Chapter 18
LYKOR
Rain hissed through the canopy, froze into sleet, and then thickened to snow as frost raced over bark and frond. Lykor’s skull still rang from the dragon’s voice, each breath a flurry that scraped his throat.
Jassyn stood closest to him, wings drawn tight, eyes lifted to the whitening sky. The jungle heaved as the canopy split open, vines snapping, branches bowing beneath the sudden weight of wingbeats. Even Vesryn and Fenn had gone still, the same rigid stance gripping them all.
A roar tore through the jungle, deep as mountains grinding, the shock punching through Lykor’s chest. Light fractured above as wings swept past, trailing frost like smoke. The air shuddered under the dragon’s passage—a shape too vast to map, too real for legend, too immense for reason.
The bellow struck again, but inside Lykor’s head this time, a blow that sent frost splintering behind his eyes. Words surfaced, cold as tidewater dragging him under.
“Ah… I’ve found you, yes, by ice, by rain.
The Emberhart flame burns again.
Even the tyrant did not see this. No, not you.
Not the crack where fate slipped scalebound through.
He stole my secrets. But one I kept.
Mine alone. The Tidecrasher’s gift slept.
He overrode my name. My breath. My spine.
But not the sea. No… That stays mine.”
Lykor stiffened as Aesar’s presence slid into the shared space of their mind, peering warily through Lykor’s eyes.
“The king has claimed one,” Aesar whispered, voice echoing like wind in a tomb.
“BUT IS GALAERYN CONTROLLING IT?”
“I don’t know.”
That uncertainty chilled Lykor more than the cold. The next roar ruptured the sky itself, as if the world tried to claw free of the sound.
Instinct screamed to flee, but impulse rooted Lykor to the earth. He needed to see what kind of power the king had unleashed, what dragon could bend the rain and sea. A Tidecrasher, Cinderax had called them—those dragons who ruled both flood and frost.
The canopy buckled. Branches cracked like ribs as the dragon crashed through the treetops, each impact flinging shards of ice into the air. The ground heaved, snow spiraling in the wake of its descent. Lykor staggered as tremors rolled through root and stone, the world itself bowing to make room.
This was no molten brat like Cinderax. No fire-swaddled whelp. This was a dragon. A real one.
The beast rose like a mountain, neck arched through the treetops. Frost seethed along its hide, obsidian scales gleaming like wet stone. Ragged wings marbled with glacial blue were tucked against its sides, wide enough to drown the clearing in shadow if they unfurled.
“Him, not ‘it,’” Aesar murmured, sensing what Lykor did through their scalebound gift.
The beast watched the group with clouded eyes, an inner lid dragging slowly across them. Behind that glassy veil shimmered a buried geometry, cold and crystalline.
Lykor’s lungs locked. Not a draconic pupil—a pattern. Familiar.
Aesar tensed. “The Heart of Stars.”
This wasn’t a beast but a weapon, a terror collared by the king. Yet the dragon didn’t feel mindless, not with those words—a will thrashing against its leash.
And perhaps that was worse. Because something alive and aware looked back through those crystal-shackled eyes.
The dragon leaned lower, neck snaking toward them. Lykor braced for the strike that never came. The dragon’s gaze roved over them, curious rather than predatory.
Steam coiled from his snout, breath melting the frost crushed beneath his webbed claws. Fins flared along his jaw and skull, thin as ice sheets, edges rimed in snow.
No one spoke. They all stood transfixed, caught in the creature’s gravity.
The dragon chuffed a slow, seismic exhale. Then his voice poured into Lykor’s thoughts again, cold and immense as the sea.
“Ah… Fires flicker deep in your veins.
Tell me, who is the unbound Emberhart that dared ignite your flame?”
“Cinderax,” Vesryn said—too quickly.
The dragon’s head whipped toward the prince, flinging snow from the leathery spines of his mane. His jaws slammed together with a crack like thunder, the impact blasting frost from the ground.
“You will not address me, star-forged whelp!
Were it not forbidden by the tyrant’s hand,
I’d crack your spine to splinters and salt your bones with sand.”
A surge of alarm lashed through Lykor’s mind—Aesar’s warning. “We need to be careful. He might be reporting back to the king.”
