Though I don’t know what I could do.
The smell hits next—iron-rich blood and something older, volcanic. Charred and fiery.
“Fuck—this isnotfun!” Ronyn’s voice bursts through the agony, strained but still so him. “Why does it feel like my organs are at war with each other?”
But then another voice overlays his, darker, ancient, vibrating through the marrow of the world itself: “This body is too small for me. This vessel is unworthy.”
The ground convulses. Trees shudder. And somewhere, somehow, I know what it is.
Awaken the Flame-heart and all will be restored in time. Not today, and not tomorrow, but soon.Nehvara warned me—she told me what would happen when the Flame-heart awakened. And here, I stand on the edge of its rebirth.
Power ripples through the soil beneath my boots, through the marrow of my bones. Not just Ronyn’s awakening—something older, vaster. But I know—the lost city stirs.
Cindralis is rising.
It’s as though two hearts beat at once: Ronyn’s fractured cry, and the slow, colossal pulse of a city rising unseen, unfelt by eyes, but undeniable in the soul.
The Stars themselves seem to recoil, making space for what has returned.
Cindralis awakens with Tarrakai, just as Nehvara warned—stones grinding, the earth’s bones shifting, the mountains groaning awake after centuries.
“Cindralis,” I whisper, awed.
“Tvira!” Rubi cries out, desperate and raw.
Ronyn snarls, half in pain, half in protest. “Oi! I’m right here, thank you very much. And I rather like my vessel, if it’s all the same to you!”
His jaw snaps wide, teeth lengthening into fangs, his scream warping into a roar that shakes the canopy. Wings tear from his back with a wet crack, unfurling in a rush of night-black membrane that blots out the moon. His hands—no, claws—dig into the dirt, leaving deep gouges as his body elongates, stretches, becomes something gargantuan.
We stumble back, desperately trying to make way for the mammoth beast he’s becoming.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
The forest bends to him. The sky parts for him.
And then, silence.
Where Ronyn once writhed, a dragon towers—scales like obsidian, eyes burning molten gold.
Tarrakai reborn.
“Holy fuckin’ Stars,” Merrik curses, eyes pinned on the beast before us.
Jax doesn’t blink. Only looks at Ronyn with something between awe and terror.
The voice that fills my tether is doubled—one soul ancient as the Stars themselves, the other Ronyn, still infuriatingly light and cavalier.
“Kneel before Tarrakai, soul of fire, Ender of Kingdoms,”the dragon bellows into the tether.
And then, layered right beneath it, Ronyn’s familiar drawl:“Don’t forget the first god metal archer of Aevryn. If they’re gonna bow, it may as well be to both of us. We’re kind of a pair now, right?”
The sheer absurdity of the two voices sharing one mind, one mouth rips a shocked laugh from me. But my skin prickles, because I know what this means.
The Flame-heart has awakened. And the realms will never be the same.
“We are no pair, mortal. I tolerate your existence so I may use your vessel as I please. Nothing more,”Tarrakai snarls.
“I think you’ll find I’m impossible not to love. You’ll come around,” Ronyn counters nonchalantly, unfazed and unoffended by Tarrakai’s brutal dismissal.
