For us,she agreed.
The stormline muttered again along the southern edge. Both ancients turned their heads in the same breath, bodies angling to the call without thought.
Vornokh unfurled to his full height. His dark plates caught the moon and made it one color. “We are late to our own sky.”
“Then stop sitting,”Nyxariel said, and the smile this time was in the wind.
He huffed, a sound of fondness, and stepped from the rim.
They launched into the air together.
Stone shuddered, glass hissed, and the broken dome below took their shadows like a blessing. Heat rose to meet storm; storm cooled the edge of heat. In the first turn, they tangled awkwardly, the old pattern reaching for places that no longer fit, and then, in the second, found a new curve. Not the bond severed and stitched. Not the bond before breaking. Something that could hold.
They climbed until the Scorchfield was far below and the academy’s lights were faint. To the south, thunder answered thunder. Vornokh and Nyxariel tipped their wings toward it, two silhouettes becoming one long stroke across the night.
Chapter
Twenty-Three
The moon hung high above the Asgar Training Academy, veiled behind a thin shroud of clouds, its pale light barely touching the windows of the upper dorms. The halls were quiet at this hour, silent save for the occasional flicker of torchlight or the soft rustle of wind winding through the ancient stones. Thorne helped Thaelyn through the threshold of his private dorm room. She was exhausted and weak from her visit with Nyxariel.
Her tunic was half-pulled aside, revealing the sigil that had begun to change. What once was a storm-scarred mark of Air had fractured, Aether threading through it like veins of light beneath the skin. New lines shimmered, silver and violet, the color of moonlit prophecy, forming a shape older than the symbols etched into the Asgar Training Academy walls. The shape pulsed slowly and deliberately.
"Thorne."
His voice didn’t answer. He stood frozen beside her, staring at her back, at the sigil as it pulsed with otherworldly light. His jaw was tense, his hands clenched.
“Are you ok? I know a dragon marking its rider is very intense.”
Aether surged, rising from the sigil, from the bond, from the breathless stillness between them, and the room shimmered as if the veil between worlds had peeled open. But this was no illusion or dream. It was a memory being shared and born from the dragons’ bond and the will of a past too powerful to stay buried.
They stood on a jagged cliff edge beneath a blood-red moon, the sky bleeding crimson across black stone. The sea below thrashed in agony, waves crashing like drums of war. Wind howled. Magic screamed in the bones of the land. Above them, two dragons circled in torment. One was Nyxariel, her blue and violet scales catching flashes of moonlight, her wings arched like blades of sorrow. The other was flame incarnate, Vornokh, trailing fire with every sweep of his wings, his roar cracking the air like thunder. It was not the dragons who descended; it was their riders.
Serenya Veyrath stepped forward in ceremonial black and crimson, her long raven braid whipping in the stormwind. Her eyes burned with sorrow and resolve. Beside her walked a vision of ancient grace: Elirien Taranveil, clad in white armor laced with silver threads, her face ageless and haunted.
“This is the memory we buried,”Nyxariel’s voice whispered within Thaelyn.“The moment it all began to unravel.”
Serenya’s eyes were glazed with an unspoken goodbye. She turned to Elirien. “You don’t have to watch.”
“I do.” Elirien’s voice cracked with grief. “You don’t have to do this.”
“I do,” Serenya said again, softly now, as if the wind had stolen her strength. “If I don’t sever the bond, Vornokh will never leave me. And he must survive the fall of the city. You know that. You saw it.”
Elirien took a step forward, tears of defiance in her eyes. “But if you sever the Prime Bond, it will kill you.”
Serenya looked back at the sky. “It’s already killing me. The city can not fall, I have to help save it.”
Below, Vornokh roared, a sound of pure heartbreak and defiance. Flames danced along his scales, and his wings tore through the air like a storm refusing to be contained.
“No,” Thorne breathed beside Thaelyn, but his voice didn’t carry to the memory. His fists clenched. “Don’t do it!”
Serenya raised her hand. Strange runes glowed along her arm, runes not of any known tongue. Not Earth, not Air, not Fire, or Water. Aether-born. Forgotten. Forbidden.
“I bind thee, I break thee, I free thee.” The words barely escaped her lips before the world cracked.
Vornokh’s roar split the sky. It shook the cliff. The stars trembled.
Thorne dropped to his knees, gasping. His hands went to hischest, as if something inside him had torn. Thaelyn dropped beside him, reaching, but the vision held fast.
