Chapter 47
Gregory
Silence blanketed everything.
The sky should have splintered and wept crimson to match the pool expanding beneath my ribs.
This stillness of the grave offended me.
My chest throbbed. A wet and heavy beat struck the cage of bone that failed to protect the only thing that mattered.
I bled hope. Fluid heat spilled from my ruined frame and sought the cracks in the soil.
Burn it.
The beast inside me still remained. It offered a truth I was ready to accept.
Burn it all.
If my mate was gone, this world had no right to exist. If his breath had stopped, the wind had no right to keep blowing. The trees had no right to stand. The stars had no right to watch.
My essence seared the dirt, and the soil gorged on the red stream.
Channels opened beneath me. They passed the topsoil and the bedrock while they searched for the veins of the earth.
My embers needed to infect the land like a plague.
They hunted for the ley lines holding this wretched realm together to pump them full of absolute incineration until the mountains crumbled into glass and the oceans boiled into steam.
The silence needed to end with the roar of oblivion.
The landscape blurred. Gray edges crept in to steal the remaining luster. I drifted. I moved away from the copper scent of death and into the cold memory of stone.
The Test of Wills.
I knelt on marble, the stone biting into my flesh. “You do not understand, boy.” My father’s call echoed through the halls. “You think the Mother Goddess demands power? You think being a Dragon Lord is about conquering the fire?”
I had thought so, believing it was about chaining the beast and forcing it to heel. I’d fought the blaze and wrestled with the monster in the dark. A tight leash seemed the only path to success. It wasn’t.
The Mother Goddess never wanted a jailor. She ignored our strength.
She tested our tethers.
To house the fire of a dragon was to be a vessel of pure destruction. To survive it, you didn’t need a shield.
You needed an altar.
You needed a divinity holy enough to make the monster bow its head in reverence. A sacrifice worth burning everything else for. An anchor that mattered more than revenge, more than rage, more than the beast’s endless hunger.
Evan.
I had viewed myself as dirt. As ash. The grime that stained the world. And he was the treasure, the brilliance, the sacred thing that must be kept apart from my corruption.
The test wasn’t about keeping the light safe from the fire. It was about letting the fire consume everything else so the light was the only thing left standing.
My anchor. My hallowed ground. The one thing the dragon would never touch, because to touch it would be to destroy itself.
I had failed the Test of Wills because I’d had nothing to love more than I hated myself.
A shudder racked me as a groan ripped from my throat, and the sound mimicked tearing metal. Grasping for firm warmth, I squeezed, but my grip slipped on the slickness of Evan’s skin.
Evan’s hand.
“I understand now,” I rasped.
But understanding was a cruel prize for a dead man.
The draconic fire found a root deep in the earth, but I drove it deeper still. I was ready to turn the soil into a funeral pyre worthy of him. The world would burn as tribute. As an apology. As the only prayer I had left to offer for the Mother Goddess.
The pressure that had pinned me to my knees eased. Metal scraped against bone as the spears withdrew. Hands I could not see pulled them from my flesh.
“Stop burning, or I will kill you myself, Gregory!” Adam shouted from a distance.
Another man spoke through the haze. William. “Snap out of it. He’s not gone yet.”
What do they know?
Crimson filled my mouth, and I spat the words out with it. “What do you know?”
Nicolai. That unhinged bastard knew we were damned from the start. He’d taken Harren and run.
The poison had weakened me. The Starlirium had done what it was meant to do. It reduced a Dragon Lord to nothing. I failed to hold the promise I’d made to Evan. I failed to answer the prayers I’d whispered to the Mother Goddess in the dark.
I forced my eyes open. Lightning shattered the dawn sky, and the flash exposed the devastation on their faces.
Lyra knelt beside Evan, pressing her palms to his chest. Golden glow poured from her skin. She gave everything she had left, killing herself to save him. I wanted to thank her. And I wanted to beg her to stop. Adam would never forgive me.
Lyra collapsed, losing her grip on Evan. “Gregory, I’m sorry,” she whispered. Her forehead hit the muddy earth. “I’m trying. I promise I’m trying. My magic is not working on him anymore.” Adam rushed over and caught her. He secured her against him.
Stella crouched beside her son and remained at his side.
She trembled while she brushed a stray lock of hair from his brow.
Her green eyes met mine, and for a heartbeat, we were the only two souls in existence in sorrow.
She watched me, her gaze lingering on my injuries before she turned back to her son.
He saved her.
He crossed worlds and fought through nightmares and faced down the very Empire that had caged her, all to bring her back.
And I couldn’t even keep him breathing. The mate bond was supposed to be sacred, a covenant between souls that promised protection above all else.
