Chapter 1 #2
The room grows colder despite Finlay’s inherent heat.
Shadows lengthen across the floor as the sun sinks lower, painting everything in shades of amber and rust. “A mage surrenders their life and power to create the binding.” His voice drops to barely above a whisper, rough with the weight of knowledge he wishes he didn’t carry.
“Only a true mate can break the curse forever.”
The words hit me like a physical blow. Only a true mate. Solaris... he’s still trapped. Still waiting. But Raven is his mate. She’ll free him. The pattern forms in my mind with brutal clarity. Mates. It always comes back to mates.
He huffs out a sad laugh that sounds more like a broken exhale and sits up. The weight of ancient sorrow hangs in his expression, carving lines into his ageless face. “It is like the curse on all phoenixes.”
He stands slowly, movements deliberate as he crosses to the window.
Each step is measured, controlled, as if he doesn’t trust himself to move faster.
He leans against the frame, looking out over the campus grounds below.
The dying sunlight catches his profile in sharp relief, all harsh angles and barely contained fire.
His reflection in the glass wavers, distorted, showing glimpses of feathers and flame beneath the human veneer.
“Oh?.” The word falls soft between us, carried on an exhale that sounds like defeat.
He turns, and the raw pain in his gaze stops my breath.
It’s the look of someone who’s lived too long, seen too much, lost everything that mattered repeatedly.
“We’re cursed with eternal life. To be reborn repeatedly, never knowing a true death.
” His focus drops to the faded rug beneath his feet, as if the pattern there holds answers he’s searched lifetimes to find.
The burgundy and gold threads are worn thin in places, a testament to decades of footsteps pacing back and forth across this same spot.
Empathy twists in my gut, sharp and unwelcome. I know what it’s like to be trapped. My prison was an egg; his is his own immortal body. Different cages. Same suffocation.
“What will break your curse?” I’ve heard the rumors. They range from true love’s first kiss to the claiming of a mate, whispered in shadowed corners and late-night conversations. Tales spun by those who’ve never felt the weight of an unbreakable curse.
When he looks up, his eyes burn with molten fire once more. The heat intensifies, making the air shimmer between us. Sweat beads along my spine despite my dragonic nature. The glass in the window behind him starts to fog up from the temperature change.
“Claiming our mate in the lake of eternity.” His breath comes rough, ragged, each word forced past something lodged in his throat. “And the water burns.”
Part of my daughter’s memories flashes through my mind: a lake of fire, flames dancing across liquid surface. The vision she shared with me confused and frightened by its intensity. She’d felt the pull of water burning, hadn’t understood why.
Because it’s meant for her.
The realization solidifies in my bones. Finlay is Raven’s mate. His shift knows it even if his conscious mind hasn’t connected the pieces yet. The tether she feels, the pull toward the dormitories, the way his control fractures when she’s near.
My heart hammers against my ribs. The protective father in me wants to roar, to demand answers, to know every detail of how he plans to protect her, provide for her, cherish her the way she deserves. The war drake in me wants to test him, to see if he’s truly worthy of my daughter.
But the strategic part of my mind, the part that survived a thousand years of isolation by learning patience urges caution.
I glance down at my desk, at the scattered notes and diagrams, at the desperate scrawl of a father trying to protect his daughter from threats he’s only beginning to understand. A drop of ink has spread across one page, obscuring words I can no longer read. Somehow, it feels symbolic.
If I tell him now, before he’s realized it himself, will it taint the bond? Will he feel forced, obligated? Will he resent the knowledge, or worse, reject it outright because an outsider named it first?
And what of Solaris? When Raven frees him, when she claims both mates, will Finlay accept sharing her? She already has three mates in her nest. Phoenix culture, from what little I know, can be territorial. Possessive. The thought makes my jaw clench, teeth grinding together.
But Raven needs all of them. Needs the immortality Finlay offers and the dragonic strength Solaris will provide.
Together, they’ll all keep her safe when I’m gone.
Together, they’ll weather whatever darkness the mages throw at our kind.
The words hover on my tongue. She’s yours.
