“She’s right, I’m not picking up on that from you,” Torvek told him. He even actually smiled at him.
But then that smile slipped all of a sudden.
He staggered back.
With a grunt of pain, he pushed his coat off his left shoulder.
Then I saw one of his dragon markings blazing—his new Crown Heir one.
He cursed and gritted his teeth.
This happening, and in this manner, could only mean one thing.
He voiced it before I could, his grave expression locking on mine, “The Dracoryn Realm is under attack.”
10
~Winter~
The place was colossal.
Not even just a magical construct, really.
An entire realm.
It sprawled across a mammoth cloudy blue-gray abyss, the realm suspended over a void rather than any true ground. The sky was basically a cosmic spiral of magic.
The jagged black palace dominated the landscape, rising high into the strange, eerie sky. Around it, the place was studded with countless needle-towers, smaller, and stretching into the distance, pushing up through the fog. I’d found out that those were the residences of the necromancers. It turned out that only Ruxnoth—and now me—lived inside the dark stone palace.
In the foreground, a long, elevated obsidian rock bridge cut across the immediate area, connecting isolated platforms and leading straight toward the palace in an insidiously intentional way that drove all the realm’s architecture towardhim.
We’d already known his construct was bigger than a Rifted Cradle, based on the number of necromancers he needed just to conceal it. But this was another thing entirely. From what Father had told me about the Celestial Plane, this seemed justas immense as that—but created and maintained mostly by Ruxnoth, not an entire legion of angels.
It was honestly as awe-inspiring as it was disturbing.
And deeply fucking worrying for that matter.
To decimatethis?
I’d thought I could see to it, but this was even more than we’d all anticipated. It wasn’t only magical, it was material. And from what I’d observed, the material aspect hadn’t been created with magical infusion. It was actual solid matter.
With that being the case, I didn’t—
“Winter?”
I blinked and turned to Ruxnoth walking beside me, his ornate gold and navy cloak sweeping behind him, and drawing attention to his bare chest. Well, for me, it was the blue veins all over his skin there—many more than before.
“Hmm?” I murmured, sparing him a single glance, then returning my attention to our surroundings.
“Are you experiencing cognitive impairment again? Descending into a state of mental lethargy?”
He’d obviously seen me staring. A lot. I’d lingered unnecessarily with a wide-eyed expression so it hadn’t looked like I was studying everything with a strategic eye, just that I was awed and exhibiting interest. And, yeah, appearing like I was also a little out of it. All effective ways to divert his suspicion.
No.“Maybe a little.”
He reached out and stroked my cheek, and to say it took a lot not to react negatively—or violently—didn’t really cover it. “All will be well. It’s almost time for anothercurative immersion.”
“Sounds good.”
