Chapter 34
The Vault
AURELIUS
Isoared back to the castle and carefully dismounted Zephyros, even though doing anything one-handed was a humiliating inconvenience.
My healing abilities offered some relief, but the damage was severe; I could stabilize the bones with magic well enough to keep the wrist from collapsing, yet I couldn’t bear weight on it without sending pain spearing up my arm.
I needed Gleeda—needed her fast—because whatever Titus had done was the kind of injury that could self-heal wrong if not treated immediately.
Titus was such a pompous ass, and the arrogant display of dominance burned behind my eyes like an afterimage I couldn’t blink away.
He had barely acknowledged Delilah’s existence when she first arrived, as if she were an inconvenience he could ignore, until the moment I showed interest in her and suddenly he was all possessive devotion and theatrical love, as if claiming her were the same thing as caring for her.
He only wanted to use her. I knew him too well to be fooled; Titus was not built to love anyone but himself, and it would always puzzle me why the Guardians entrusted someone like him with so much power when he wielded it like a weapon first and a responsibility second.
The castle was quiet and relatively empty with Titus, Delilah, Calpurnia, and Cercies away on their little outing, leaving me alone in these cavernous halls with nothing but my thoughts and the steady throb of my wrist to keep me company.
It should have been me. I should have been the one taking Delilah to see the wonders of my kingdom on dragon-back, the one teaching her the skies, the currents, and the way the world looks when you stop walking through it and start flying above it; I should have been the one courting her, even if I could never officially make her mine.
I had wanted her first, and I knew she would have run away with me if he hadn’t stolen her from me and tempted her with his title.
I should have killed him that night at the SkyGuard feast. I’d had the perfect opportunity, the cleanest moment, until Delilah warned him, and ever since then I’d been turning that betrayal over in my head like a blade I couldn’t stop testing against my thumb.
Why was her loyalty to him so strong? It had to be his power, his title, his throne— because there was no other explanation that didn’t make me feel like an idiot for believing she could ever choose something gentler when the world rewarded brutality.
My boots echoed through the dim corridors as shadows from the hearths crawled along the stone walls, and the silence pressed in until it felt suffocating, until I could practically hear my own thoughts ricocheting off the vaulted ceilings.
An emptiness overtook me—an old, familiar ache—because my so-called brothers had mocked me for being “sensitive” as if emotion were a flaw instead of a blade.
Fools. They had never understood that feeling deeply didn’t make me weak; it made me dangerous, because there are certain emotions that sharpen into something lethal if you carry them long enough.
I turned down the eastern corridor toward Gleeda’s quarters when I nearly collided with an unexpected figure.
“Ah, Dragon Master. Good evening. Do you know when Lord Titus will return?”
Folliade.
The mention of Titus’s name felt like salt ground into an open wound, as if I were his keeper, as if my purpose were to orbit him and answer for him, but diplomacy was a habit carved into my bones.
I straightened my posture, placed my hands behind my back to hide the tremor in my injured wrist, and painted a calm expression across my face.
“Apologies, Lord Folliade. I have no knowledge of his return. I would imagine he will join you for breakfast in the main hall.”
I resumed walking—because I didn’t owe him anything more— until he called after me again.
“Perhaps you could help me?”
I suppressed my annoyance and turned back, forcing the scowl off my face before it could settle in.
“Of course. How can I assist?”
“My guards and I have searched your archives for new citizen records from the year my mother went missing. We found nothing. Titus mentioned a restricted vault. I do not require access to sensitive material—but perhaps you could check whether those records were misplaced?”
My brows furrowed before I could stop them. “You’re asking me to access the vault?”
“I do not need to enter. Simply check. Surely the Kingdom of Flame would not hide something as mundane as new citizen records.”
Something in me tightened at the word vault, because Titus had barred him from it, and yet here was a loophole—thin enough to slide through, clean enough to pretend it wasn’t defiance—because sending me instead of letting Folliade in wasn’t quite treason. It was… flexible.
It was the kind of rule-bending Titus practiced whenever it benefited him, and for the first time in a long while I felt an urge to return the favor, to do something small, sharp, and private simply because he’d earned my contempt.
If I was being honest with myself, the last thread of my loyalty to Titus had snapped the moment my wrist did.
“Very well,” I said evenly. “You will remain outside the wards.”
“Marvelous,” Folliade replied, pleased with himself, and I hated that he sounded like a male who expected the world to obey. I despised High Lords.
The vault lay in the lowest level of the castle.
We descended into a damp corridor lined with warded doors and Everburn torches whose flames didn’t flicker no matter how the air shifted.
The farther down we went, the more the air changed; it carried a faint metallic bite and a steady hum of power, subtle at first, then louder, until the magic felt like a vibration in my teeth.
As we neared the vault, the hum intensified into a buzzing thrum, and a translucent wall of blue magic sealed the arched entrance like a living barrier.
“This is it,” I said.
Folliade waited beyond the shimmer as I stepped forward, letting the wards slide through me, scanning bone, blood, and breath as if the magic were reading every part of my body to confirm my identity.
Inside stood a single iron safe, plain, heavy, and ancient, as if it had been built to outlast time.
I pricked my finger and let the blood drip onto the lock, and it spun open with a quiet, obedient click.
I sifted through documents—border patrol schedules, dragon inventories, weapon counts—each page more classified than the last, each one proof of a kingdom that survived by locking its secrets away.
Nothing about new citizens.
“What exactly am I looking for?” I asked, irritation thinning my patience.
“New citizen records. Year 5,673 After Divide.” “I see nothing.”
“Wait—what’s that?” He asked.
He pointed to a notch at the base of the safe, and I crouched, vision narrowing.
A false bottom.
Guardians, what did I get myself into? I highly doubted that Titus and Cercies knew of the false bottom because no one ever came down here. Whatever was hidden, I knew it wasn’t good.
