Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
AUREN
The flight back to the fortress is silent.
Tamsin rides on my back again, but everything about her grip has changed.
Where she held on with fierce determination during the assault, now her hands rest limply against my scales.
Where her fire burned just beneath the surface, ready to ignite, now it’s banked so low, I can barely feel it.
She’s folded in on herself, processing something too vast for words.
She killed her sister.
I understand the necessity. Understand that Morrigan would have destroyed everything if left alive. But understanding doesn’t erase the grief I feel radiating from the woman on my back—a grief so profound, it seems to darken the air around us.
Behind us, Morrigan’s fortress collapses into rubble. The wards tied to her life magic fail one by one, the wrong-angled architecture losing its coherence until nothing remains but broken stone and bad memories. By the time we’re over the borderlands, smoke is all that marks where it stood.
Good riddance.
Drayke flies at the head of the formation, Selene’s gold fire visible even from this distance as she rides on his bronze back.
Rurik flanks him to the right, Aisling secured between his massive wings, her red hair streaming in the wind.
Zyphon brings up the rear, Nasyra’s shadow-touched form barely visible against his obsidian scales.
We lost no one. The assault was clean, surgical, exactly as I planned. Morrigan is dead—truly dead, no resurrection possible. Her ritual chamber is dust. Her stolen treasures are buried beneath rubble. Every dark ambition she harbored for decades has been reduced to nothing.
It should feel like victory.
It doesn’t.
Tamsin doesn’t speak for the entire journey.
Doesn’t move except to adjust her grip when turbulence threatens her balance.
I can feel her thinking—can almost hear the spiral of thoughts that must be consuming her.
The sister she loved becoming the monster she killed.
The family that no longer exists. The burden of being the last Valdorian royal, carrying a bloodline stained by betrayal.
I want to comfort her. Want to say something that will ease the pain I can feel bleeding from her silence. But I’ve never been good with words—with emotion—with any of the things that matter in moments like this.
So I fly steady. Keep my wings level against the crosswinds. Carry her home as carefully as I can.
It’s not enough. But it’s what I have to offer.
The Brotherhood fortress rises from the mountainside as dusk paints the sky in shades of amber and rose.
The landing platform is crowded with dragons who stayed behind—those too young or too old for the assault, those assigned to guard the fortress in our absence.
They roar a greeting as we descend, the sound echoing off stone walls that have stood for centuries.
Victory.
Tamsin doesn’t react to the celebration.
When I land and shift to human form, she slides from my back with mechanical precision, her feet finding the stone without seeming to register the impact.
Her amber eyes are distant. Hollow. The woman who burned through Morrigan’s defenses with unprecedented power now looks like she might shatter at a touch.
Something twists in my chest at the sight. Something I don’t want to examine too closely.
Selene reaches her first. Wraps her in a hug that Tamsin accepts without returning, her arms hanging limp at her sides.
Aisling checks her for injuries with practiced efficiency, her healer’s hands moving over Tamsin’s body with clinical precision, pronouncing her physically unharmed in a tone that suggests she knows the wounds are elsewhere.
Nasyra hangs back, understanding in her mismatched eyes—she knows what it is to lose family to violence.
Knows that some griefs don’t want company.
“She should rest.” Aisling’s voice is quiet but firm, her Irish accent thickening with concern. “The power expenditure alone would have killed most Fire-Bringers. She needs food, fluids, sleep—”
“I’m fine.” Tamsin’s words come out flat. Empty. The regal control she usually wears is cracked, letting something rawer bleed through. “I just need—” She stops. Doesn’t finish the sentence. Maybe doesn’t know how.
“You need sleep,” Selene says gently, stroking Tamsin’s hair with maternal tenderness. “Food. Time to process.”
“I need to be alone.” Tamsin pulls away from the group, her movements too controlled. Too careful. The kind of control that precedes breaking. “Just—give me tonight. Please.”
She’s gone before anyone can argue, disappearing into the fortress with steps that don’t quite qualify as running but want to be.
The Fire-Bringer women exchange worried looks.
Drayke places a hand on my shoulder—the solid grip of brotherhood, of shared concern, of centuries knowing when I’m about to do something inadvisable.
“She killed her sister,” I say quietly. “There’s no comfort for that.”
“No.” Drayke’s voice is heavy. “There isn’t.”