My daughter is your mate. My mouth opens.
The confession sits there, heavy and waiting.
I swallow them back. The taste is bitter, like ashes and regret, but I force it down.
Let fate do its work. Let the bond pull them together naturally.
I’ll watch. I’ll wait. And if Finlay proves himself worthy, if he shows even a fraction of the devotion a mate should have, then I’ll welcome him into our family.
If he doesn’t... well. I’ve survived worse than dealing with an unworthy phoenix.
The temperature in the room has stabilized, no longer fluctuating with Finlay’s emotions. The shadows have stopped dancing. Everything feels still, suspended, like the moment before a blade falls.
I arch a brow, forcing my expression into careful neutrality, watching him with the careful assessment of a father who’s already made his judgments but won’t show his hand.
“Will the water only burn with a mate?” The question tastes bitter on my tongue, testing him without revealing what I know.
“Or can you set water aflame on a whim? And is it only the lake you speak of, or will any water work?”
The corner of his eye twitched. A muscle jumped in his jaw, working beneath skin that’s gone pale with strain. He looks like a man standing on the edge of a precipice, staring down at a fall he both fears and craves.
“The water protects the female if she’s not of my species.
” Each word comes clipped, controlled, bitten off as if he’s physically restraining himself from saying more.
“It can be any water. The important part is that it shields the female the first time we join.” His fingers curl into fists at his sides, tendons standing out in sharp relief. “After that, burning is a nonissue.”
He moves to the door with sharp, jerky movements that lack his usual grace.
His control is fracturing, splintering at the edges.
I can see it in the way his shoulders bunch, in the rigid line of his spine, in the heat that’s making the air around him waver like a mirage.
“I have work to do.” The words came out strangled.
“If you have other questions, we can address them later.”
The door closes behind him with barely a whisper of sound, though I sense the restraint it takes him not to slam it.
The force of his departure creates a vacuum that makes the papers on my desk flutter and settle.
The temperature in the room drops by several degrees almost immediately, leaving me shivering despite my internal fire.
I sit in the sudden silence, surrounded by shadows that have grown long and deep. The storm outside has moved closer; I can hear the distant rumble of thunder, feel the charge in the air that promises rain. The scent of ozone drifts through the gap beneath the door.
A flash of light catches my peripheral vision, bright enough to make me squint. I turn toward the window as warmth brushes against my senses, familiar and welcome after Finlay’s oppressive heat.
Mina’s familiar, Iris, hovers outside a shimmering presence wreathed in soft golden light, with parchment clutched in her talons.
Her ethereal form pulses gently, like a heartbeat made visible.
The sight of her sends a wave of warmth through my chest, easing some of the tension Finlay’s departure left behind.
Even though her familiar, I can feel the echo of my mate’s presence, that golden thread that connects us across whatever distance separates us.
I cross the room, my footsteps muffled by the worn rug, and open the window.
Cool evening air rushes in, carrying the scent of approaching rain and the sweet perfume of night-blooming flowers from the gardens below.
The contrast to the stuffy, overheated office makes me gulp it down like a drowning man finding air.
Iris flies past me with barely a sound, just the whisper of wings that aren’t quite corporeal, and lands on my desk with the delicacy of falling snow.
Her ethereal form cast dancing shadows across my scattered papers, illuminating the cramped handwriting and desperate theories I’ve compiled over two decades.
I reach out, letting my fingers hover near her luminous form, and feel the phantom warmth of Mina’s touch through the familiar bond.
Over the last twenty-one years, my mate has sent Iris across our continent and the northern lands, gathering information for me.
Piece by precious piece. Mina never questions why I need to know these things, never demands explanations for my obsessive hunt for answers.
She understands the driving need to protect our daughter, to uncover the truth of what was done to me, to us.
She just sends her familiar again and again, pulling threads from distant places and weaving them into a tapestry I’m only beginning to understand.
My throat tightens with emotion I don’t have time to process. Gratitude. Love. The bone-deep knowledge that I couldn’t have survived these twenty-one years of freedom without her. It seems my daughter isn’t the only chimera on record.