Morrigan wants me to know she can reach me here.
The thought sends ice through my veins, colder than any frost Auren has ever produced. She planned this. Sent her forces to die, sacrificed twisted creatures and shadow dragons, just to prove a point.
That’s when I see it.
Auren is fightingthree shadow dragons simultaneously, his gold-white form wheeling and diving with devastating precision. He’s magnificent—every strike calculated, every burst of fire placed exactly where it needs to be. The shadow dragons are outmatched. He’s going to win.
He doesn’t see the construct forming behind him.
It’s not coming from the sky. It’s rising from the shadow of the fortress itself, coalescing from darkness that’s pooled along the eastern wall. Bigger than the others. Denser. This isn’t a random construct—it’s targeted, designed, aimed specifically at the dragon whose back is turned.
I’m too far away. I’m on the rampart and he’s in the sky and the construct is already reaching, tendrils of pure shadow extending toward his exposed flank?—
I don’t think.
I vault over the rampart edge.
For one crystalline moment, I’m falling—wind tearing at my hair, stone walls rushing past, the ground impossibly far below. Then my fire erupts, not from my hands but from my entire body, a corona of white flame that catches the air and pushesagainst gravity. It’s not flight. It’s barely controlled falling. But it’s enough.
I angle toward the construct, drawing every scrap of power I have left, pulling fire from reserves I didn’t know I possessed. The world narrows to a single point: the shadow reaching for Auren’s unprotected side.
I hit the construct at the same moment my fire does.
White flame meets concentrated darkness, and for an instant, reality itself seems to shudder. The construct is massive, dense, designed to kill a dragon. My fire tears through it anyway. Burns through layers of accumulated shadow. Annihilates the core of dark magic that holds it together.
The construct dissolves into nothing, and I’m left hanging in empty air with no fire left to hold me up.
I fall.
Something massive catches me.
Gold-white scales beneath my body. Wings beating powerful strokes. Cold radiating from dragon hide that should be warm, that particular frost I’ve come to recognize as distinctly his.
Auren.
He caught me. He was fighting those dragons, and he still saw me fall, still turned, still caught me before I could hit the ground.
His wings carry us upward, away from the battle, toward the rampart where the other Fire-Bringers are gathered. I should say something. Thank him, maybe. Explain why I threw myself off a wall without a plan beyond “don’t let him die.”
No words come. I’m too drained, too shaken, too aware of the scales beneath my palms and the impossible strength keeping me aloft.
He deposits me on the rampart with surprising gentleness for a creature his size. Then he shifts—that moment of blurringimpossibility—and he’s a man again, standing before me in armor that appeared with the transformation.
The battle is ending around us. I can hear it—the sounds of combat fading, the shadow dragons retreating, the twisted creatures falling as their animating magic disperses. The brothers are chasing the remnants. The other Fire-Bringers are catching their breath.
But Auren isn’t watching any of that.
He’s watching me.
His expression is something I can’t read—not the cold mask he usually wears, not the analytical assessment I’ve grown used to during training. Something else. Something that makes my exhausted heart beat faster despite the drain on my reserves.
“That was reckless.” His voice is rough. Unsteady in a way I’ve never heard from him.
“It was going to kill you.”
“You threw yourself off a rampart. Without wings. Without a plan.”
“I had a plan.” I’m too tired to argue properly, but I try anyway. “The plan was ‘don’t let the shadow construct murder you.’”
