Chapter 38
SERENNA
The Blackreach churned with unrest as Serenna flew over the lake, racing toward Fenn and Vesryn.
Battles still raged in splintered pockets, haphazard clashes between the king’s forces and their own. Burning ships groaned beneath rising smoke, the sky thundering with the collisions of Essence and earth.
But the chaos blurred as Vesryn’s panic battered the bond.
Serenna’s hand flew to the Starshard at her throat, fingers trembling as she gripped the crystal hard enough to grind its facets into her palm.
She didn’t have time to cross the mountain ranges to their location—not with Vesryn’s pleading urgency.
Flinging her awareness into the gem, Essence surged to her call. She seized the portaling talent fused within the crystal’s core and reached toward Vesryn’s distant beacon. A rift tore open in the air, a void shearing across her vision.
Tucking her wings tight, Serenna plunged through.
She dropped from the sky, wings shuddering as wind tore past the shattered cliffs of the Maw.
Fire and lightning had carved their vengeance into the peaks, blackened veins still smoking where power had scorched stone.
A gust yanked her sideways, and she battled the current, breath catching the instant she glimpsed the wreckage below.
On a jagged ledge, Vesryn knelt over Fenn. Half of the prince’s silvery hair had been burned clean from his scalp. His armor clung in charred strips, melted leather curling like seared bark.
Naru circled them in a restless, limping arc, one claw hovering off the ground. Even from above, Serenna heard his breath heave in labored bursts.
Nearby, a razorwing carcass lay sprawled in a bloody heap, iridescent wings shredded to ribbons where the dracovae must’ve torn it apart.
The moment Serenna’s boots struck stone, the world cinched to a single, unbearable point. Pain slammed through her—Vesryn’s, Fenn’s—agony crashing across the bonds in a jagged rush.
Her knees nearly buckled, but she shoved the onslaught back, bracing a barricade inside her mind. Only then could she see straight.
Vesryn’s left arm hung useless at his side, shoulder clearly wrenched out of joint. One eye was swelling shut beneath a crust of soot. His hands shook where they hovered above Fenn’s chest, mending light spilling in frantic waves.
Again and again he slammed Essence into him—too much, too wild. Each surge burst apart, disintegrating into useless fragments before it ever sank deep enough to mend.
“You stars-cursed, reckless bastard,” Vesryn hissed at Fenn, voice breaking on every word, as if she weren’t there at all. “That lightning was meant for me.”
His shoulders trembled as he tried again. And again. Each attempt more desperate than the last.
“Why would you do that?” he choked, fury and despair scorching through the bond. “I don’t even like you, remember?” The words fractured into a growl. “And I won’t know how to hate you if you die on me.”
Serenna nearly slipped on Fenn’s blood as she rushed forward, dropping to her knees beside them. Drawing on what remained in her Well, she ignited Essence, sending out threads to assess him.
Fenn’s wings lay splayed, membranes ragged where lightning had punched through. His legs twisted at angles that made bile rise in her throat, bone jutting white through the split seams of his armor.
Her stomach lurched as blood pooled outward from his skull in a creeping sweep. For one devastating heartbeat the world tilted. Terror drove a spearpoint straight through her ribs, whispering that she’d come too late.
Serenna swallowed hard and forced her breaths to steady. She anchored her focus into place as she began threading together healing lattices.
Fenn’s chest rose once with a rattling inhale. Then another. Each breath a battle.
But he was breathing.
Relief swept through her, only to shatter the moment Vesryn’s panic slammed down the bond.
Ignoring her magic unspooling around them, he drove a hand against Fenn’s chest. Essence lashed outward in a chaotic burst—wild, unshaped mending light scattering in broken arcs.
“Vesryn.” Serenna caught his wrist. “Stop.”
He didn’t seem to hear her. “I can’t save him.” The words tore out of him, raw as their open wounds. “I can’t—”
His shoulders shook with each heaving breath, mending unmoored in his palms.
“Vesryn.”
Serenna hauled his arm back, hard enough that he had no choice but to look at her. Still slitted with dragonsight, his open eye burned feral with fear.
Her breath hitched when a deluge of his guilt and helplessness punched through her defenses.
For a heartbeat she was back in the wraith fortress with Fenn slipping away beneath her hands.
The instinct to recoil, to break under the memory of nearly losing him once already, hit so hard her vision quivered.
Fingers trembling, Serenna forced the memory down with a slow draw of air, shoving the past back into its grave.
