Chapter 36
Chapter Thirty-Six
Midnight Rain
MAGNOLIA
Four days.
Four days of isolation. Four days of not eating. Four days of wondering when Dahes was going to attack Hael using his dragon.
His dragon. I still couldn’t believe he had one.
I knew he kept hundreds of beasts lurking in the depths below the castle.
It shouldn’t have surprised me. It was a known fact that dragons were once ruled by Dahes and that he gifted them to Elion to end the War of Two Kings—same way Elion gave Dahes magic.
I just never put two and two together. I never imagined that it meant Dahes’ origins were drakin, that he was a rider himself, and still had a dragon.
I thought he just ruled over them, like Elion does now.
My mind raced, going through all six dragon breeds, wondering which one he was bonded to, which magic he possessed through the Vinculum bond.
It made him more terrifying. Even though I already knew he was immensely powerful, my mind kept screaming at me that this made him worse.
I didn’t mean to give him a way to defeat Hael. I didn’t mean to betray him.
It’s for the best, Magnolia.
Either way Dahes was going to punish someone I cared about. It’s better if it was Hael, better it wasn’t him, even if the thought was slowly killing me, instead of giving me comfort.
Masin was still safe somewhere. I kept telling myself that it was enough.
My door opened, and I looked up to see Dahes leaning against the frame. I’d been sitting on my armchair, with my knees curled into my side, nervously biting my nails until my fingers bled.
He eyed me, completely unmoving for a heartbeat, before he was in my space, leaning forward and encompassing my breath.
He tsked in time with the door slamming shut behind him. “I thought we went over this already,” his hand reached forward and he pried my finger from my mouth. “This is a bad habit.”
When my slavery first started, I couldn’t stop biting into my nails.
He hated anything I did that left me disfigured, but I couldn’t stop.
It was compulsive. It took Dahes removing the fingers of every prisoner below the castle before I suppressed the impulse.
I hadn’t even realized I started doing it again since I came back.
Breathe. One. Two. Three. Four. Exhale.
He smiled, barely, only the slightest upward tilt of his mouth, and that’s when I noticed he was wearing his mask.
The alabaster mold perfectly formed to his face, seamlessly blending with his features. The only real difference was the horns, but he had his white cloak drawn over his head, obscuring them from view.
And if his mask was on—I swallowed. It meant we were leaving.
I had to keep my breathing steady. Outwardly, I was a ghost, no better than the ones beneath his castle. I forgot what it felt like to be numb, that belonging to Dahes made me feel physically dead.
Inwardly, I was screaming. Dahes said Hael wouldn’t die, but I knew him well enough to know those words held little gravity.
Dahes needed to keep Hael alive in order to fight with him, but that didn’t mean he would be in one piece.
Hael was the strongest drakin in Viven, but Dahes didn’t even question if his own dragon could take him. His confidence absolutely terrified me.
I tried to avoid this, tried to make Hael seem untouchable, but instead I was the reason he was now walking into a trap. I was the reason Dahes was going to murder Aura—all because I told him he cares about nothing except duty and his dragon.
I was starting to not completely hate his dragon either. Those nights on the beach, watching her stretch out onto the sand before taking off… it made her seem less like a monster and more like a tamed pet.
But now she was going to die. The realization hit me like a brick. I was going to be forced to watch the man I was falling for get annihilated by the man I was enslaved by.
I followed Dahes through the castle like a puppet on strings. I was in my usual iridescent slip, no shoes, no undergarments—none of the necessities I was starting to get accustomed to in Viven. After the bath, the clothes I wore back here were gone.
My hair was down, pushed behind my shoulders exactly as Dahes liked it. With each step through the halls, I felt myself growing colder. My feet were frozen, the numbness slowly working its way up my legs toward my throat, until it cut off my breath, my voice… but not my thoughts.
Suns. I hated how I was struggling to make my mind numb. I couldn’t turn it off anymore, like I lit the flame of my emotions in Viven, and now it wouldn’t extinguish. The fire too wild, too far gone to suffocate.
