Chapter 45 Dayn
DAYN
My claws screech against the enchanted gold plates of Anees’s armor. He’s slower, less agile, but the plates absorb the kinetic force of my attack, deflecting my fury. He is a coward hiding in a gilded shell.
“Is this all you have, traitor?” Anees hisses, his own fire, an imitation of my own, washing over my obsidian scales. “You’ve grown soft, nesting with these vermin.”
I ignore the taunt, my focus absolute on finding that moment of weakness. That gap in the plates at his throat, the joints of his wings.
He twists, and I dive under him, my claws gouging deep furrows in the softer plating of his underbelly. He roars in frustration more than pain and brings his tail around in a sweeping arc. I meet it with my own, the impact a jarring shockwave that I feel in my bones.
He is my brother. The thought is a splinter of ice in the furnace of my rage.
The same blood flows through his veins. But as we circle each other against a backdrop of burning towers and screaming darkbloods, a cold certainty settles in my soul.
With Arrynth, my every move was calculated to subdue, to disable, to preserve.
My instincts fought against a killing blow.
With Anees, there is no such resistance.
I look at the smug cruelty in his amber eyes and feel nothing pull me back.
I don’t know when his bitterness took root—only that it must have grown slowly, a poison seeping in over years.
I never remembered him like this before I left.
He resented me for leaving him and our people after our mother died.
He resented me even more for the stone sky that was sealed over his head while mine remained open and blue.
None of that matters now.
He killed our father.
The betrayal is absolute. Irrevocable. There is no path back from it, no forgiveness waiting on the other side. For that, he cannot be allowed to live.
I see the gap in the armor at the base of his neck, where the gilded plates meet the thick muscle of his throat.
A single, well-aimed strike. A twist of my claws.
It would be over. The thought is not born of rage, but of a chilling, surgical clarity.
I can kill him. I will kill him. I never thought I would stand ready to commit fratricide.
But Anees has dragged me past the last boundary I had left.
Then a sound cuts through the din—completely wrong for a scene of battle.
A low, keening howl rises from the very heart of Darkbirch’s academy, a vibration that seems to resonate beyond flesh or blood. Beyond anything mortal.
It sounds like… a door opening, to a place no living thing should ever see.
Anees falters, his head cocked. Even he, in his arrogance, feels it. From the central spire of the academy, a wave of pure, silent darkness erupts. A tide of liquid black that spills outward, washing over the grounds. It moves too fast, pouring across the courtyards and over the battlements.
I watch as it touches the darkbloods below. Every single one of them—soldiers, medics—stiffens. Their heads snap back, and for a single, horrifying second, their eyes turn to solid, glistening black.
“P-Parlor tricks.” Anees sends, though his eyes shine with doubt and unease. “This still changes nothing.”
He comes at me again, a renewed fury in his charge, trying to gain an urgent advantage. I meet him, my teeth sinking into the armored plating of his shoulder. The metal groans but holds.
But something has changed. A network of incandescent light flares to life across the entire coven, tracing the ancient spiritual grid that protects it. It shimmers for a second, a web of silver—then the darkness touches it. The light curdles, turns a diseased, necrotic black, and surges upward.
A dome of pure, silent darkness snaps into place over the entire academy, an impenetrable bubble of void.
To Anees’s horror, and my own, dozens of dragons are caught beneath it.
Their screams are silent. One moment they are magnificent beasts of fire and scale; the next, they are.
.. unmade. The black energy of the dome touches them, and they wither.
Scales flake away like ancient parchment.
Flesh turns to gray, brittle dust. Their roars die in their throats as their bodies become weathered, rotten husks, collapsing inward on themselves before dissolving into nothing.
Screams of terror erupt from the dragons still outside the dome.
They see their brethren erased from existence in a heartbeat.
And I see it. I see the terrible truth of what the darkbloods—or at least their elders—have been chasing. This is more than a weapon. It is erasure. A way to remove an army without a battle.
A door that never should have been opened.
