body answered too slowly, like it no longer recognized her urgency.
When the blur receded, the chamber resolved into three seamless walls. The fourth gaped open, a violet barrier shimmering across the gap, pulsing faintly. Beyond the shield, a tunnel curved toward blinding light.
A cage with a window, only there to remind her she couldn’t leave.
She remembered nothing of her arrival, or whether Fenn and Jassyn had been taken somewhere else. All she could recall was her brother’s haunted face—those cold, unreadable eyes—as he tore the Starshard from her throat.
Her hand flew to her neck, heart thrashing when metal met her touch.
Gold. She didn’t need to see it to know. Her wings—
She tried to shift. Agony fired down her spine, phantom joints jerking to answer a call already smothered. No rush of muscle or membrane followed. Someone had crammed her back into this form, like clay forced into a mold, and she couldn’t begin to fathom how.
Serenna swayed where she sat, palm pressing hard to her sternum. Skylash’s spark still coursed as a restless current, but when she reached for the static, the charge recoiled from her touch.
Her breath hitched, shallow and sharp. The next collapsed in her throat, air itself seeming to refuse her now. Her thoughts began to scatter until a sound swelled above her.
At first it was distant, reverberating through the stone like rolling thunder. Applause came next, drowning out a clash of steel, shaking the walls.