A roar sounded overhead. Tilting my head toward the open sky in the rotunda, the fog swirled, dispersing as the flap of wings rang through my ears.
Another roar sounded, darkness still flooding my vision, but it didn’t look like the fog. I pressed my back against the stone wall before I saw it.
A black dragon—the Ater.
The dragon completely engulfed the entire rotunda. Its wings were extended, cramping the space, unable to stretch to its full height.
Its head whipped toward me as it roared again. I briefly saw Dahes smirking out of the corner of my eye, but I couldn’t stop staring at the dragon.
Its eyes were just as dark as its scales, everything blending together like midnight rain. Its talons were even darker, the purest shade of onyx I’d ever seen. It rapped one against the floor, the stone instantly cracking, creating a hole in the ground.
It blinked as smoke puffed out of its nose, and I was instantly engulfed in heat, my back sticky, pieces of my hair plastering across my neck.
“I thought…”
Dahes’ eyes pierced through me, cutting off my voice, but my thoughts wouldn’t stop.
I thought Aters were extinct.
“You learned a lot while you were away, little ghost,” Dahes crooned inside my mind, and I knew he was reading my thoughts.
Then another realization dawned…
The Ater’s power was psychic manipulation. Was his Vinculum how he was able to control me? How his deal was soul binding? How he could read my thoughts, get inside my head, hear everything?
“Yes.”
Shit. I had to turn it off.
Breathe. One. Two. Three. Four. Exhale.
Stop thinking, Magnolia. Just breathe.
Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think.
Dahes scaled the dragon, leaving me staring up at him with my back still pressed against the wall. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw two thatchers fly onto the stone archway. One was holding a female I’d never seen before. The other had its beady eyes set on me.
If I hadn’t been leaning against the stone, I would have fallen over. The Ater dragon raised its wings, its hind legs extending, and flew skyward. The fog swirled around me, temporarily blocking my view of the thatchers as I lost sight of the dragon.
Bones crunched and rot consumed me as one of them scooped down the moment Dahes was airborne.
I couldn’t even inhale before we were flying into the fog-lit night.
The twin suns were rising in the sky by the time we made it to the Sinking Islands of Perinth.
I glimpsed about twenty different islands before we landed, some half submerged in water, some completely under.
I assumed it was once the main island where the Perinthian King used to live because we were standing in the middle of a ruined castle.
The castle’s floor was consumed by ocean, but the top balconies were still unaffected after all these years.
We were alone again.
The thatchers were close. I could still hear the bone crunch of their wings, but Dahes’ dragon flew off the second we landed.
The girl the other thatcher flew was also gone.
I caught glimpses of her before she disappeared to another island.
Her ankles and wrists had layers of dried blood beneath thick manacles.
Whoever she was, she must have been Dahes’ prisoner for a long time.
She looked more skeletal than the thatchers, her clothes rotted with too many holes in the fabric to be considered functional.
Her eyes were red-rimmed and her lips were so far cracked, she was past the point of dehydration.
It was how all Dahes’ prisoners in his castle were—barely alive.
I wanted to fill the deafening silence. I wanted to ask Dahes what was about to happen and why he needed another prisoner, but I didn’t. I held my tongue, forcing myself to hold back my burning questions, and focused on my breathing while I watched the waves churn over the castle floor.
A single fish swam beneath us, caught between the massive ocean and the ruined stones. So close to freedom, but trapped by its own damnation. It felt symbolic.
“You’re fidgeting,” Dahes’ voice filled my head. I turned to find him already staring at me, assessing, watching.
I swallowed, trying to think over how I was expected to respond.
I couldn’t calm myself down. I felt myself spiraling on the inside, my lungs and heart in a silent battle for which organ could pound against my chest the hardest, and it was slowly creeping outside my body.
I couldn’t hold it in anymore. I couldn’t make myself numb, couldn’t hide the sheer terror that was bubbling inside me.
An image flicked between us, saving me from responding. A projection—that must have been why he brought the prisoner. Realization dawned on me—she was a Wielder.
“Always so bright,” he murmured, my mind still open to him. “Now watch.”