Lykor’s fingers curled at his sides as he stepped forward, voice dropping low. “Galaeryn. He freed you, only to leash you?”
The dragon’s gaze latched onto him, words hissing with venom. “Do I look ‘freed’ to you?”
“We freed Cinderax,” Jassyn said, his voice steady despite the tension shivering through his wings beneath that stare.
“Cinderax…” The name rolled like surf, the dragon disregarding Vesryn as though he hadn’t spoken at all. “So he’s the Emberhart Warden. And he’s nothing but kindling.”
Lykor’s jaw clenched. The judgment stung, too close to words he’d already thrown himself. Because he didn’t want kindling. He wanted an inferno—a dragon to match the ruin, a beast that could turn the tide.
Like this one before him.
“Perhaps we could free you too,” Jassyn offered, quieter now.
“Free me?”
Jassyn drew breath to answer, but the dragon’s reply hit first, slamming through Lykor’s skull.
“You think freedom is simple? Like your fire? A gift, passed from palm to palm? Unbind one dragon, and you crown yourselves saviors of the rest?”
Like a continent cracking beneath a frozen sea, a sound rumbled from his chest as frost seethed from his fangs.
“These chains do not break. Not while the leash still bites my throat.” He tilted his head skyward, through the gash his landing had torn in the canopy. “But if I could be freed…”
The dragon’s crystalline gaze returned to them. “Death is all I’d ask for.”
Aesar flinched, and the echo ran through Lykor. This wasn’t a plea for freedom, nor even revenge, only that weary mercy found in the wish to stop existing beneath another’s will.
Lykor wondered what would’ve been left of him if Jassyn hadn’t destroyed the king’s coercion on his mind. Maybe he’d be begging for silence too.
Then, softer than Lykor had ever heard him, Jassyn broke the quiet. “Do you have a name?”
The dragon blinked slowly, as if remembering.
“Rimeclaw.”
The name landed without grandeur. Above them, the canopy groaned, a vine sheathed in ice tearing loose and crashing down.
“Why are you here?” Fenn asked.
“And not freezing or drowning us,” Aesar murmured.
Rimeclaw’s gaze clouded, distant and haunted. A long breath fogged the air, frost creeping across everyone’s boots. “I smelled a lake and thought I could rest where no stars scream.”
The surrender seized Lykor’s chest. Too familiar, the same quiet despair that had once chained him in the prisons, when death had seemed the only mercy left.
“You’re bound by a Heart of Stars, aren’t you?” Lykor asked, voice rough. “That’s what’s…controlling you.”
The emptiness in Rimeclaw’s voice said more than any nod could. “‘Aid the mortals. Melt their path.’ That was the command. So I bend the snow. I break the storm. Not by will. Not by want.”
Webbed talons flexed, scraping frozen fronds. Rimeclaw’s gaze drifted toward the jungle’s heart, where the lake lay veiled behind the trees.
“But the mortals trail behind,” he rumbled. “Slow on their brittle legs. I can wait. I can sleep. He won’t yank the leash. Not yet.”
Lykor stiffened. His gaze met Vesryn’s as a cold understanding bled from Aesar’s thoughts into his own. This dragon was the vanguard, leading Galaeryn’s ground forces across the Wastes.
Aesar’s words drifted into Lykor’s awareness. “They’ll overrun us in Asharyn with the kind of magic that reshapes outcomes.”
“I’ll scout,” Vesryn said, wings unfurling, scales still plated down his arms. “See what we’re up against.”
The prince kept his tone light, though a muscle ticked in his jaw. Lykor heard the restraint beneath it, the measured calm of someone holding steady so others wouldn’t fear the approaching storm.
“You’ll need someone to cloak you, princeling,” Fenn said, wings flaring wide.
Vesryn’s mouth thinned, but he gave a curt nod. Without another word, they launched upward, wings shearing through the cold until they vanished into the jagged wound torn through the canopy.
Lykor exhaled as he turned back to the dragon, breath fogging in the frost-laden air. If Rimeclaw was speaking freely, Lykor couldn’t afford to waste the chance.
“And stars help us if he decides we’ve overstayed our welcome,” Aesar mumbled.
