I sighed.
“We’ll meet again at dusk,” Benedict said to the Elders. “We will bury him and we will tell the others what we know. No lies. No panic. Just truth.”
“And if they ask what that truth means?” Ronan murmured.
Benedict’s jaw set. “We tell them what we always tell our people.”
Kieran raised a brow. “Which is?”
“That we endure,” Benedict said, “until we understand.”
I looked around the room at the men I loved, at the elders who had guided us through ruin, at the faint light slanting through the broken ceiling, and I felt it again.
It wasn’t fear, but something deeper and older.
The quiet, living tremor of a world about to expand.
Chapter Two
WREN
The sun bled out behind the sea, streaking the clouds in copper and rose. The air smelled of salt and smoke, of endings pretending to be beginnings.
Drakens gathered along the dark sand in a wide crescent, their wings folded tight, scales glinting with the last of the day’s light. The body lay at the center of it all, wrapped in linen, resting on a pyre of driftwood and woven branches.
Seawitches had crawled up from the tide pools, curled at the edges of the tide, respectfully waiting with tails still wet and glistening. Meruse, the leader, stood on shore with us, eyes heavy, her wild red curls tamed in a plait today.
Air witches hovered overhead, dropping off earth witches on the ground next to us. Many of them lived permanently on the island with us now, preferring peace over constantly dodging humans on the continent. A few even found draken mates, and their half-human, half-draken children toddled around, beginning the next generation.
The fire witches were still nowhere to be found. They were either extinct or gone somewhere else. The bloodwitch survivors from the Overlord’s castle hovered here and there, keeping to the tree line.
No one spoke.
Even the waves seemed to hush as they rolled in, whispering over our feet like something listening.
I stood beside Benedict, his hand cold against mine. Kieran flanked my other side, a solid wall of quiet tension. Ronan lingered a few steps back, his gaze fixed on the horizon like he was trying to read the wind itself.
The fire wasn’t lit yet. Benedict wanted to speak first. He always did, when things were uncertain. He stepped forward and let his voice carry over the crowd.
“We found him this morning,” he said, each word measured, deliberate. “He is a draken, but not one of ours. His scales, his armor, his sigil, none match any bloodline we know. The sea brought him to us, and until we understand why, we will treat him as kin.”
A murmur rippled through the assembly.
Benedict’s gaze swept the crowd. “I know what you’re thinking. That he could have been a traitor, a soldier of the Overlord who crawled back once his master fell. But I don’t believe that. I believe he came from somewhere else.”
The words hung there, impossible and heavy.
“Somewherealive. We have to consider the possibility that when Lyoness fell, drakens survived and were scattered. This draken could be a descendant of such a survivor. There could be other draken enclaves out there we do not know about.”
The crowd shifted uneasily. A few wings rustled.Someone whispered a prayer. Then the crowd exploded into excited cheers and shouts.
“Quiet!” Kieran said, his voice low but carrying like thunder. The sound cut through the noise and the muttering died.
Benedict nodded once to him, then looked at me. He wanted me to step forward, to put a face to this impossible hope, to remind them what we had already survived. I hated speeches. I hated how eyes clung to me as though I were something holy when I was still learning how to be anything at all, but I went anyway.
“Lyoness was meant to be our ending,” I said, “our last refuge, but maybe once again, it is a beginning.”
A few heads lifted.
