A chill rolled over me.
Ironic for an ice dragon? In part.
But it wasn’t exactly a temperature-related thing.
It was the energy in the immediate area.
Something sinister, dark, and creepy as fuck.
I pocketed my phone and dematerialized my wings as I looked upon Winter about a hundred feet away.
Amid ruins.
He was on his knees frantically sweeping his necromantic magic all over the ash and debris before him.
His amber waves were stable. That was a great sign.
But the distress and anxious intensity coming off him was concerning.
What was he doing?
And what was this place?
I rapidly took it in. Some sort of former… castle?
The stone walls were now mostly crumbled or shattered and blackened with ash. Pillars were cracked and warped, many jagged, some cleaved in half. The ceiling was mostly a bigopening, and the marble floor was fractured and covered in debris and thick dust.
Over by where Winter was, there were scorch marks on the ground, those indicative of magical impacts and stress.
There was so much of it.
It had clearly been the site of a great battle.
And judging by that nasty sensation in the air, that acrid taste of wrongness and corruption, it had been against one hell of a fucked-up enemy.
With a burst of draconic speed, I moved to close the distance, but not far into the burst, an invisible barrier knocked me back with insane force.
“What the—”
“You can’t pass through.”
I looked to see Winter striding over, worry all over him.
“You literally caged yourself away from everyone and everything?” I asked, my gut twisting at him thinking he needed to do something that extreme.
“What? No. This area was sealed off decades ago.”
Oh.Thank goodness for that.
He gestured around at the state of the place. “This was the site of the last stand against Draco—the disgraced and maniacal Immortal. Once a True Celestial manufactured by the Celestial Plane to be their weapon without the constraint of morality, who they intended to use for unsavory tasks. But he turned on them. He was imprisoned by Cornelius Martel, but rose again about forty years ago. He then terrorized the supernatural world, before he was finally defeated. Actually, even wiped from existence by the Wrath of Hades dagger wielded by Mia Snow.”
“Oh, this is that infamous battle site. The location isn’t exactly well known.”
“Yeah, it’s a place of a lot of pain and damage. Mia Snow, Ariana Martel’s mother, died here to vanquish the Beast. Shewas resurrected later on, Ariana was born, but there was a lot of nastiness that occurred before that happy ending.” He sighed. “And then Ariana had to sever the Celestial Plane from ours just twenty years later because they still hadn’t learned the cost of their interference.”
Yeah, that was when Haven Initiative had been born—a refuge for Celestial kids. Like Christalyn. They were all grown up now and it had been turned into a community at this point. Back then, though, I knew that Winter’s father, Cassius Ashmoor, and the Polygenus Entity, Ketheron, had liberated a bunch of Celestial children just moments before the Severance had been completed. The True Celestials up there had tried to turn them into weapons like Draco and then Ketheron. That had backfired too and the bastards had subsequently imprisoned them on the Celestial Plane for a long while.
“So, in that case, you’re here because of the Mark of Draco you experienced earlier?”