She tightened her grip on Vesryn’s arm and pressed her other hand firmly to Fenn’s chest. Letting purpose eclipse fear, she rethreaded her healing weaves.
“You don’t have to heal him alone,” Serenna said softly, steadying her voice as much for herself as for him. “But you’re overwhelming his wounds. We have to guide the magic, not drown him in it.”
Vesryn’s gaze dropped to Fenn’s body. Something fractured behind his eye—not only guilt, but the terrible certainty that Fenn was already gone. And that the fault lay with him.
Releasing the prince, Serenna reached through her Starshard. She drew from the gem’s reserves, her Well nearly wrung dry from calling sunfire. Essence unfurled from her fingertips. Glimmering like crimson starlight, she swept the magic across Fenn’s chest, sinking it deeper.
“I know it looks bad,” she murmured, steering the healing current outward to map the damage. “His wings aren’t broken, but his legs definitely are. Most of this blood is from the blow to his head. It looks worse than it is.”
Serenna’s awareness drifted instinctively toward Vesryn—to the burned edge of his scalp, the shoulder hanging out of joint, the eye swollen nearly shut. A protective urge flared to send a wave of healing through him too.
Vesryn shook his head the moment her gaze found his.
“Worry about him first.” He jerked his chin toward Fenn. “I’m not the one bleeding out.”
Serenna nodded, redirecting her focus to the thread of Fenn’s life still pulsing bright. “He has a few bruised ribs,” she said, finishing her assessment. “But nothing’s collapsing. He’s still fighting.”
Some of the wildness drained from Vesryn’s frantic exhales. “You’re sure?”
“Yes,” she assured him fiercely, thinking to herself that Fenn had been dragged out of worse.
Uncertainty still rippled from Vesryn in quiet waves. His fingers hovered near one of Fenn’s ruined wings before curling back on themselves, as if he feared his touch might harm more than it healed.
“You can help me,” Serenna said softly, weaving the mending lattice into a cohesive pattern. “I’ll braid our magic together. Let me guide it. You can follow. Like at the Bramblemaw den when you steadied sunfire for me.”
For a moment, Vesryn didn’t move, doubt creeping between them like a toxin. “I can’t be the reason he dies,” he whispered. “Because if I am…” His voice splintered as he dropped his gaze back to Fenn. “You’d never forgive me. Would you?”
“No,” Serenna said.
He flinched and she gentled her voice. “Not because I’d ever blame you,” she added. “But because you’d never stop blaming yourself.”
She reached for his hand and squeezed. “So let’s not give either of us the chance.”
Vesryn exhaled, jaw clenching before he gave a tight nod. He drew away, fingers shaking as he pulled his Starshard from beneath his armor, Fenn’s blood trickling down his palm. A stream of Essence bloomed from the crystal’s core, spiraling outward in wavering arcs.
Serenna gathered his summoned current of magic and threaded it into her own. His power met her in a resisting jolt, still tangled with guilt, strung tight with the conviction that he’d only make things worse.
She didn’t force it, only channeled her own power into Fenn first, shaping a path the prince could follow. With a gentle tug, she coaxed Vesryn’s magic closer.
Slowly—painfully slowly—tension unwound as he surrendered to her guidance. His Essence flexed around hers until she could steer it fully.
Serenna twisted their magic together—one strand hers, one strand his—weaving them into a single stream. Light from both Starshards spilled into the mending lattices anchored across Fenn’s wounds.
The rhythm of the merge felt…peculiar in its ease. As if the gems anticipated her intent, slipping Essence together before she steered it.
Her gaze flicked to Vesryn, but his attention stayed riveted on the rise and fall of Fenn’s chest.
Perhaps not her will alone, then. He must’ve been directing more of the magic than she realized.
The lattice suddenly buckled. Serenna stiffened as light flared beneath Fenn’s armor in a blinding rush. Essence surged as a third thread snapped into the flow with enough force to wrench the current taut.
Serenna’s breath locked. “You gave him a Starshard?”
“I…” Vesryn swayed, his dislocated shoulder grinding in a pulse of pain she felt lancing through her own.
His fingers tightened on his shard. “It’s possible I didn’t give all the gems we found to Kaedryn.
” His unswollen eye flicked toward the light streaming through Fenn’s torn leathers before he mumbled, “Figured he could use one.”
Serenna pressed her lips together, hearing everything he didn’t admit—that maybe with access to all of the talents, Fenn might stand a better chance of keeping her alive.
Shaking her head, she forced her attention back to mending. Essence curved and coiled, light sweeping between all three Starshards in a seamless circuit.