Old and hungry, rustling in her shadow, tasting her name.
Ronan had killed darkness once. He could do it again. But this,her, she was not darkness. She was destiny wearing a mortal shape.
And Ronan had learned destiny was inevitability he couldn’t outrun.
Smoke bled from his teeth, curling into the air. He should scorch the realm and silence whatever starvation raked through his blood.
But he didn’t. Not yet.
Every bloodline had been raised on their own version of the tale. Each a gods’ foretelling, bent to suit their truths.
A dozen different narrations. A dozen different lies.
But all of them ended the same—with a monster crowned, Selvarra fractured, and the world in turmoil.
He should destroy that monster now.
Whatever she was, she was tied to him—by fate, by fire. By something older than creation itself. The bond he never asked for. The prophecy that doomed them both before they ever drew breath.
His power roared, a current thick and violent, winding through the air as dark as the obsidian scales sheathing his form.
Lightning split the clouds as the echo rolled through the horizon, his dragon heart beating to her rhythm below.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The sound of destiny tightening its snare.
He angled above the Roux Forest, toward the small clearing cradled inside it. The air there shifted as he descended, crisp and pure, then soured to must, crushed beneath his weight as the ground trembled.
Magic hummed instantaneously through the lattice of his scales, reminding him what he was. What hedidn’tneed.
Dragons did not require the core’s energy to become everything they had evolved to.
Immortal Fae. Deity made flesh.
The supremacy of his lineage burned not in relics, not in crowns, but in the rush of his own veins.
He had been forged to be a warrior. Bred solely for battle, not for the politics an heir should inherit.
And Ronan’s soul bore the brand of only one truth: fight.
Fight for honor. Fight to kill. Fight to end.
So, for over five hundred years—he has.
The land of Luamis felt strange under him. Ryuu had always been sea and stone. Unyielding, eternal, impervious to flame. Where mountains sat endless and slate.
But here, it was dirt and meadow and trees that leaned too close. It practically screamedinferno.
Only the Indra Mountain stood as parallel, its high, cresting peak a beacon to both kingdoms.
For a moment, the forest was serene. Night insects sang their thin, steady chorus. Pine draped the air in sweetness.
But then bitterness seeped through, curling with a scent, acrid as rot.
He lowered his spike-ridged head, holding back the violence that sat caged in his chest. Dragon-fire would be desolation here. One breath, one plume offlame, and this forest would crumble to ash faster than even the Bale’s hunger could consume it.
A bush shuddered. His gaze snapped left, claws flexing deep into the roots.
