Nasyra in firelight, her mismatched eyes bright with laughter. Nasyra in my arms, her warmth a counterpoint to the cold that had already started spreading through my veins. Nasyra reaching for me as her brother drained the life from her body, her lips forming my name even as the light left her gaze.
So many years of guilt so heavy, I can barely breathe around it. Of wondering if I’d flown faster, fought harder, been less concerned with the clan’s forces and more focused on reaching her?—
You were too late.The shadows whisper it, a truth I’ve never been able to escape. They curl against my chest, press against my ribs, remind me of everything I am and everything I failed to be.Too late to save her. Too late to stop them. Too late for everything except vengeance.
The vengeance had been satisfying, at least. Balroth’s face as I tore him apart, piece by screaming piece. The terror in his dying eyes as he realized his sister’s dragon had come for him at last.
Not enough. It would never be enough. I could kill everyone who’d touched that altar and it wouldn’t bring her back.
Except.
The shadow-territories earn their name.
Light itself seems afraid here. The sun barely penetrates the canopy, and what illumination reaches the forest floor is thin and gray, leeched of warmth. Mist curls between the black-barked trees, moving in ways that have nothing to do with wind.The air tastes of old magic—bitter and metallic, coating my tongue with every breath.
I move through the forest in silence, my boots finding solid ground without conscious thought. The darkness parts for me without resistance, recognizing something of itself in what I’ve become. I’m an intruder here, but I’m also kin.
Two more days of tracking. Finding traces of her passage—footprints pressed into soft earth, branches broken by someone unfamiliar with moving quietly through undergrowth. A scrap of dark fabric caught on a thorn, the weave fine enough to suggest someone who once knew luxury. She’s not trying to hide. Either she doesn’t know how to conceal her trail, or she doesn’t care who follows her.
Or she wants to be found.
The traces lead deeper into Shadow Clan territory. Closer to their stronghold than I’ve ventured in decades. My shadows stir with something that might be recognition—this is the direction the altar lies. The clearing where they killed her. The place I’ve never returned to, not since I burned it to slag and collapsed the trees and tried to erase every trace of what happened there.
Why would she be heading that way?
Unless she remembers.
The possibility hits me harder than a physical blow. If this woman is truly Nasyra, does she remember the altar? The brother who betrayed her? The dragon who arrived too late?
Does she remember me?
I move faster. The shadows part before me with increasing eagerness, sensing my urgency, feeding on the emotion I can’t quite contain. Cold spreads through my chest, my arms, my hands—the darkness inside me responding to the desperation building in my blood.
Closer. She’s close now. I can feel it in the way the air changes, the way the darkness seems to lean toward something ahead. A presence I haven’t sensed in three hundred years.
And then I feel it.
Magic.
Not Shadow Clan magic—I know that signature too well, have tasted it in my own veins for centuries. This is different. Changed. Familiar in a way that makes my blood freeze and my shadows surge with desperate recognition.
Fire-Bringer.
But not the pure flame I remember. This fire has been touched by shadow, twisted into something that burns darker than it should. Shadow-flame. The same essence that pulses in my veins, that feeds on darkness and breathes destruction.
Nasyra’s magic was pure once. Brilliant and fierce and full of warmth that could reach even the coldest parts of me. This... this is her signature, unmistakably hers, but wounded. Altered. Changed by the same darkness that changed me.
I stop breathing.
She’s real.
Somehow, impossibly, after centuries of ash and absence and grief that carved itself into my bones—she’s real. She’s here. Her magic is singing through the darkness, a beacon that calls to my shadows with an urgency I can’t ignore.
And she’s hunting me.
TWO
ZYPHON
