She’s gone.
I killed her.
The tears come before I can stop them—grief and relief and horror all tangled into something I can’t name. I’m crying for the sister I lost twice: once when she became a monster, and once when I destroyed what was left. Crying for Lyric Valek, who died in a room just like this one. Crying for my parents, who died holding a door so I could escape. Crying for myself, for the girl who used to worship her big sister, who never imagined it would end like this.
I press my palms against the scorched stone. It’s still warm from my fire—warm from the power that killed the last of my blood family. There’s nothing left of Morrigan. Not even ash to bury.
The door behind me disintegrates—burned through by magic that’s still leaking from my exhausted form. Through the opening, I sense Auren. Feel his cold presence like a balm against the heat still radiating from my skin. He stood out there the whole time. Waiting. Trusting me to do what needed to be done.
Then his arms are around me, frost meeting fire, and I collapse into him.
“It’s done,” I whisper against his chest. “She’s gone.”
“I know.” His lips press against my hair. He smells like ice and battle and something that’s purely him. “You did it. It’s over.”
The fortress shudders around us. The wrong-angled architecture is losing its coherence, walls shifting, floors tilting as the magic that held it all in place unravels.
“We need to move.” His arms don’t release me. Can’t release me, maybe, or won’t. “Can you walk?”
I look up at him—this dragon who hated everything my bloodline represented, who has every reason to despise me, who just stood outside a door and trusted me to face my demons alone. His golden eyes are soft with something that might be concern. Might be something more.
“I can do anything,” I say, “as long as you believe in me.”
He kisses my forehead. Brief. Tender. A promise of more when we’re not standing in a collapsing fortress, covered in ash and exhaustion.
“Then let’s go home.”
TWENTY-ONE
AUREN
The flight back to the fortress is silent.
Tamsin rides on my back again, but everything about her grip has changed. Where she held on with fierce determination during the assault, now her hands rest limply against my scales. Where her fire burned just beneath the surface, ready to ignite, now it’s banked so low, I can barely feel it. She’s folded in on herself, processing something too vast for words.
She killed her sister.
I understand the necessity. Understand that Morrigan would have destroyed everything if left alive. But understanding doesn’t erase the grief I feel radiating from the woman on my back—a grief so profound, it seems to darken the air around us.
Behind us, Morrigan’s fortress collapses into rubble. The wards tied to her life magic fail one by one, the wrong-angled architecture losing its coherence until nothing remains but broken stone and bad memories. By the time we’re over the borderlands, smoke is all that marks where it stood.
Good riddance.
Drayke flies at the head of the formation, Selene’s gold fire visible even from this distance as she rides on his bronzeback. Rurik flanks him to the right, Aisling secured between his massive wings, her red hair streaming in the wind. Zyphon brings up the rear, Nasyra’s shadow-touched form barely visible against his obsidian scales.
We lost no one. The assault was clean, surgical, exactly as I planned. Morrigan is dead—truly dead, no resurrection possible. Her ritual chamber is dust. Her stolen treasures are buried beneath rubble. Every dark ambition she harbored for decades has been reduced to nothing.
It should feel like victory.
It doesn’t.
Tamsin doesn’t speak for the entire journey. Doesn’t move except to adjust her grip when turbulence threatens her balance. I can feel her thinking—can almost hear the spiral of thoughts that must be consuming her. The sister she loved becoming the monster she killed. The family that no longer exists. The burden of being the last Valdorian royal, carrying a bloodline stained by betrayal.
I want to comfort her. Want to say something that will ease the pain I can feel bleeding from her silence. But I’ve never been good with words—with emotion—with any of the things that matter in moments like this.
So I fly steady. Keep my wings level against the crosswinds. Carry her home as carefully as I can.
It’s not enough. But it’s what I have to offer.
