Scales rippled across his skin as flames slammed his side, the heat blistering enough it would have peeled ordinary flesh. The blast glanced off the armored plating, but his leathers hissed, reeking of charred hide.
Snarling, he reached back and snatched Cinderax by the frills on his neck.
“If you scorch another set of my armor,” Lykor growled, dragging the little bastard up by the scruff, “I’ll dice you intoribbons and feed your entrails to Trella. Don’t think she’d refuse.”
Cinderax flailed—claws slashing, wings flapping, fangs snapping with all the fury his tiny body could muster. Hissing croaks spilled from his throat.Might’ve been a proper roar. If he weren’t so fucking small.
Lykor hauled the writhing beast forward and dumped him onto Trella’s withers.
The whelp sprawled in a tangle of wings and limbs, then righted himself, coiling atop her spine like nothing had happened.
“Your tantrums are tedious,”Cinderax rumbled into Lykor’s mind, licking one claw with reptilian disdain.
Lykor’s fingers tightened around the saddle. Another druidgift—hearing dragons when they allowed it. Too often, in his opinion. One voice in his head proved intrusion enough.
“I heard that,”Aesar clipped, still focused on steering the dracovae beneath them.
Ahead, Vesryn and Naru carved a line toward the highest ridges. Beyond the Dreadspire’s reach, the world blackened into a wall of clouds chained to the sky, veined in endless lightning.
Cinderax blinked slowly as Lykor refocused on him. Maroon eyes, the color of his wings, carried the depth of an elder wyrm trapped in a whelp’s body.
To Lykor, he was still the stars’ cruelest joke. A hatchling. But the memories festering in that skull were useful fragments of an older age, and the right questions could unseal that vault.
When he’d asked why Serenna heard a dragon’s voice before receiving the boon, Cinderax sifted through his ancestral knowledge and claimed the Heart of Stars had bridged her mind—not to him, but to another.
“What do we need to know about what’s ahead?” Lykor pressed again.
“Skylash is beyond those peaks,”Cinderax said, releasing a lazy puff of smoke.“And as noble as your steeds are, they won’t survive two wingbeats in the Crackling Maw.”
That meant Trella couldn’t fly into the storm.
Which meant neither could he.
“Because of the lightning?” he asked, though he already knew.
“Precisely.”Cinderax cocked his head, eyes glowing with amusement.“You’ll need your children of earth and starlight to bend the skies and guide the path—which Kaedryn already told you.”
Lykor scoffed. They barely had thirty among their number who’d manifested the earthen powers—some of the academy’s former initiates turned wraith by the king, and a handful of Jassyn’s rebel magus. Fewer still could direct it with purpose, let alone twist a storm to their will.
“Fine,” he muttered as Trella caught a thermal, climbing higher. “And once Skylash is free, her lightning will be ours to wield?”
“It doesn’t work like that.”Cinderax vented steam from his nostrils.“Your greed runs as deep as your Aelfyn forebears’. Ever reaching. Ever frothing for every boon.”
“I don’t want power,” Lykor growled. “I want theadvantage. There’s a difference.” Then flatter, he concluded, “So scalebound—druids or whatever the fuck you want to call us—can only harness one element.”
“And onlyifthe Warden of the line deems you worthy,”Cinderax said with a chuff.“Dragons don’t share. Some of us don’t take kindly to drifters—those who leap from boon to boon. You harness one gift. One element. And you’re already claimed by fire.”
Lykor’s lip curled. Fitting that he was shackled to a temperamental cretin like Cinderax. A sharper insult itched onhis tongue—about offendingrealdragons—but he swallowed it. No sense provoking the lizard while he was actually coughing up something useful.
Ahead, the rangers strung their line across the terrain. Trella skimmed the sweep’s outer rim, high enough for Lykor to watch the scouts, yet low enough to feel the mountain gusts batter her wings. Below, warriors dropped from their dracovae like plunging seabirds, wings flaring as their mounts wheeled above.
The mountains cracked open into the Maw, the sky fevered with a hunger coiled to erupt. Rimmed in black stone, the earth lay gutted from horizon to horizon, a black lake sunken at its center. Above the water, storm-swollen clouds writhed, spewing lightning in serrated convulsions.
None among the rangers could bend the elements like Jassyn or Serenna. At best, they could shield with Essence. The only question was for how long.
“We’re training as fast as we can,” Lykor said. “But it isn’t enough. You can’t speak to Skylash through the Heart? Find where she’s bound?”
“If the relic remains silent for Serenna after all your forcing, it won’t answer for me,”Cinderax replied.“Skylash’s mind might lie too deep in the dream-sleep to catch the echo of any voice.”
