ONE
ZYPHON
The dead don’t ask questions.
I stare at the message crumpled in my fist, the ink already smearing from the sweat on my palms. Brotherhood contact. Urgent. A woman asking questions about the dragon guardians. Hunting them, some say.
The description stops my heart.
Pale white skin. Long black hair. And eyes?—
My shadows surge without permission, slithering across my knuckles, cold and hungry. They’ve been worse lately. More demanding. Coiling beneath my skin at odd hours, pressing against the inside of my chest until I can barely breathe.
One purple. One pink.
Heterochromia so distinctive, there could be no mistake. In five centuries of existence, I’ve never encountered another soul with those eyes. Never seen that particular arrangement of impossible colors staring back at me from any face but hers.
Nasyra.
The name tears through me. A blade I’ve been falling on for three centuries.
I scattered her ashes myself. Watched them catch the wind and disappear into nothing. Knelt in that clearing until my kneesbled and my voice gave out from screaming. She’s dead. She’s been dead for three hundred years.
The dead don’t ask questions. They don’t hunt. They don’t come back.
But the dead also don’t have mismatched eyes that I’ve dreamed about every night since I failed to save her.
I leave within the hour.
No word to my brothers. No explanation. Drayke would insist on coming, his protective instincts making him impossible to dissuade. Rurik would turn it into an adventure, crashing through the shadow-territories with all the subtlety of a forest fire. Auren would demand reconnaissance, intelligence, a plan.
I don’t have time for plans. I don’t have time for anything but the desperate, clawing need to see for myself.
The fortress corridors stretch before me, torchlight flickering against ancient stone. Most of the Brotherhood sleeps at this hour, their quarters dark behind heavy doors. My boots make no sound on the worn flagstones—a skill the shadows have given me, payment for everything else they’ve taken.
My quarters are sparse. A bed I rarely use, the sheets cold and untouched. A weapons rack bearing blades I’ve carried through centuries of battle. A single chair positioned by a window overlooking the garden I’ve tended since her death. Moonlight spills across the pressed flower on my wall—a moonflower, perfectly preserved, its petals still holding a faint shimmer.
She loved moonflowers.
The thought comes unbidden, as they all do: Nasyra in the garden at midnight, her face tilted toward blooms that glowed inthe darkness. Her laugh when I told her they’d been impossible to cultivate. Her fingers brushing mine when she showed me how to coax them into opening.
I shove the memory down. Lock it away with all the others that threaten to drown me if I let them surface.
The darkness inside me writhes, feeding on the grief I can never quite bury. It pulses against my ribs, sends tendrils of cold spreading through my veins. Three centuries of this. Three centuries of something eating me alive from the inside out, and I still haven’t learned to make peace with it.
I take the eastern passage out of the fortress. The corridor narrows as it descends, the torches growing sparse until only my shadows light the way—a faint luminescence that shouldn’t exist but does. The hidden launching platform waits at the end, carved into the mountainside far from the main gates where guards might report my departure.
Not that they’d stop me. I’m the Brotherhood’s executioner. I go where I please.
But I don’t want questions. Don’t want to explain why I’m flying toward the shadow-territories in the middle of the night, chasing a ghost who shouldn’t exist.
The night air hits me as I step onto the platform. Cold. Sharp. The wind carries the scent of pine and distant snow, cuts through my leather armor and raises goose bumps along my arms. Stars blaze overhead, indifferent to the desperation building in my chest.
I want to see her.
Even if it’s impossible. Even if it’s a trick, a trap, a manipulation designed to break me. I want to see those eyes one more time.
The shift takes me fast and hard. My human form tears apart as the dragon surges through—obsidian scales erupting across skin, wings unfurling from shoulder blades, bones reforminginto something ancient and terrible. The shadows come with me, as they must. Veins of darkness crack across my scales, visible evidence of the centuries of poison that’s been eating me alive.
