Chapter 37
SERENNA
Angling her wings into the wind, Serenna climbed toward the convulsing heart of the storm. Rain flayed her in silver sheets, plastering her hair to her face, soaking through her armor. Each wingbeat burned down her spine, her muscles seizing in protest.
Above, Skylash carved a furious arc across the clouds, a serpent wreathed in lightning. Sparks spiraled in her wake, every sweep of her wings beating lightning down.
Heart hammering, lungs straining, Serenna fought the sky itself. Wind struck sideways, hard enough to send her in a tilt she barely caught. Gritting her teeth, she rose, forcing her body higher.
The dragon scythed through the storm, wings folding as she plunged.
Straight for Serenna.
Lightning kindled in Skylash’s throat, released with a roar.
Serenna’s pulse lurched as she pivoted hard. No time to think—instinct snatched the reins. She reached for the charge and wrenched the bolt off course.
Her hands trembled as the light disappeared into the clouds, her thoughts floundering. The gulf between the dragon’s fury and anything Serenna could reason with stretched impossibly wide. How was she supposed to speak to a raging storm?
“Skylash!” Serenna shouted. “My people aren’t here to harm you!”
The dragon neither slowed nor answered, her chest flaring with sparks.
Skylash arrowed past her so fast the air fractured. The shockwave flung Serenna into a spin, pain lancing through her shoulders as the wind tore at her wings.
She barely righted herself before another lightning strike came, as precise as a dagger hurled for her heart.
With a snarl of her own, Serenna thrust her palms forward. Flames erupted from her fingertips, intercepting the bolt.
The elements collided, fire and lightning shattering in a burst of cobalt and gold. The recoil struck Serenna like a hammer, tossing her backward through the sky.
Her wings snapped wide, catching the wind until she steadied. Then an eerie calm reigned as the storm went still.
Across the sky, Skylash hovered. Every stroke of her wings thundered through the air, the rhythm shivering deep into Serenna’s chest. Lightning crawled over her scales in crackling arcs, her violet eyes blazing through the rain.
“Clever little spark,” Skylash crooned into her mind, voice a silken hiss. “Shall I hurl another?”
Serenna’s pulse jolted when she recognized the voice—the dragon who’d spoken through the Heart when she’d been Lykor’s prisoner.
Lightning gathered again in the dragon’s throat, humming with threat, a predator savoring the moment before the strike. She bared her fangs and released a careless volley that streaked toward Serenna—half test, half dare.
Serenna didn’t flinch. Barely. She snatched the sparks, the charge skittering between her fingers. She twisted it slowly, unraveling the current strand by strand until the light dispersed into the wind.
Preservation begged her to flee, but she didn’t.
Beneath the scorched edges of fear, the ache in every wingbeat, and the thunder pounding in her blood, she’d flown to reach the dragon—to meet the storm with spine.
“You spoke to me through the Heart,” Serenna said, lifting her voice into the wind. “You told me where to search for more relics.”
Skylash’s snarl lashed through the air, lightning veining across her wing talons. “I would not aid creatures like you who chained me to the realm of dreams.”
An argument burned against Serenna’s tongue. None living had wrought that crime. And Skylash knew it.
Instead, Serenna reached for the truth that bound them, a sliver of common ground even if the dragon would try to scorn it.
“I know it was you who helped,” Serenna insisted, the memory from Lykor’s tower resurfacing. “You told me, ‘Search in tempest’s eye, where fury reigns; nature’s roots, the shade of a glade; or volcano’s core, where flames cascade.’”
The dragon’s pupils narrowed to slits. Lightning flashed behind her eyes, spinning like a gathering storm.
“We found two of those Hearts because of you,” Serenna continued. “We freed Cinderax with one, and—”
Skylash cut her off, voice crackling like shattered bone. “And was Rimeclaw’s freedom your doing too?”
Serenna faltered. “We lost one of the Hearts.” The admission scraped her throat. “And because of that…we failed him.”
The silence that followed cradled the weight of consequence.
“That’s why we need you now,” Serenna forced out. “Rimeclaw told us the king broke the mind of another dragon. If we don’t find the final Heart before the elves do, the last dragon will be lost too.”
Skylash’s nostrils flared as she stilled. Then, with a slow blink, she began to spiral through the air—a serpent closing in, lightning warping to her will.
“Ah,” she purred, her voice curling through Serenna’s skull. “You’ve come to beg. So tell me, little spark, what will you offer me if I choose not to snuff you from the sky?”
