Chapter 2
Zephyros
The scent of harpy blood still clings to Zephyros’s scales as he sweeps through the pine canopy, silver wings cutting through branches like blades.
The Screechclaw battle has left him hollow with hunger.
He searched beyond the massacre and the monsters’ putrid flesh, unsuitable even for a starving dragon.
Below, the Flametop Mountains stretch endlessly, hiding prey in their rocky crevices.
Where are you, little morsels?
A flash of brown catches his ancient eyes. Elk. Three of them picking their way through a meadow, oblivious to the death circling overhead. His stomach clenches with need.
He folds his wings and dives.
The lead elk lifts its head just as Zephyros strikes. Antlers scrape uselessly against his hide before obsidian talons find their mark. The creature’s cry echoes across the peaks, then cuts short.
I got you.
But even as he feeds, unease still crawls beneath his scales like ice through winter stone.
Rhealyn’s distress pulses through their bond, discordant notes that make his jaw clench around warm flesh.
The Stormsong whelp discovered she is responsible for the Neutro’s death, and he may confront her soon.
Zephyros knows she’s worried. He must make haste and return to her.
Zephyros is still eating when terror explodes through the bond like lightning through his skull. Not fear. Not worry. But undiluted panic that sends every scale along his spine rigid with alarm.
Rhealyn!
He abandons the carcass without a second glance, powerful haunches launching him skyward.
Wind screams past his scarred face as he climbs, then banks hard toward the source of her distress.
Five millennia of flight, and he’s never pushed himself this hard.
Pine needles blur beneath him as he rockets through the mountain passes.
—Little one, I’m coming. Hold on.
Silence answers him. The bond remains open, flooding him with her terror, but she doesn’t respond. She seems closed off when she needs him most. His talons flex involuntarily as he imagines himself tearing to ribbons whatever threatens her.
—Rhealyn, answer me.
Still nothing. Her panic intensifies, washing over him in waves that make his ancient heart hammer against his ribs.
Something is definitely wrong. Deeply, catastrophically wrong.
In all their time together, she’s never blocked him during distress.
Never turned away when danger struck. Why would she do that now?
He pours more speed into his flight, muscles burning as he cuts through cloud cover. The Flametop peaks rush past in a blur, but not fast enough. Her terror spikes again, so sharp it nearly sends him tumbling from the sky.
—What’s happening to you?
The bond pulses with something worse than fear now. Desperation. The kind that comes when escape becomes impossible and hope dies. His vision goes red around the edges, like heat in the entrails of a volcano. Someone is hurting his little one. Someone will pay.
He crests the final ridge and spots the Skyriders below, their dragons circling like carrion birds over a corpse. But where is Rhealyn? Where is her voice calling through the bond?
I should have stayed with her. Should never have left her alone.
He roars—the sound echoing across the mountains like thunder—and dives toward the cluster of riders with killing speed.
—Where is my rider? he demands of the other dragons.
—Taken into the mountain, Notos replies.
—What nonsense is that? he growls.
Notos’s pointed snout turns toward him, wind swirling around the younger dragon’s scales. Without warning, images flood Zephyros’s mind—not words, but pure vision shared through their most primal draconic language.
The mountain splits like a cracked egg. Rock peels away as if the stone itself bleeds.
A figure emerges from the depths, tall and obscured, with power that makes the air itself recoil.
Rhealyn struggles against invisible bonds as the man pulls her close, her mouth open in a scream Zephyros cannot hear.
Then wind swirls, lifting them both and darkness swallows them whole as the earth seals shut.
By all the stars!
Zephyros’s silver eyes burn as the visions fade.
Below, three figures hack at the solid surface like insects gnawing at a boulder.
The Stormsong whelp leads them, his wind magic pointlessly blowing debris away.
Beside him, two Skydunes pound their earth magic against the mountain, their effort useless as the rock knits itself.
He circles lower, trying to comprehend. It’s been a long time since he’s felt this helpless, though the echoing emotions from his past are nearly as terrible. His rider, stolen by some dark phantom while he gorged himself on elk.
Zephyros roars his pain, then banks sharply and plummets toward the mountainside, the sound splitting the air and making the Skyriders cover their ears.
The sound reverberates off stone faces, sending rockslides tumbling into distant valleys.
He doesn’t spare a glance for the humans scrambling below. Let them dodge him or be crushed.
His obsidian talons strike the rock face with enough force to shatter granite. Sparks fly as claw meets stone, the impact jarring through his bones. But the mountain barely acknowledges his assault. A few pebbles skitter down the slope. Nothing more.
Impossible.
He strikes again, putting all his fury behind the blow. His talons, sharp enough to slice through dragon scale, leave only faint scratches on the surface. The bedrock pulses with an energy that makes his scales crawl, pushing back against his strength like a living thing.
Terrible power hums in the air. Not the Stormsong’s wind magic or the simple earth-shaping of the Skydunes. This resonates deeper, older. It tastes of starlight and forgotten oaths, of power that ruled when the world was young, beyond memory.
He has never felt magic like this since—
No. It can’t be.
But the resemblance claws at the back of his mind, feeling like a half-healed wound.
The same otherworldly strength that once commanded respect from every dragon alive.
The same force that vanished without explanation over a thousand years ago, leaving them all orphaned and lost. He’s almost sure of it.
Zephyros backs away from the rock face, silver eyes narrowing. Below, the pathetic humans renew their futile scratching, unaware that they battle something far beyond their ability. Something that shouldn’t exist anymore.
Heratrix disappeared long ago. This has to be something else.
But even as he tells himself the lie, dread coils in his chest like an ever-tightening whirlwind. If old powers are stirring, if they’ve taken Rhealyn into their web of schemes and whatever divine madness took Heratrix, then all his strength means nothing.
Nothing!
He can’t even sense her through their bond, which he now suspects isn’t Rhealyn’s doing and only means someone more powerful is preventing him from contacting her.
The thought cuts deeper than any wound. So many years of solitude, and when he finally found her, the one creature who matters most to him might be lost because he chose hunger over vigilance.