And now, some hunt for the stones. Not for protection, not for balance. But for power. For divinity and vengeance.
But the funny thing about power... is that it always wants more.
I pressed three fingers to my lips, sending a kiss skyward. A small, foolish offering in case the gods still bothered to watch.
But my stomach soured as my focus fell to my hand, to what I hadn’t noticed until now.
I lowered my arm slowly, as if haste might summon a different truth.
My breath caught. My pulse scattered.
Please,I prayed,let it be shadow. Let it be the dark playing tricks.
What had once been olive skin, familiar andmine, was now covered in black, a creeping shroud swallowing every line, every mark.
I turned it in the faint light, trembling fingers betraying me.
It felt no different. And yet it was. The curse whispered along the surface, a caress too intimate, too final.
My stomach plummeted. There was no mistaking it, no unseeing.
It had taken more.
CHAPTER FOUR
Ronan
RONAN D’VYRE HAD ALWAYS PREFERRED THE SKY.
Up here, the world was quiet.
Honest.
It didn’t demand anything of him.
No crown. No throne. No legacy rumbling down the back of his skull.
Just the wind rushing cold and clean across the scarred ridges of his spine where wings unwound in forged steel and shadow-fire.
The air held him the way nothing else ever had.
The only place he felt like himself, or perhaps the only place where he didn’t have to.
In Ryuu, the heir prince in dragon form was a symbol, an acceptance.
Here in Luamis, it only meant danger.
Below, the Light Kingdom sprawled in a patchwork of collapse and aching beauty—forests drowning in silvered mist, villages stitched together by old hope and older memory, oceans throwing themselves against the cliffs like desperate forces.
And there, tucked under a razor-thin crescent moon, cutting through the trees...her.
She was a lone figure in the clearing, half silhouette, half damnation. Moving as if the world didn’t realize she was the thing it should be afraid of, a spark wandering through a forest made of kindling.
She didn’t notice it, didn’t feel how the air sharpened in her wake. How the dark beneath the world stirred when she breathed.
But he did.
Heheardit.