Words burned in Serenna’s throat, some indignant part of her stirring. Whether beastblood or pride, it made no difference as defiance rose sharp and reckless. She wanted to snarl that Skylash owed her, that she’d risked everything to set the dragon free.
But the impulse soured even as it formed. Serenna swallowed it down, knowing gratitude wasn’t a language this dragon spoke. Something deep in her blood warned that Skylash would sooner tear her apart than endure the reminder.
“What more do you want, beyond your freedom?” Serenna asked, her aching wings fighting to hold the sky. “Whatever it is, I’ll see it done. We can’t win this war without you.”
“I care nothing for your war,” Skylash spat, her tail swiping through the rain. “You stormless things—with your starlight and steel—ripped the sky from its roots. And that molten whelp Cinderax is storm-blind and ash-minded for flinging power at your kind like embers into wind.”
Serenna clenched her jaw, forcing her voice steady. “Without Cinderax’s gift, we would’ve never survived the storm that guarded your prison.”
A low rumble spilled from Skylash’s throat. “And do you think that fire will save you now?” Her violet gaze narrowed, slicing beneath Serenna’s skin like a blade. “I’ve devoured stars brighter than you. I could swallow your bones and pick my fangs with your screams.”
Yet Skylash didn’t strike. Crackling and coiled, she hung in the air, sparks whipping across her scales. Whether the dragon was considering or simply waiting for dread to ripen, Serenna couldn’t tell.
But if her judgment hadn’t fallen yet, perhaps she could still be swayed.
“There’s more at stake than you see,” Serenna said, her own conviction a storm rising to meet the dragon’s.
“The king’s power grows every time he steals starlight from someone like me or shackles the might of a dragon like you.
” She exhaled slowly. “You may be free today. But what about tomorrow? If we fall to him, you won’t be safe in any sky. ”
A silence settled, more menacing than the breath before thunder. When Skylash spoke again, her voice came colder. Deadlier.
“If you can do more than spit words then listen.” The clouds thickened behind her, sparks veining the dark. “I want Veyrix unleashed—Breath of the Tempest. My mate. He’s shackled in the floating isles of the Aetherveil, his own domain poisoned by your star-rotted chains.”
Even as hope swelled in Serenna’s chest, her answer caught, choked by foreboding. Another dragon. Perhaps even more volatile than Skylash.
But there was no turning back now. They needed the dragons—their strength reclaimed, not bent for the king. Even if it meant waking another storm.
“We’ll free him,” Serenna said. “Once we find another Heart, we can—”
“I want more than his freedom!”
Lightning detonated from Skylash’s jaws, a wave of fury hissing through the rain.
“You will bind yourself to the Stormstrikes!” she thundered, every word a blow to the air itself. “You will serve the ancient scalebond oath. As it was meant to be.”
Her wings unfurled in a violent sweep, sparks crowning her in a burning halo.
“There is a clutch of eggs buried in that mountain below. The Unbound. I did not lay them, but I claim them now—every one a Stormstrike. You will tend them. And you will mark each in my name.”
Shock jolted through Serenna. The mountain held eggs? She and Jassyn had barely escaped the chamber alive, let alone had time to search it. But the dragon raging before her allowed no room for questions.
Rain coursed down Serenna’s cheeks as she fought through unsteady wingbeats. She didn’t fully understand what Skylash demanded—or the price buried beneath the vow—but she had no choice.
“I’ll do it,” she breathed. Whatever it took.
Skylash circled her, slow and predatory, the storm folding inward like a jaw made of lightning.
“Then hear this,” she hissed, voice slithering in Serenna’s skull. “You will bear no other boon. Only mine. Forever. And if you ever scorn my gift”—her jaws opened, throat lit with sparks—“I’ll shred your wings from your spine.”
Serenna’s breath thinned as the pressure around her tightened. Agreeing meant surrendering Cinderax’s fire, the druid gift that had first lifted her into the sky. He’d trusted her as the First Keeper of the Cradle Flame, and now she stood on the edge of trading his favor for the storm.
Worry slipped free before Serenna could cage it, quiet but threaded with everything she wasn’t ready to relinquish. “Forever? But Cinderax—”
“One does not make a bargain with dragons!”
Skylash struck. Lightning speared down, a blade of wrath hurled straight into Serenna’s heart.
The bolt exploded through her. Sparks ripped along her spine, lashing her ribs, scalding limbs and scales in molten threads.