“You say the king holds your leash,” Lykor said quietly. “Why not end us? Why speak to us at all?”
Rimeclaw’s frilled spines lifted, then shuddered, ice flaking from his shoulders. “Speech was not forbidden. He thinks me a beast and knows nothing of the pact the scalebound keep.”
His eyes, pale like diamonds in light, swept over them with a weariness that had outlived grief. “And it has been longer than memory since a voice answered back. Those who could… Gone, before the chains bit deep. My scalebound. My offspring. My mate.”
As silence settled, Lykor’s gaze flicked to Jassyn, the clawed tips of his wings curling inward. What stirred in Lykor’s chest blurred between kinship and dread, pity’s edge cutting both ways.
Then—almost like an afterthought—Rimeclaw added, “Once, I gave a poem of the Wardens to a young draka of earth and starlight. She never spoke, but I think she heard. Perhaps I only dreamed it.”
Lykor’s jaw went tight. Earth and starlight. Of all the cursed phrases. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” he growled under his breath.
Jassyn shot him a questioning look, but Lykor waved it off—along with the memory of Serenna’s absurd claim that the Heart had spoken to her.
Rimeclaw blinked and frost began to thaw, weeping from his flanks.
“I long to join my kin in the endless skies,” he confessed, softer now.
“But even that fate was denied me.” His head lowered, crystalline eyes catching the fractured light above.
“Would you two grant that release, the mercy that ends this binding?”
The question fell like a stone into still water, despair rippling through Lykor’s ribs. In Rimeclaw’s voice, death sounded more like atonement than escape—penance for a life he could no longer bear. And Lykor wondered when mercy had learned to feel this cold.
“No.”
The word wasn’t loud, but it sliced clean through the air. Jassyn stepped forward. “We could help you. Find a way where your will could be your own again.”
Rimeclaw’s eyes flashed. “You assume there will be a will left to free.” A low rumble rolled through his throat. “One of us is already hollowed to the marrow. The tyrant fetters her mind in madness and rot—sealed somewhere deep in the earth, where no light dares follow.”
Lykor’s gut clenched as if the ground had dropped away beneath him. Two dragons bent to Galaeryn’s command.
While they had only a hatchling.
Barely fledged.
“Do you think Skylash is already his?” Aesar asked.
Lykor shook his head, more denial than certainty. “WE WON’T KNOW UNTIL WE SEARCH THE MAW. IF WE’RE NOT ALREADY TOO LATE.”
“We shattered the Heart binding Cinderax,” Jassyn continued, attention fixed on the dragon. “We could do the same for you.”
“We’ve no way of tearing a relic from the king,” Lykor muttered, doubtful the words were low enough for Jassyn alone. “And how do we trust Rimeclaw won’t lead Galaeryn straight to our people?”
Jassyn’s jaw tightened. “It’s not about trust. It’s about doing what’s right.”
Scowling now, Lykor turned fully to him, no longer caring to keep his voice low. “And what if death is right for him?” His words roughened, bitterness scraping up through his throat like rust. “What if enduring this”—he gestured toward the dragon—“this endless puppetry is worse?”
He leaned closer, unblinking, his stare a knife pressed to the truth. “You never thought about ending it? Before they finished grinding your will to dust?”
Regret struck the moment the words left him.
Heat seared across Jassyn’s face, his pupils constricting to draconic slits. When they fixed on Lykor, the amber flared hot enough to burn.
“You think I wanted to live through that?” he hissed.
“I swallowed poisons just to stay numb while they defiled me. Then smiled when they did.” His wing talons clacked, words spilling between clenched teeth.
“Don’t act like suffering makes you unique.
Some of us just learned how to survive differently. ”
“Enough.” Rimeclaw’s chuff thundered through the clearing, a sound halfway between breath and avalanche. “Right. Wrong. You speak as if the world still bothers to choose between them.” He stamped a claw, snow pluming outward in a halo. “I grow weary of this.”
His massive bulk swung wide as he turned toward the trees, each trudging step blackening the moss beneath his talons. His sinuous, fin-crested tail followed, dragging through the ferns.
“To the lake I go.
I’ll wait beneath the surface.
When he calls, I’ll rise.
But until then…
Let the waters pretend I died.”