They wantedher.
Why couldn’t they wait? Just a few hours, until the prince returned. She’d still play the part they wanted. But with Vesryn beside her, she might feel steadier, more certain that the magic wouldn’t consume her whole.
“What if I harm the eggs?” Serenna asked softly, the question scraping out.
“We will begin with one,”Cinderax said, solemn but sure.“We’ve accepted the cost of hope—the potential sacrifice. We haven’t come to this lightly. If we do nothing, my clutchmates will never see the sky.”
Serenna chewed her lip, another question rising to buy more time. “If the Heart freed you, why not the others? They were in the same chamber.”
His wings shifted, dappled light sliding over the maroon membranes.“When Vesryn wielded sunfire through the Heart, every facet blazed with power. Each could have carried that magic outward—threads that might have broken the chains on every egg. But he focused it toward me alone. By the time I understood what he’d done, the relic had already shattered.”
Serenna didn’t move, her breath dragging heavy through her chest. She didn’t want to do this. Not without the prince to pullher back if she began tilting toward that spiral of stars again. The memory still burned behind her eyes, the Aelfyn whispers echoing that she already belonged to them.
The Starshard at her throat thrummed, pulsing like a second heartbeat—as if it had known her longer than a day. Serenna clutched the gem, her voice thinning as she looked at Kaedryn.
“Will you drain my Well with your shard?” she asked, fear raw in her voice. “If something goes wrong?”
Kaedryn nodded. No judgment kindled in her eyes, only that quiet and terrible belief that left nowhere to hide. The cruelest kind.
Serenna’s fingertips tingled as Essence writhed beneath her skin, a promise of power strong enough to shatter the crystal.
Or to silence the life waiting inside.
She looked past the sailcloth snapping in the wind, over the wide, bare desert to where the horizon trembled in waves of heat. Somewhere, the king’s forces were already carving their path—across the sea, or through these realms.
Her brother could be standing at the bow of a ship, watching these shores rise from the waves. And here she stood with war already on the wind, knowing that even a clutch of dragons couldn’t delay the fall of darkness. No matter how many wings they summoned.
For a single breath, the world held still. This wasn’t about proving her strength or surviving the sunfire that had nearly unmade her. She was here to restore the balance her Aelfyn ancestors had stolen and kindle life back into dragons long denied it.
The fear didn’t pass, but she stepped closer to the pedestals anyway, drawn to the nearest egg cradled in talons of rose-hued stone. Cinderax’s unblinking gaze followed her, a furnace banked within his eyes.
“Do you care which I begin with?” Serenna asked softly.
He tilted his head toward one egg, then another, before prowling close, the sweep of his tail whispering across the rugs.
“No,”he said at last, coiling beside her ankles.“And you aren’t choosing one to die,”he added, as if hearing the hesitation behind her words.“You’re choosing one to free.”
Serenna exhaled slowly and reached for the egg, the cool crystal meeting her palm. She caught Kaedryn’s gaze, and the druid leader inclined her head, stepping to her side. That nearness steadied her, a silent promise that someone would stop her if the sunfire raged wild.
Serenna drew on the flame in her chest, scales rippling across her skin to shield herself. Closing her eyes, she let every doubt fall away and fixed her focus on the shell resting under her hand.
Delving through her Starshard, Serenna plunged into her Well and hauled illumination upward with a shudder that rattled her ribs. The gem ignited against her collarbone, beating in tandem with her heart, pulse for pulse.
Power swelled behind her sternum, pressure mounting, impatient to break. She shaped it, guiding the torrent instead of yielding to it. Essence raced down her arm, crowning her fingertips in a burst of blinding brilliance.
The egg drank in the stream of light. Illumination bent around the crystal in a living halo, refracting in narrow bands of silver and white until the shell lay wrapped in a radiant shroud.
But it wasn’t sunfire yet.
Serenna reached deeper, recalling Vesryn’s fingers twined with hers—his steadiness, his control. This time, she eased the floodgates open herself, coaxing rather than unleashing the storm.
Magic still surged, roaring through her gem. Stars flecked her vision as the flare built faster than her body could channel. Her lungs locked, straining to contain the nova blazing through her like a sun.
The air vibrated with power. Her spine arched as warmth licked beneath her skin. Every nerve shrieked alive, threatening to incinerate her from within.
Serenna staggered, knees buckling before she caught herself. Sunfire tore through her veins as if it already knew the way, no longer asking permission to burn.
For a single, devastating heartbeat she feared it was true—that she’d released the dam and lost the right to steer what raged through. Essence spiraled out of balance as the line blurred between controlling the sunfire and becoming it. Heat clawed up her throat, her vision tunneling to a starlit void.