I slid my blade into the seam and lifted carefully, and beneath it lay a single piece of parchment, and a book of forbidden spells. The parchment was folded as if whoever hid it had taken their time.
I unfolded it.
CLASSIFIED BLOOD REPORT
Name: Aurelius, son of Aiddos Markers: High Lord
Blood Magic Level: 998 / 1000 Lineage: Ancient
Designation: Highest recorded blood level in the Kingdom of Flame
The numbers didn’t register at first. I read them once, then again, as if my eyes were the problem—nine hundred ninety-eight out of a thousand, magical markers of a High Lord, indication of Ancient lineage, decree: Aurelius, son of Aiddos, most powerful Fae recorded to date in the entire Kingdom of Flame.
For a moment, the vault felt too small to hold air.
My grip tightened until the paper creased, and my pulse climbed so high I could hear it in my ears, but it wasn’t panic that flooded me—it was the sick, dizzying sensation of the world shifting under my feet, because I had just realized I had been living inside someone else’s story.
I was younger than Titus by two years, which meant, I was the most powerful Fae ever recorded.
All my life I had stood beside Titus and told myself the order of things was natural.
He was stronger. He was chosen. He was meant for the throne, and I was meant to support it.
I had swallowed every joke about being sensitive, every glance that said soft and second, every condescending smile when I showed restraint instead of aggression, and I had convinced myself that was virtue instead of survival.
Even when my blood burned with the feeling that my magic was wrongfully measured, even when something in me whispered that I was more than what they allowed me to be, I had kept it contained—polite, loyal and useful.
And then Delilah arrived, and I made the mistake of thinking she might see me.
I had wanted to show her the sky the way I saw it, to give her something beautiful, wild, and honest, and I told myself I could want her without needing to own her because I was not Titus; I did not crave the throne, I did not crave worship, I did not crave to be obeyed.
I craved to be chosen. I craved to be enough.
And she looked at me with wonder when the bond surged through Zephyros, when she felt that circuit of breath, magic, and longing, and for a heartbeat I believed the Guardians had finally placed something in my hands that Titus could not take.
Then he did anyway.
He marked her. He claimed her. He broke my wrist like it was nothing—like I was nothing—and he did it with the confidence of a male who had never once questioned whether the world belonged to him.
Delilah said no to me, and I told myself it had to be his title, his power, his throne, because there was no other explanation that didn’t make me a fool; there was no other explanation that didn’t make her devotion feel like an insult, a betrayal I couldn’t understand.
But now the paper was in my hand, and the truth was printed in cold ink: Titus was not the strongest. Titus was not the most powerful High Lord in Flame history.
Titus was simply the one everyone bowed to—because his father had decided it, because the kingdom had accepted it, because I had allowed it.
The realization sank in like poison, slow and absolute, spreading through every memory until it altered the shape of my entire life.
Titus was never meant to be High Lord, I was.
If I was the most powerful and had been all along, then every time I stepped back, every time I softened myself, every time I swallowed my anger and called it loyalty, it hadn’t been noble—it had been submission.
A strange calm settled over me, so complete it felt as though something inside me had finally stopped fighting. The loyal brother, the patient one, the “sensitive” Dragon Master who told himself he was above power did not shatter. He simply went quiet, like a blade drawn cleanly across the throat.
If Delilah had chosen Titus for power, then she had chosen wrong, because the power she thought she was clinging to was a crown built on stolen truth.
And if Titus had been allowed to rule while my blood carried Ancient lineage and near-perfect magic, then the kingdom had crowned the wrong male—and I had spent my entire existence helping hold that crown in place.
I had thought Delilah was different.
I had thought she saw past titles. Past crowns. But then she chose him.
Titus.
The throne.
And now I understood. She did not want freedom. She wanted power.
She was just like the rest of them.
The Council and the Fire Fae who had bowed to Titus my entire life.
If power was what she worshiped… Then power was what I would become.
And when she finally looked at me again—she would learn that I was never the gentle one.
My gaze lifted from the report to Folliade, and I felt my expression shift before I even saw it mirrored in his eyes.
This wasn’t jealousy anymore, and it wasn’t grief either.
It was something quieter and far more final.
Years of restraint condensed into a single choice.
I could keep begging to be seen, or I could make the world look.
“They hid this,” I said, my voice low and steady, and when the words left my mouth I understood something with terrifying certainty: whatever part of me still wanted to be good, still wanted to be loved, still wanted to be the brother who held the pillars up with Titus and Cercies… was already burning away.
Because the truth didn’t make me feel chosen.
It made me feel owed.
They hadn’t made me second. They had buried me.
And I had thanked them for the dirt.
“Well?” Folliade pressed, and his voice sounded distant, like it was coming from down a long tunnel. “What is it?”
My heartbeat roared in my ears. “It’s a blood magic report.”
He scoffed, impatient. “Why would that be hidden?”
And that was when something inside me—something I’d spent a lifetime restraining—finally cracked open.
All my life I had been second: second to Titus, second to his power, second to his title, second to the story the kingdom told itself about who deserved the throne.
I had been mocked, dismissed, and minimized until I learned to wear obedience like armor, and now I held proof that I had never been lesser—only buried, only sealed away beneath his crown like a dirty secret no one wanted exposed.
I lifted my eyes slowly, and the paper trembled in my good hand, not from fear but from the force of what was trying to rise through me.
“Because,” I growled, my voice no longer entirely my own, “it’s mine.”
And in that moment, Aurelius—the sensitive Dragon Master, the loyal brother, the male who still believed in honor and loyalty—died. I would make them all pay.
What rose in his place was not jealousy, and it was not longing, and it was not wounded pride.
It was wrath.
I WAS WRATH!