Chapter 43
Chapter
Forty-Three
Thorne landed hard, boots slamming into the stone ground as Vornokh folded his wings with a rasp of agitation.
The flight field was still chaotic. Cadets were rushing to and from the stables, and professors were shouting orders.
The dragons were lined up on the field and snarling.
Their wings rippling with restless fury.
When a dragon loses its rider, it is not only like a death for the dragon, but it also impacts the whole dragon empire.
Thorne was already sprinting across the field, shadows dragging at his heels.
“Iri!” he bellowed; his voice hoarse. “Is there any word?”
Iri met him halfway, stumbling in her run, wide-eyed and pale.
Her hands were trembling. “No, they took her,” she said, barely above a whisper.
“We were in the sky with Brynnek’s unit; they came out of the clouds.
Dark forces, necromancers, and mages ambushed us.
Several landed on Nyxariel’s back and ambushed her.
Brynnek was fearless. He did everything he could.
He’s with the healers. We all fought, but we were no match against the kind of magic they were using. It blocked Thaelyn’s Aether.”
Thorne didn’t wait for the rest. “Where’s Garric?” he demanded.
Iri pointed toward the eastern field, where Tarken was crouched, wings flared. Garric was already moving, dark coat unfastened, his hands glowing faint blue with residual frost. His eyes met Thorne’s, grim and cold.
“She was taken either in the north or northwest area,” Garric said before Thorne could ask. “I can still feel the pull. It’s faint, but there, like a fracture in the Aether stream.”
“You can track her?”
“Not her directly,” Garric replied, voice clipped. “But the way the air twisted when she screamed. The energy didn’t vanish; it bent. Someone’s cloaking her. Hard.”
Thorne nodded. “Vornokh, ”
Already ahead of him, the black dragon reared his head, sniffing the wind, wings twitching. His eyes narrowed like twin coals. “Something unnatural lingers where the sky cracked,” Vornokh growled in Thorne’s mind. “Vaelion is circling above. He sensed it too. The tear hasn’t sealed yet.”
Commander Dareth strode toward them, eyes sharp beneath his hood. “I think I know what kind of wards they’re using,” he said without preamble, his voice low. “Old binding circles, reinforced by shadow coils. Not something the academy uses anymore. They were found to be too dangerous and unstable.”
“But unfortunately effective,” Thorne muttered.
Commander Dareth nodded. “They suppress the Aether bond just enough to delay dragon resonance and mute her presence in the stream. But they don’t erase it.”
He turned to Garric. “Can you follow the echo?”
“Not for long,” Garric said. “Once the wards settle, the trace will vanish. But I can give you a direction. Maybe a stretch of sky where the dragons can pick up her scent.”
By nightfall, the map was marked with three potential sanctums. They were all old, hidden, and dangerous. Commander Dareth’s finger hovered over the northernmost one, where the cliffs split like a jagged wound into the higher ranges.
“Stoneveil Hollow,” he said, voice taut with memory. “Last I heard, the scholars abandoned it many decades ago when the storms shifted. It has enough deep warding to suppress any bond.”
“That’s a full-day ride,” Garric muttered, his hand still burning with blue light as he maintained the directional pull. “And if they move her.”
“They won’t,” Commander Dareth said. “Not until the bonds are fully suppressed. Cloaking that kind of power takes time and ritual. Thaelyn won’t be able to call for help. Not yet. But she’s alive. We’d know if she wasn’t.”
Thorne didn’t speak. He was watching the horizon, his fists clenched so tightly his knuckles cracked with each flex.
“She’s scared.” The thought came from Vornokh, low, furious, and distant as thunder. She’s hiding her thoughts, but I felt it. She raised her mental shields to protect herself and us.
Thorne turned. “We go now.”
Commander Dareth raised a hand. “Not alone. You’ll need a team. One that is quiet and will not alert anyone to the secret rescue mission. We will need a team that is fast and dragon-bonded. No noise. No messengers. We don’t know who else is part of this.”
Thorne’s gaze turned toward the dark end of the field where dragons were gathered in a loose crescent. Already, three of them had stirred. Tieren, Brynnek’s, was alert. Tarken was still coiled, waiting. High on the perch tower, Mirra watched with luminous and frost-touched eyes.
“I know who I’m taking,” Thorne said. “The ones who’d die for her.” He strode away from the command table, his voice rough with command as he passed each shadowed cluster of riders.
“Brynnek, Darian, Rowan, and Sorren. Gear up. You’ve got ten minutes.”
