From the cart behind me, I heard the faint creak of wood – the wheels of the cage holding the Queen’s prize catching on the slope, just for a moment. It was the first time I heard a sound from his directionsince last night. Alaric had not said a word since he had quietly sung something he had no place knowing. Instead, he had kept his eyes on me ever since. I didn’t look back, but I could feel his gaze like a weight on my spine, heavy and yet calm. It was not the stare of a man awaiting death. It was the steady gaze of someone who had made his peace with the inevitable.
The ache in my shoulder flared again, twisting through muscle and bone with a sudden, familiar sting. The crowd roared around me, but I couldn’t hear it clearly anymore. Behind my ribs, a tremor began – a subtle pull, like a thread being drawn.
I tightened my jaw and focused instead on the rise of the road, the way it coiled like a serpent toward the keep. We passed beneath carved arches, each more elaborate than the last. Sunlight spilt between the eaves, catching in the petals at the hooves of my horse. Someone reached out to touch my boot, and a guard shoved them back. There was no malice in it. Just order.
“There are no windows in Dragna’toch, but you will see inside, sister.”
Magic in Eryndia had never belonged to men. In truth, it had not belonged to anyone until it was stolen.
The Old Gods had shaped the world with divine hands – raising mountains, guiding rivers, and setting the stars in their places. But they grew tired. Not all at once, and not with malevolence, but with the slow erosion that comes from the quiet disinterest of beings who had grown too vast to hear the voices that once praised them. And so, as their gaze turned elsewhere, they left stewards in their place: the dragons.
Born from divine fire, the dragons were meant to shepherd the world, to preserve the balance left behind. But power without love curdles quickly. The dragons grew arrogant, then cruel. They saw mortals not as wards to guide but as offerings to consume. Where once the gods had tended, the dragons now ruled – and not with wisdom, but withhunger. So began the Age of Ash, when the skies were scorched, and the ground shook with the weight of wings too vast to oppose.
And it was during the Age of Ash that the dragons began to demand a tribute from us mortal beings. Firstborn daughters, born beneath the blood moon – taken to the mountains, dressed in red, veiled with lace and given over to flame. The dragons feasted on their souls, drinking in their essence like a fine wine. And it had been thus for hundreds of years. The people forgot the Old Gods and only knew their new rulers, the tyrants on wings, who consumed their beloved daughters.
Somewhere in the crowd, a child called out – her voice high-pitched and joyous. A moment later, I saw her perched on her father’s shoulders, waving a black banner emblazoned with golden flames with both hands. For a heartbeat, I saw another child: a boy with limbs too thin for the armour that covered him, his eyes wide with pain as he bled out beneath Haedor’s corpses. His voice, like torn silk, had begged for help. This girl, however, held silk in her hands, her eyes gleaming with an excitement that had never witnessed death.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Astrid. As our gazes locked for just a moment, I knew she felt it too: the smile the child wore did not belong in this grotesque theatre. The dragons had consumed their daughters. Now we taught ours to cheer as if the flames had never come.
It had been Drizzna the Deceiver who turned that tide. Not by strength. Not by flame. But by theft and cunning.
She had walked the path as so many had before her – barefoot, bound in red, eyes lifted to a sky that had not answered for centuries. The dragon came for her, vast and glimmering, its breath turning stone to ash. But Drizzna did not weep. She did not kneel. She offered a bargain: her hands, her service to nurse the unhatched egg in exchange for her life. The dragon, amused by her audacity and perhaps weary of its own solitude, agreed.
A gust of wind funnelled down the narrow stone corridor ahead,tossing flower petals beneath my horse’s hooves. Some stuck to the wet iron of a soldier’s greaves. They looked like blood. For a moment, I wondered how long the scent of burning would linger in these streets after the Feast.
But Drizzna had not burned. She lived. She waited. She watched. And as the days and months passed, she began to hear them – the voices of the sacrificed. The daughters who had come before her. Their souls, devoured but not destroyed, still clung to the dragon’s fire, bound in torment. They whispered to her. Not with grief, but with fury. They told her what the dragon would never reveal – its nature, its arrogance, and most importantly, its weakness.
They whispered of the weapons that might wound it, of scales shed in slumber, of eggshell fragments buried deep in the soot. They taught her how to bind those relics together—bones from the devoured, shells from the unborn, and scales from the still-proud beast—and how to shape them into a blade not forged by fire but by revenge and rage. They guided her hands, each movement a litany of vengeance passed down by voices too long silenced.
When the egg cracked and the beast bent low to meet its young, Drizzna moved. A blade, fashioned from bone and scale and sorrow, struck true. The dragon’s heart split open. But its magic, ancient and unbound, did not die with it. It chose her. Or perhaps the souls did. They flooded her veins with fire and fury and retribution.
Not a gift. A wound. A pact.
She rose from the carnage changed. Not just alive, but aflame, magic made flesh. And she shared her fire with no king, nor priest. Only her sisters – seven women in all. This was Drizzna’s legacy: her blood, her line. The fire would burn only through them. It lived only in the blood passed from mother to daughter – never to sons, never to strangers, and never to those who sought it. It could not be learned or stolen or tricked. It burned only in the ones born to it and no others.
And I had inherited none of it.
“Let us know you, sister, and we will welcome you home.”
I adjusted my grip on the reins as we passed through the outer court. The keep loomed ahead, draped in silks and smoke. Somewhere beyond those walls, she was waiting. My mother. My Queen.
The people called out for joy, for triumph, for glory.
I rode through them like a stone dropped into water.
Chapter Nine: Frejara
The Throne Room was a vast, hollow cavern of stone and silence. Cold, polished stone floors stretched out before me like an endless river, every step I took echoing against the high, towering walls. The air within the chamber was thick, heavy in a way that made it hard to draw a full breath, as though the stone itself pressed in, unyielding, watching. Yet it was not the walls or the shadows that made the room so suffocating. It was her – my Mother.
The Sorcerer Queen Mowgara sat upon her throne, a twisted mockery of a regal seat carved from black obsidian. The dark stone pulsed with faint, unnatural warmth, as though it had a life of its own. The throne rose above all else in the room, a twisted silhouette against the flickering torchlight that cast shifting, malignant shadows across her face. She was as if a spectre, a queen who did not belong to the mortal realm. Her eyes – bright like the embers of a raging fire – burned with that unrelenting intensity, as though they could see through the fabric of time itself, measuring the value of all things, yet never softening for any.
I moved closer, my boots striking the stone floor with deliberate force, each step ringing through the oppressive silence like the toll of a bell. The sound echoed, lingering far longer than it should have, filling the room with a heavy, suffocating weight. In the shadows along the edges of the throne room, figures stirred, their presence felt more than seen. A few flickered in and out of the dancing torchlight, their faces half-hidden, like vultures waiting for the right moment to swoop. Between them, the Acolytes scurried, pale and skeletal, moving like insects, crawling over the stone floor, their pale hands twitching as if they too could feel the weight pressing in.
The chains that bound Alaric clattered against the floor, the noise a sharp, jarring sound that seemed to break the stillness of the chamber. The metal hit the stone with a loud, hollow boom, the sound sharp enough to shatter the air. The echoes bounced off the walls, then faded into silence, a quiet so deep it felt unnatural. It was as if the very air held its breath.
And then, in that silence, came her voice – low, measured, and as cold and cutting as the sharp end of a dagger.
“Bring him closer.”
