Make it precise where it had only been vast.
Pyrran could already feel the difference in his own body since the bond had begun forming. There was now steadiness in his soul, his aethercore, that had never existed before.
Now he knew without a doubt that their soul mate, a dragon with the power of ice, would be their true anchor.
A Cryovareth.
Pyrran still could not fully accept it.
Sol shifted in her sleep. A small sound left her throat — barely a breath — and the bond between them flared warm against his sternum. His dragon pressed hard beneath his ribs, straining toward her the way flame strained toward air.
He steadied himself and let the pulse settle.
Then he studied Sol's sleeping face — the soft part of her lips, the dark fan of her lashes, the way her dark brown skin held the moonlight.
All this time, they had believed the Cryovareth dragons were extinct.
During the Shattering War, the human armies had targeted them first. Of course they had.
The ice dragons were the archivists.
The memory keepers.
They held the histories of every dragon bloodline sealed within glacial vaults that stretched for miles beneath frozen mountain ranges. If humans wanted to erase dragonkind from the world's memory, they had to destroy the Cryovareth first.
And they had.
Pyrran remembered. He and Korin had been little boys—barely past their first decade.
The news had rippled through the remaining clans like a crack splitting stone.
The Crystalline Citadel had fallen. The great libraries shattered. Every monolith melted or broken open and looted for the Aethercores preserved inside.
The elders had wept. Their souls—the Worldspark within them—had dimmed, and for three days, every living dragon felt a cold so deep it had nothing to do with temperature.
An entire race.
An entire element of dragons silenced.
The Pyrathryx—his kind that wielded fire—had raged. They had burned seven human cities to cinder in retaliation, and it had changed nothing.
The Cryovareth were still gone. Their eggs had been the first things the humans had hunted, because even the youngest human soldier understood that if you wanted to end a species, you didn't start with the warriors.
You started with the unborn.
Pyrran's gaze drifted to the mark on Sol's collarbone. The mating seal pulsed faintly in the dark—three dragons intertwined around a crescent moon.
It was still faint, but the natural soul mate was rising on her skin and would be visible soon.
Fire and ice bound together. How did your egg survive, little one?
There’d been talk by the elders that a Cryovareth egg could survive dormant for millennia if sealed within deep enough ice. The embryo would slow. The Aethercore would dim to nearly nothing—undetectable, even to the humans' cinderglass instruments. A faint pulse buried beneath miles of frozen silence.
The elders sent a team of different families to search for possible eggs, but none had ever been found.
Your mother hid yours very well before she was killed. Do you know how special you are?
Sol shifted in her sleep, and the sheet slipped down past her shoulder, exposing the faint mark.