Rurik shifts beside us, his usual chaotic energy subdued for once. “Should someone follow her? Make sure she doesn’t—”
“She asked for space.” The words taste wrong in my mouth. Every instinct demands I follow her, comfort her, do something other than stand on this platform watching her walk away. “We should respect that.”
Zyphon materializes from the shadows at the edge of the platform, his curse-cracked scales still smoking faintly from the battle.
His violet-shadowed gaze meets mine briefly, and I see understanding there.
We’ve both lost sisters. We both know there are griefs that can’t be shared, that require solitude to process.
I force myself to turn away. To walk toward my quarters through corridors that feel colder than usual. To pretend I’m not counting every step she’s putting between us.
To pretend I don’t feel her absence like a wound.
My quarters are in order.
Every item in its designated place. Every surface clean.
Every book shelved according to a system only I fully understand.
The space should feel like a sanctuary—the precision a comfort after the chaos of battle.
Instead, it feels like what it is: a fortress within a fortress, walls I’ve built to keep the world at a distance.
Cold, technically. But there’s supposed to be beauty in the precision.
Artistry in the organization. I’ve spent centuries perfecting this space, arranging it so I know where everything is, know when anything moves.
Control made manifest in stone and furniture and the exact angle of every book spine.
Tonight, it just feels empty.
I strip off my battle-worn clothes. Wash the grime and sweat from my skin in water that feels warm to most but merely ambient to me.
Pull on clean trousers and leave my chest bare—the ice in my blood keeps me comfortable in temperatures that would freeze most beings.
For longer than most humans have been alive, this routine has been enough. Discipline. Order. Control.
Tonight, I can’t stop thinking about her.
The way she looked standing in her sister’s ashes. The tears streaming down her face. The fire in her that guttered and dimmed but never quite went out. The way she collapsed into my arms and let me hold her—this woman who doesn’t let anyone see her break.
She let me see.
I try to read. The words swim before my vision, refusing to resolve into meaning.
A treatise on ward construction that I’ve been meaning to finish for months—tonight, the pages might as well be blank.
I try to work—there’s correspondence that needs attention, reports from the assault to compile—but my mind keeps returning to the same images.
Tamsin burning through defenses that should have been impenetrable.
Tamsin facing her sister with grief and determination carved into every line of her body.
Tamsin walking through flames untouched, radiant, more beautiful than anything I’ve ever seen.
I set down the quill I’ve been holding without writing a single word. My hands are shaking slightly. My hands never shake.
This witch princess who should be everything I hate, who represents the bloodline that murdered my sister—she’s become something I can’t define.
Can’t categorize. Can’t file away in the carefully organized system I’ve built to make sense of the world.
She’s slipped past every defense I have, and I don’t know when it happened.
Don’t know how to stop it. Don’t know if I want to.
That last thought terrifies me more than any enemy I’ve faced.
I want to protect her. Want to hold her.
Want to take her grief and carry it myself if that would ease her burden.
These feelings—whatever they are—have become so tangled and vast that I can’t separate them enough to analyze.
They’re just there, demanding attention I’ve spent my entire existence learning not to give.
She matters. That’s the simplest way to put it. She matters in ways I’m not prepared to examine. In ways that make my carefully constructed walls feel fragile.
A knock at my door.
I know who it is before I open it. Can feel her fire signature through the wood—muted, guttering, but unmistakably hers. My hand pauses on the handle. Centuries of control screaming that this is dangerous, that letting her in means letting her past walls I’ve built for reasons. Good reasons.
I open the door anyway.
She stands in the corridor, wearing a simple shift that must belong to one of the Fire-Bringer women.
The thin fabric clings to her curves, doing nothing to hide the body beneath.
Her dark hair is loose around her shoulders, still damp from bathing, and the copper highlights catch the torchlight from the sconces.
Her feet are bare on the cold stone. And her eyes—her amber eyes that burn white when she wields her power—are raw with a pain that makes my chest ache.
“I don’t want to be alone tonight.” Her voice is rough. Stripped of the regal control that usually shields her. “I know I said I needed space, but—”
“You don’t have to be.”
I step aside. She moves past me into my quarters—this space I’ve kept private for centuries, this sanctuary of ice and precision that has never contained another person’s warmth.
Her scent drifts past as she enters: something floral from her bath, underlaid with smoke and magic and something that’s purely her.
The door closes behind her, and the sound is louder than it should be.