He hesitated. “Then what do we do?”
The Queen’s gaze fell to the table. The runes under her hands dimmed. “We protect them from the crown. From Kaen. From the King, your brother, if we must.”
“You’re asking me to choose treason.”
“I’m asking you to choose Thorne. He’s your son, our son.”
That stopped him cold. The torch crackled. A single ember dropped, vanished in the dust. “We must not speak of him as my son, for your safety. My brother is a vengeful man.”
Elyria’s eyes glistened, but her voice stayed steady. “Thorne is not ready for what’s coming their way, what is prophesied. Neither of them is. They are the only ones who can face it.”
Kieran looked away, the muscle in his jaw working. “The council will demand containment. You know how this ends.”
“I know how it mustbegin,” she said. “You’ll keep them safe until I can see the rest.”
He didn’t answer at first. The maps fluttered in a faint draft that shouldn’t have existed this deep underground.
He nodded once. “I’ll hold the line.”
Her hand brushed his as she passed, barely there, a memory more than a touch. “As you always have.”
The wards lifted with a low hum as she turned toward the stairs.
“Elyria,” he said quietly.
She paused.
“If the dragons fly together again?—”
Her voice came back through the dark, soft and unshakable. “The world will remember what it tried to forget.”
Chapter
Twenty-Two
Vornokh crouched, wings folded hard to his sides, claws sunk into basalt to keep from pacing. Red heat ticked in his eyes, dim as embers banked for a long winter. He watched the dark for movement and tried not to remember the last time he’d waited.
He felt Nyxariel before he saw her, pressure along old pathways that should have been ash. The air thinned, then bowed.
Nyxariel descended. Stormlight ran the length of her scales and vanished in the seams, as if night itself were stitched to her. She touched stone, and the field steadied around her.
They did not speak at first. Their nearness said enough: two mountains remembering they were once the same ridge.
Vornokh’s mind rumbled like rock giving way. “Ghost.”
Nyxariel’s answer came warm as thunder over rain-warmed stone. “Not a ghost. Not anymore.”
Silence again, but different, less blade, more bandage. The gap between them hummed with things unsaid.
“You vanished years ago,”he said at last. The thought scraped like flint.
“The world did first,”she returned. “When the sky sealed, sound ended. I kept breathing so someone would remember how. I have been sealed away all this time.”
Vornokh’s fire pulsed once in his chest, small and stubborn as he recalled the events of the past. “She cut the bond with cleanhands.”
“She saved you with broken ones.”
A low growl rolled through him and died against the wall. “It killed her.”
