Chapter 3
THREE
NASYRA
THREE WEEKS EARLIER
Iwake screaming.
Cold stone beneath my back. Darkness pressing against my eyes. My lungs burn as I gasp for air that tastes of ash and old blood, and my hands—my hands are clawing at my chest, searching for a wound that isn’t there.
There should be a wound. I remember the blade. Remember the blood. Remember—
“Easy.” A voice, smooth and calm, cuts through my panic. “You’re safe now.”
Light flares. Soft, flickering, casting long shadows across walls of black stone. A face swims into view above me—beautiful in a cold way, with hair dark as ink and eyes the color of bruised twilight.
“Who—“ My voice comes out as a rasp, my throat raw as if I’ve been screaming for hours. Days. Centuries. “Where am I?”
“Somewhere safe.” The stranger kneels beside me, his movements deliberate and graceful. He’s dressed in dark silks, silver jewelry glinting at his throat and wrists. “My name is Lakhu. I’m the one who brought you back.”
Brought me back. The words don’t make sense. I push myself upright, my arms trembling with the effort, and look down at my body. Pale skin. Black hair tangled around my shoulders. A simple white shift that I don’t recognize.
No wound. No blood. No evidence of what I know happened to me.
“I died.” The words come out flat. Statement, not question. “I remember dying.”
“You did.” Lakhu’s expression is sympathetic. Careful. “Three hundred years ago. I’m sorry—I know this must be overwhelming.”
Three centuries.
The number doesn’t compute. Can’t compute. I open my mouth to argue, to demand explanations, but all that comes out is a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
Lakhu waits. Patient. Understanding. When I finally find words, he answers every question with the same measured calm. Explains resurrection magic. Explains the artifact that made it possible. Explains that the world has changed beyond recognition while I slept in death’s embrace.
He doesn’t rush. Doesn’t push. Just sits beside me on that cold stone floor and helps me understand.
I should be grateful. I am grateful.
But something in his patience feels practiced. Calculated. Like a hunter waiting for prey to lower its guard.
One week later
The rectangular thing squeals at me.
I stumble backward, shadow-flame erupting from my palms before I can stop it. The dark fire scorches the wall behind me, leaving a blackened streak across stone that’s already seen better days.
“It’s called a phone.” One of Lakhu’s servants—a human woman with tired eyes and a permanent flinch—hurries forward to retrieve the device I’d knocked from the table. “It makes noise when someone wants to communicate. It’s not... it’s not attacking you.”
I stare at the thing in her hands. Small. Flat. Glowing with unnatural light. It makes another sound—a cheerful chime that makes my teeth ache—and the woman taps its surface with her finger. The noise stops.
“How does it work?” I hate how uncertain my voice sounds. Hate how everything in this new world makes me feel like a child stumbling through darkness. “What powers it?”
“Electricity.” She says the word slowly, as if I might not understand. She’s right—I don’t. “It’s like... lightning, captured and controlled. It powers most things now.”
Lightning. Captured. Controlled. Put into boxes that scream at you.
I sink onto the edge of the bed—another strange contraption, too soft, with metal coils inside that squeak when I move—and try to absorb yet another impossibility in a world that seems built entirely of them.
Yesterday, they showed me a metal carriage that moved without horses. Roared down a paved road fast enough to blur the trees on either side. I’d gripped the seat until my knuckles went white, certain we were about to die, while Lakhu watched me with something that might have been amusement.
The day before, I’d nearly set fire to my quarters when I touched a switch on the wall and light exploded from the ceiling. No candles. No torches. Just... light, appearing from nothing, bright enough to hurt my eyes.
Everything is wrong. The clothes are wrong—tight in strange places, made of materials I can’t identify.
The food is wrong—too sweet, too fake, wrapped in crinkly substances that make my skin crawl.
The air itself is wrong—thick with smells I can’t name, tainted by the residue of a thousand machines I don’t understand.
And my magic is wrong.
I stare at my hands, at the shadow-flame that flickers across my knuckles without my permission. Before—before I died—my fire burned gold. Warm and bright and alive. Now it burns black, cold despite its heat, responding to emotions I can’t control.
The woman is watching me. I feel her gaze, wary and pitying in equal measure.
“Leave me.” The words come out harsher than I intend. “Please.”
She goes without argument. The door clicks shut behind her—another wrong sound, too mechanical, too precise—and I’m left alone with my fractured memories and my twisted magic and the growing certainty that I don’t belong in this world.
That maybe I was never meant to come back to it.
Ten days after resurrection
“Tell me about Zyphon.”
Lakhu’s voice is gentle, but something in my chest tightens at the name. We’re sitting in his study—a room full of books and artifacts and the faint smell of old magic—and he’s poured me tea that I haven’t touched.
“I don’t...” I shake my head, trying to grasp memories that slip away like water through fingers. “I remember him. But it’s hazy. Fragments.”
“What kind of fragments?”
I close my eyes. Try to focus. “His face. Dark hair. The way he looked at me like...” The image wavers, refusing to solidify. “Like I mattered. Like I was something precious.”
“You were precious to him.” Lakhu’s tone is carefully neutral. “Or so he claimed.”
My eyes snap open. “Claimed?”
“I’m sorry.” He sets down his own cup, the ceramic clicking against the saucer with precise control. “I shouldn’t have said anything. You’re still recovering, and the memories will come back on their own—“
“Tell me.” I lean forward, my shadow-flame flickering in response to my agitation. “Whatever you know, tell me.”
Lakhu studies me with those bruised-twilight eyes, and I see calculation behind the sympathy. See him weighing options, choosing words.
“Zyphon Koros,” he says finally. “One of the Brotherhood dragons. He pursued you for months before your death. Claimed to love you.” A slight emphasis on claimed. “Your brother tried to protect you from him.”
“Balroth.” My brother’s name surfaces instantly, wrapped in warmth and grief. “I remember Balroth.”
“He was the only one who saw through Zyphon’s obsession. Tried to warn you. Tried to keep you safe.” Lakhu’s voice drops, soft with false reluctance. “And Zyphon killed him for it.”
The words land like blows. I feel the blood drain from my face, feel my heart stutter and stop and start again.
“No.” The denial comes automatically. “No, that’s not—I would remember—“
“Are you sure?”
I open my mouth to argue. To insist that Zyphon—that the fragments I remember—that there’s no way—
And then the memory surfaces.
Clear as glass. Sharp as a blade. Balroth’s face, twisted in terror. His body crumpling to the ground. And Zyphon—Zyphon with blood on his hands and madness in his gaze, tearing my brother apart while I screamed and screamed and couldn’t make him stop.
I double over, gasping. The teacup shatters on the floor—I must have knocked it from the table—and shadow-flame erupts across my skin, responding to grief so fresh, it feels like dying all over again.
“I’m sorry.” Lakhu is beside me now, his hand on my shoulder, his voice dripping with sympathy. “I shouldn’t have pushed. It was cruel of me.”
I can’t respond. Can’t do anything but shake as the memory plays behind my eyelids, over and over. My brother’s death. Zyphon’s hands. The sound of my own screaming.
“He’s still alive, you know.” Lakhu’s voice cuts through the grief, sharp and deliberate. “Zyphon. He’s still out there. Living his life while your brother rots in an unmarked grave.”
Something in me goes cold. Still. The grief doesn’t disappear, but it reshapes itself into something harder. Something with edges.
Hatred.
“Where?” My voice doesn’t sound like my own. “Where is he?”
Lakhu smiles. Just a flicker, quickly hidden. But I see it.
I see it, and I file it away, and I don’t let myself think about what it means.