Brynnek grunted, “I am ok to fly again, no arguments.”
Garric flicked his hood up and vanished into the darkness with a whisper of mist.
Thorne turned and found Sorren already beside him, silent as ever, nodding once before slipping into the shadows.
“You’ll need someone watching the skies while you’re inside,” Commander Dareth said. “I’ll send Vaelion with you. He can cloak the valley from above while the others circle wide.”
“And what about you?” Thorne asked, pausing.
“I’ll ride to the northern observatory. If the bond flares again, that’s the closest point I can amplify from. If she breaks through, if she calls, Razorth will hear it.”
Thorne nodded, then turned back to Vornokh. “Arm us,” he said. “We ride in silence.”
The dragons moved in eerie coordination, no roars, no light flares.
Only the tightening of flight harnesses, the soft thump of heavy claws, the low, bone-deep hum of power building in their chests.
Kaeroth’s saddle was secured around Darian now.
Rowan mounted Tarken. Brynnek mounted Tieren.
Mirra’s wings spread with gliding ease as Sorren leapt up behind her head.
Vornokh turned his head, massive and dark, to watch them all fall into place behind him.
Thorne’s hand found the hilt of his second blade, the one gifted to him by the Queen herself. A rare steel meant only for shadowbound heirs.
“Are we sure about the site?” Garric asked as he mounted.
“No,” Thorne answered, tightening Vornokh’s reins. “But if they picked the wrong place to hide her,” his voice dropped, “Then they’ll regret it.”
Commander Dareth stepped forward one last time. “Thorne, don’t let rage blind you. You’ll soon feel her panic through the bond. It’ll pull at you. Twist you. You’ll want to burn everything to the ground to get her back.”
“I already do.”
Commander Dareth nodded grimly. “Just make sure you don’t burn out and that she’s alive when you find her.”
The air was thick, too thick to breathe correctly, like it had been steeped in dust and silence for a century.
Thaelyn stirred against the chains again, her wrists raw and bloodied, iron cuffs enchanted with something old.
Not just elemental suppression. These were ancient ward-craft, the kind used in rites long forbidden.
She had been punched in the face. Her eye felt swollen, and her rib felt as if it had been broken.
Her arms stung. She remembered being dragged for miles.
Her back and legs burned from them dragging her.
Her shoulders and limbs were also dislocated from being hung up and suspended in the air for long periods of time.
Cold sank into her bones from the stone platform beneath her.
She saw blood on the ground, her blood. The room was round, windowless, and lit only by the flickering green-blue burn of everflame torches embedded in skull-shaped sconces.
A ring of wardlines, etched in blood and something darker, pulsed around the chamber.
She’d traced them with the one eye that she could see out of.
She followed it so many times she could sketch them from memory now.
Symbols she didn’t fully understand. Half Aetheric, half something else. Not quite shadow, not quite earth.
Her body trembled, but not from cold. Her clothes had been torn from the dragging and the beatings. Her body was bare. The absence of the bond was the worst part. The utter void where Nyxariel’s presence should be. She had never felt so alone.
She knew Nyxariel lived. She had to. But whatever spell had severed their connection, it was cruelly precise. Aether did not flow through her veins now. It dripped like a dying candle, flickering inside her ribs. Thaelyn slipped into consciousness from a tonic they had forced her to drink.
Thaelyn woke to the sound of dripping water and the taste of iron on her tongue.
Her wrists burned even deeper where the shackles bit and chewed through her skin, cold, blackened metal that pulsed faintly like veins beneath flesh.
The world around her hummed, deep and unending, like the heartbeat of something monstrous.
When her vision steadied, she realized she was suspended in a cavern vast enough to swallow mountains. Jagged spires of onyx jutted from the floor, slick with Aether rot. At the center, a rift split the air, a vertical wound that bled violet light and whispered in the voices of the dead.
Nyxariel was gone. The bond was muted, cut off, but not broken. Not yet.
Chains of necromantic runes glowed around her, thrumming with a rhythm that made her teeth ache. Every breath drew in the stench of decay and burnt ozone.
A voice came from behind her. Low. Measured. Too calm.
“So this is the Aether-born.”
Thaelyn turned her head.
From the shadowed archway emerged Maelor, the Arch Necromancer.
His skin was gray as stone, his eyes twin pits of sickly red light.
His robes trailed mist that reeked of grave soil.
Around his neck hung a talisman made of fused bone and dragon scale.
Behind him came the others, the Shadow King Sovereign and the Triumvirate.