“Anees, pull back!” I roar, the words tearing from my mind. “For the sake of all the gods, pull back! This is not a power you, we, can fight! Fall back NOW!”
He looks at the empty spaces where his soldiers once were, at the silent, black dome, and his displeasure curdles into pure, vain rage.
“Never.” He turns on me, his tail whipping around in a massive arc that catches me across the wing, forcing me backward through the air. “And you will die with them, traitor!”
Then he ignores me, turning his full, terrible might on the dome. A sun ignites in his throat, and he unleashes a continuous, blinding torrent of golden fire.
The blaze slams into the black surface, a silent, cataclysmic explosion of energy that illuminates the entire battlefield. The fire does not penetrate. It washes over the dome, turning the impenetrable night into a roaring inferno.
But I’m out of time for his foolishness.
I need to find… Esme.
As my eyes scan the smoke-choked ground, I see her suddenly, near the base of the black dome. She… levitates. Effortlessly. Her slender form untouched by the heat that still rages around her.
But her eyes are not the storm-gray, intelligent pools I know. They are pits of absolute blackness. The power of an Ide. At least one, by the looks of it.
The fools, they actually did this.
Anees roars beside me, now joined by several other equally foolish dragons, blasting their fire against the blackness.
My focus narrows, all the chaos of this new reality collapsing into a single, burning point: her.
It’s time to do what I do best.
I fold my wings and dive.
The air grows cold, thin, charged with an energy that scrapes against my scales. Anees roars my name, a curse of betrayal or warning, I can’t even tell anymore—he is now a ghost, an echo from a world that no longer matters. I plummet toward the dome, toward her.
The darkness rises to meet me, full of a silent, screaming hunger, an ancient will that seeks to unmake everything it touches.
I feel it clawing at my mind, whispering of entropy and dust. But as it washes over me, a strange resonance hums through my blood—the blood I took from her, the blood I gave to her.
It is an anchor. A password. The darkness recognizes a piece of its own vessel within me, and while the touch of it is a violation that makes my soul cringe, it does not dissolve me like it should.
I land with a ground-shaking impact just inside the perimeter of the dome.
The world beneath this black sky is silent, the sounds of battle replaced by an intense, wrong, pressurized stillness.
Darkbloods stand like statues, their faces turned up toward the dark sky, their eyes empty black pools, each of them channeling this… power. The power of a Merlin Ide.
My gaze locks onto her. My witch. My woman.
She floats at the center of it all, motionless, yet hair drifting as though underwater.
Beautiful. As dark as I’ve ever seen her.
The blackness in her eyes is deep, layered, endless.
It feels as if something vast now looks out through her, aware of my presence.
I feel a focus settle on me, heavy and curious, like weight pressing down on my spine.
I move.
I lunge for her, for the still point at the heart of the silence. The closer I get, the heavier the air becomes, crushing, compressing. The space around her tightens, warning me back. As my talon reaches out, the darkness flares, coiling defensively around her like a living thing.
It knows I don’t belong.
But my blood answers.
The blood we shared. That pulse thrums louder, insistently. Ownership. Claim. I push the thought outward, raw and instinctive.
Mine.
The resistance falters—just a fraction. Just long enough.
My talons close around her waist.
The shock of contact rattles through me. She is ice-cold, unnaturally so, like a body pulled from a tomb. I drag her against my chest, curling myself around her on instinct, shielding her with my bulk.
Then I leap.
One massive beat of my wings drives us straight up. I slam into the dome before any of the darkbloods can react. It hits like a wall—solid, dead, crushing despair—before it tears open around me.
I burst through into the burning night.
And I don’t look back. There’s no point. The dome is growing, spreading, expanding. Dragons are already falling from the sky. Whatever Esme opened can’t be closed now.
The bottle has been uncorked, and I can’t stop what’s coming. Not alone.
But I still have one thing. We still have one thing.
Esme lies limp in my claws, small and breakable against the endless dark. I draw her closer to the heat of my scales and fly—away from the fire, away from the screaming earth, into the cold, thin silence of the stars.