The charge should have flayed her from the sky—she’d seen it before, bodies ripped apart—but something ancient in her veins caught the blow, her shaman blood bracing when she should’ve been turned to ash.
Baring her teeth, Serenna surged into motion. She looped wide around the dragon, spooling the lightning in her palms.
“Rimeclaw made a bargain!” she shouted, hurling the crackling mass back at Skylash.
Somewhere inside her, a wildness broke loose—feral, fanged, unafraid—beastblood rising in a roar of vengeance she couldn’t have stopped even if she’d tried.
“I am not Rimeclaw,” Skylash seethed. “I am not fallen. I am not collared. And I will never be so broken as to seek penance through the likes of you.”
Fury writhed beneath Serenna’s skin. “You need us as much as we need you! You can try to scorch that truth out of the sky, but it won’t change what we both already know.”
Skylash flashed her fangs, violet light burning her pupils. Serenna halted midair, facing her squarely, refusing to yield.
Before the dragon could strike her again, she added, “I’ll see your mate freed and I’ll claim those Unbound eggs as yours. And if I have to accept your gift to do it…” Her nails dug crescent moons into her palms. “Then so be it.”
Serenna left the rest unsaid. Skylash’s pride burned too fiercely to bear reminders of the chains Serenna had shattered, and she wouldn’t risk fracturing this fragile moment by naming the debt aloud.
When war rose on the horizon, she could only hope the dragon remembered who had returned her to the sky.
So Serenna held, wings trembling, allowing the silence to stretch.
Without warning, Skylash swept in close. Sparks didn’t fly from her jaws this time, only a breath of magic. Power exhaled in a rolling surge that enveloped Serenna whole, unmaking and remaking all at once.
Her body seized, wings snapping wide in reflex. She hung suspended in the storm’s grip, a single thread snared between sky and earth. Heat followed, subtle at first, a tingling creep along her leathery membranes that whispered its way through her blood.
Then the true strike came as magic burned and consumed.
Color bled from her wings like ink drowned in rain, until they darkened into violet dusk. Cinderax’s ember—steady for so long beneath her sternum—flickered, guttered…and died, a final wisp of warmth dissipating like smoke.
The hollow it left behind seared with a new current, a charge lancing through marrow and sinew until Serenna’s limbs thrummed with storm. The claws on her wings stretched, scattering sparks like a spray of stars.
“Prove yourself worthy of my gift,” Skylash growled, sweeping a final arc before rising higher.
“Free the clutch. Seek the tempest’s eye—Zephyrfang’s breath, Stormstrike’s fury.
The legacy Veyrix and I forged before the chains.
Our scalebound hid one of the Aelfyn’s cursed relics there in the seas.
Reclaim it. Bring it to the Aetherveil.”
Sparks whirled in her pupils as her gaze fixed on Serenna. “Until this so-called ‘bargain’ is fulfilled…” Her voice thinned to a hiss. “I strike for no one.”
With a crack of pressure and thunder, Skylash vanished, streaking upward in a blur of light. A ribbon of lightning lingered where she’d been, pulsing with an afterglow.
Breath scraping through her lungs, Serenna hovered in the silence left behind. Her limbs shook, but she was alive.
Still flying.
She exhaled slowly and flexed her fingers. Erratic sparks leapt between them, wild and unfamiliar.
She’d come hoping to reason with Skylash, not to carry her storm. And she’d gained more than the dragon’s gift—the location where Veyrix lay chained. But first the winds called her to the restless blue of the Cerulean Sea, where the Maelstrom churned.
Serenna lifted her gaze as the bruised clouds above her began to tear apart, light fracturing across the Maw in tentative shards. The storm that had ruled these skies for a thousand years was breaking at last.
Just as she turned her sight to the wreckage in the Blackreach below, a voice slammed into her skull.
Vesryn’s.
“Serenna—stars, answer me. Fenn’s down. I—”
Pain followed. Not hers—theirs.
Agony cleaved through her chest, bursting behind her ribs, ringing in her skull.
Her wings faltered as both bonds flared at once, blazing through her mind. She’d been too consumed by Skylash to sense it until now, and the delayed blow nearly buckled her.
For a heartbeat, everything stilled except the roaring in her ears.
“He’s bleeding. I can’t stop it. Jassyn’s not answering. I can’t—”
Vesryn’s voice cracked, despair splintering the words.
Serenna went weightless.
Her body moved before thought returned. Lightning surged as she wheeled midair and dove—fast, reckless, the storm screaming around her.
She raced toward the bonds.
Toward the ones she couldn’t lose.