Chapter 14
RAVENA
This time, I wasn’t trapped in a cell, watching my mother be shackled in iron chains and dragged away.
No, this time, I stood in the heart of a battlefield.
The air was thick with the scent of blood and burning, the clash of steel against steel ringing in my ears.
Every supernatural creature—witches, vampires, shifters and more —was locked in brutal combat.
Their fury shook the ground beneath me. The sky was a warzone on its own, dragons soaring through the storm clouds, their wings slicing through the darkness as they breathed fire upon their enemies.
Magic crackled through the air, violent bursts of light splitting the blackened sky as the witches unleashed their anger. The storm raged in answer, thunder roaring like a beast in pain while the rain lashed down, turning the battlefield into a sea of mud and carnage.
This was the Ashen war that nearly tore the realms apart, the very war that had begun with King Draeven's cruelty towards witches. He had set this world on fire with his hatred and need to be the most powerful in all the realms.
My stomach twisted the moment my eyes landed on him.
He stood untouched amid the blood-soaked chaos. Cloaked in burgundy robes, more suited for a royal court than a battlefield. He looked every bit the monster whispered about in nightmares.
My nightmares.
His face was a grotesque canvas of old scars, and his eyes… God, his eyes were blood-red, pulsing with veins that spiderwebbed across his pale face, glowing like embers ready to consume everything in his path.
He was a monster.
He didn’t fight, no, he didn’t need to with his loyal guards surrounding him, who cut down anyone that so much as breathed in his direction; he just watched the slaughter unfold with a twisted kind of calm.
A coward dressed like a king, letting others do his killing—but somehow, that made him worse.
More dangerous, because monsters like him didn’t need to try.
Just one look or a whisper of his name terrified you.
One of his guards pulled someone forward, I couldn’t tell what species and threw them at the king.
He looked down at the man screaming and thrashing with a bored expression before lunging and sank his fangs into the man’s throat with a sickening rip, blood splattering across his lips and face, then just dropped the lifeless body at his feet.
I wanted to rip him apart. Make him pay for everything he had done—for the lives he had stolen, the families he had broken, the suffering he had carved into history.
But I couldn’t because I wasn’t here.
I was just a bystander, a ghost lost in the past, watching a nightmare that had already played out. Vespera stood atop a jagged hill, her voice weaving dark magic into the howling wing.
Dark magic was forbidden and dangerous, but clearly Vespera found a way to possess it.
A stone was around her neck, pulsing with an eerie, otherworldly glow, its sickly red light casting shadows over her face. The moment her incantation reached its peak, the sky trembled as the stone glowed brighter.
Dragons let out agonising roars as they began plummeting from the stormy skies, their mighty wings faltering mid-flight.
One by one, they crashed to the earth, their dying cries ripping through the battlefield.
My breath caught as I watched them collapse, one by one, swallowed by death.
Their scales—golds, sapphires, emeralds—lost their shimmer, muted under death's merciless hand.
She was killing them.
Nobody knew who was responsible for the slaughter of dragons or how they had been brought down, but now the truth was seared in my mind.
It was her.
I hated that I was related to her, but my mother and I were nothing like her.
A cold ache settled in my chest as I thought about Xarothar.
He was more than my familiar—more than a companion.
Dragons did not simply belong to witches; they chose their bond, and that choice was sacred.
It was a rare connection forged in magic and trust, one that could amplify a witch’s power.
In the wrong hands, it could be catastrophic.
Vespera had always wanted one, but instead she was given Nyx.
Now she was making them pay for it. I swallowed hard, forcing back the sting of tears as I watched the dragons fall, their final cries carving into my soul. The smell of death clung to me.
The edges of my vision blurred, shadows creeping in as a pull of reality began to drag me away. But even as the world around me dimmed, the echoes of their agony remained—something that I would never be able to forget.
Just before the darkness swallowed me whole, a raw, guttural scream tore through the air. It sounded a lot like the king, and it wasn’t the sound of power or command.
It was the sound of something breaking from pain.