Chapter One Hundred Three
The Moon Rises
A dragon’s eyes opened, and his brother looked out.
The voice threaded through the dark like wire.
“Wake up, Tory.”
Viktor’s eyes opened to the red throat of the brazier and the mutter of rain working the far side of the mountains—the storm he’d pulled down now pacing at the ridge.
He didn’t move.
His hand lay over the scar that crossed his ribs. The heat there answered him as if it were alive.
“I’m awake,” he said.
A cold presence settled at his shoulder—felt not seen. The Midnight always arrived like shade when a candle guttered. Tonight he felt nearer. Human-near.
“It’s time,” he said. “You asked to see.”
“To see…”
The apothecary.
The handfast.
The potion.
Viktor pushed up, blanket slipping to his waist.
Outside, the camp turned in its sleep: a horse stamped, a strap creaked, some watchman whispered a prayer he did not finish.
On the table the vial waited: glass the color of stormlight, wax dark as blood. Viktor reached for it with steady fingers—but its weight stirred violence in his hand.
“You can still choose not to,” The Midnight said, something rising in his breath.
“No,” Viktor answered, throat raw.
“The Elders sent you to wake me before battle. I don’t have a choice anymore.”
He broke the seal.
The scent climbed—a bitter bloom, like crushed laurel and lightning. He tipped it, let the draught burn a road down his chest, flare in the furnace of his scars, then settle like a brand against his heart.
The world narrowed to pulse and heat.
“Hold to me, brother,” The Midnight murmured. “We go together. Take my hand.”
Viktor closed his eyes and found it—the cool pressure at his palm, the meeting of two grips that had been searching seventeen years in the dark.
The potion struck.
Light splintered under his skull.
The brazier’s glow blew wide into a ring, and the ring became an eye, and the eye opened.
Cloth and pole and cord fell away.
The tent skin thinned to water, and he was falling through it—through smoke, through halls of memory, through a corridor where light pierced the dark.
“Don’t fight it,” The Midnight said, nearer now. “Breathe, Tory.”
He did.
The river of light forked.
On one branch—two newborn cries braided together, the ache-bright certainty of same. Adamar’s breath mirroring his own, two small fists grasping at the same sun. A woman’s exhausted laugh. A father’s trembling hands. Twins wrapped in one woolen blanket.
He could feel her warmth, her sigh, her hair.
Momma.
She kissed one brow, then the other.
“Adamar,” she breathed. “For my father, and for the blood that carried me here.”
Her gaze held on the second child.
“And you… Viktor. Because that is what you are.”
The warmth of her kiss still lingered when the light tore sideways, ripping him from the cradle of that moment. The memory dragged him down a darker path—into night, into blood, into loss.
Earth under bare feet. His mother staggering, linen dark at her thighs, hair unbound and matted. She held a third bundle close—smaller, too-still—while the night-forest opened its ribs for her.
Aetherheart.
The tree that called to Viktor in his dreams.
Heartwood shot through veins of light. Its roots curled from the earth like the fingers of an elven god.
“Azrikel,” his mother sobbed, shaping a name around a breath that might have been the child’s last. “Live, my son—please. Take him. Take—”
Elders stepped from shadow, bark-worn hands cupping the failing infant. Blood dripped from her calves to the roots. The tree drank. The air tightened—then sang, a high, glass note that made the night hold still.
Light threaded the baby’s lips.
A flicker. A breath.
He lived.
Viktor’s fingers crushed around the hand in his own. The Midnight’s grip trembled back, a shudder running through him. His breath rushed over Viktor.
“My name.”
The vision cracked open again.
Cassandra’s chamber—white curtains, figs gone soft, a silver pitcher at her elbow.
Zeporah poured the tea.
Cassandra drank.
Her hand trembled once.
Not age. Not chance.
Poison.
Zeporah bowed her head.
The ring clicked the saucer. Breath hitched. Cassandra reached for the armrest—missed. Zeporah caught her, the gentleness of a sister.
Whispered, “Stay.”
Kissed her burning brow.
Stone, salt, smoke.
A sharkskin ledger.
A bronze bowl black with years.
“The twins,” the Tyrian murmured.
“Both,” Zeporah said, letting her blood fall.
“One for the pit. The other—I’ll set his feet on Oustinon’s stones. A cleaner kill.”
“And the price?”
“My firstborn.”
The bowl glowed.
The pact sealed.
Flashes: Oustinon’s cliff, a sling in a scout’s hand—a knife laid for his sleep.
A ledger’s tally:
One for the pit.
One for the blade.
Darkness surged—dragons wheeling, wings like ravens stabbing light.
A thread pulled taut, identical to his own.
Adamar.
Viktor’s throat shattered the breath that came.
The Midnight’s voice broke.
“She bartered him. She gave him to the Host.”
The vision burned in him—
Westport.
The sea.
The tomb.
He pulled against his own Endowment, but the wind tore through him, dragged him deeper.
Into the garden.
Into the tomb.
Adamar was not there.
Iron rings sunk into rock where a body should have been.
A dragon’s eye lit a cell window.
A second breath in the dark that beat in time with his own.
Light flickered.
Black hair.
Blue eyes.
Darkness.
Twin.
The Midnight’s grip eased, not leaving. His voice—so close now, it brushed his cheek.
“You saw him.”
“I saw him.”
Viktor’s throat scraped raw.
“And I won’t lose him again.”
He crossed to the brazier. The copper caught his reflection in red. His face, his hair—too long, too much like the life he’d been living, far from the life that had been taken.
“Make me his mirror. If Zeporah can’t tell which twin she faces, I’m close enough to take her throat.”
He took the field-knife from its sheath and wrapped a leather tie around his hair at the nape. The old habit of braiding hesitated in his fingers—then he drew the blade.
Steel whispered.
Hair fell.
He bound a second tie higher, closer.
Cut again.
Shorter now.
Harsher.
The heat from the brazier kissed the back of his neck. He lifted his head to the copper and a different man stared back—angles sharper. A soldier’s crown instead of a prince’s mane.
“I saw him, Azrikel.”
His voice sent shivers over canvas dark.
“I’ll climb their shoulders. Rip through their sight. Shatter what binds him.”
The Midnight—Azrikel—stood with him in the hush.
“Together, brother.”
“Into Oustinon.”
“Come, Tory.”
Azrikel’s shadow made flesh.
“The moon rises.”