But what good was the blood of dragons, what good was fire hot enough to melt crowns, if the person it was meant to shield lay broken in the mud while his mother watched?
I wondered whether she perceived what I saw in myself: a failed guardian donning the alpha title like an unearned costume.
The last spear came free. William grunted with the effort, and I collapsed onto my side, away from Evan. Rain fell, mixing with ash on my bare skin and turning the crimson to dark rivers. I dragged myself back until I could reach him.
Pushing myself up onto my knees, I slid my arms beneath his small body, pulling him flush against my chest. His head tucked naturally into the crook of my neck. Shifting my weight to support him with one arm, my free hand reached up to trace the curve of his jaw and the softness of his cheek.
He blinked. Emerald depths reflected a sky that wept gray tears. The bloody stench of spilled life buried his scent. Red stained his chin and trailed from the corner of his mouth. It marked the pale column of his throat. It painted a gruesome path over skin I had sworn to keep whole.
“What do I need to do?” The words scraped out of me. “My sweet Evan. This time, what does the Mother Goddess want of me? I failed to protect you. How can I walk between the Sanctum?”
I waited for the condemnation, for him to see the failure etched into every one of my scars.
He raised his hand, shaking with an exhaustion that terrified me. His fingers found the hand at his face and gripped tight. His touch was cold and slick, but he held on with a strength that defied his broken body.
“I want to see the dragon,” he murmured. “Without fire or anger. Just the dragon. I want to see you.”
“No.” The word tore from me. “I can’t.”
“Please, my alpha.” Evan struggled to draw enough air to speak. “I died once, and I thought waking up in this world beside you was a fate worse than death. But it has been the best gift I could have asked for. Be the Dragon Lord for me. Just once.”
I kissed his knuckles, then released his fingers and gently laid them across his chest. I lowered him carefully back to the ground while keeping my touch firm on his shoulder.
Then I let go. Not of him. Never of him.
I let go of the leash.
Steam billowed from my skin as the transformation began. Bones snapped in a symphony of breaking and reforming. The heat that had been seeping into the earth reversed its course. Inhaling it back, I drew it from the soil, the roots, and the veins of the world I’d tried to burn.
The heat returned as magma.
Draconic life-fluid ignited in my veins. The bone in my forehead expanded, reshaping itself with wet cracks that reverberated in my skull. Horns erupted. They curved back in arcs of polished obsidian.
My spine lengthened. Vertebrae multiplied and ground into place while my body stretched and contorted.
The skin of my back split open. Wings tore free in a spray of heat and ash—massive, leathery spans with membranes stretched between bones that shone black in the rain.
My tailbone extended. It became a weapon, a balance, and a completion all at once.
Claws broke through fingertips and punched through skin and nail.
The last drops of human life-fluid ran out.
Liquid fire replaced it, cauterizing the wounds as they formed.
Obsidian scales erupted across my flesh in overlapping layers.
Each one was a shard of night given form.
They shimmered in the gray. Onyx bled into deeper black until living armor covered me from snout to tail.
My jaw elongated as teeth became fangs, and my roar built in a chest that had grown to house a furnace.
The world ripped itself apart and rebuilt itself in shades I had no name for.
Souls revealed themselves.
Adam’s burned blue-silver, lightning given form, crackling with the same power that had made him Knight-Commander.
William’s was similar—azure fire wrapped in silver threads, a storm barely contained.
Lyra’s flickered with that familiar blue-white luminescence, nearly extinguished from pouring everything she had into Evan’s broken chest.
Stella’s glowed emerald through the collar’s suppression, portal magic that refused to be chained.
And Evan.
Ember.
Fire-red. Dragon-red. Mine.
But not alone. Two smaller lights nestled within his brightness, twin sparks of crimson that glowed with new life. Three souls where there should have been one. Three lives I would protect with every breath in my body.
I spread my wings in an instinctive movement and gave one powerful flap. The fire that had lingered in the air extinguished, and my tail swept the ground in a final gesture of control as the destruction stopped.
I crouched low, my massive form folding down beside where Evan lay. I scooped him into my open palm, fragile as glass and precious as divinity, and brought him close to my face.
He lifted one arm from where it rested on his chest and touched my snout.
His fingers traced the scales, trembling with the effort.
A soft smile curved his crimson-stained lips.
“I guess I’ve seen everything in this medieval fever dream world now,” he whispered.
“Thank you.” His eyes closed, and his hand slipped from my snout to fall back against his chest, joining the other in stillness.
My transformation reversed in a rush of fire and collapsing bone, leaving me human again in seconds, with Evan still cradled in my arms. Dropping to my knees, I pulled him close and pressed my forehead to his.
“My sweet Evan from another world. You haven’t seen everything yet. We are bound for eternity.”