Chapter 15 Nasyra
FIFTEEN
NASYRA
Aweek.
Seven days of training with Zyphon. Of his patient instruction and my slowly crumbling resistance. Of his hands correcting my stance, his voice low in my ear, his shadows reaching for my fire in ways that make my skin prickle with awareness I’m running out of excuses to deny.
I’m getting better. The shadow-flame responds to intention now, not just emotion.
I can hold constructs for minutes instead of seconds, shape them into blades and shields that don’t explode when Rurik inevitably shows up to offer commentary.
Yesterday, I managed to maintain focus through an entire session without snapping at Zyphon once.
He’d noticed. Said “good” in that quiet way of his, and something warm had flickered in his expression before he looked away.
I’d looked away too. We do that a lot now—catching each other’s gaze and then retreating, neither willing to acknowledge what keeps pulling our attention back.
The memories don’t help.
They’ve been coming more frequently since that first fragment in my window—flashes of a life I don’t remember living.
Zyphon’s face, younger and unburdened, laughing at something I said.
His hand in mine as we walked through a garden I almost recognize.
The way he looked at me across a crowded room, as if I was the only person in it worth seeing.
Last night, I dreamed of dancing. His arms around me, my head against his chest. I woke with the phantom sensation of his warmth still pressed against me, and I’d lain in the dark for an hour, trying to convince myself it meant nothing.
It’s getting harder to hate him. Harder to hold onto the fury Lakhu planted when the man in front of me keeps failing to match the monster I was promised.
“You’re staring at your porridge like it personally offended you.”
Selene’s voice pulls me back to the present. I blink, realizing I’ve been sitting at the Fire-Bringer table for several minutes without actually eating anything.
“Sorry. Thinking.”
“Dangerous habit.” Aisling slides into the seat across from me, her own plate loaded with eggs and toast. “I find it’s better to repress everything until it comes out as inappropriate sarcasm.”
“Is that medical advice?”
“Personal experience. The medical advice is to talk about your feelings, but that sounds exhausting.”
Selene laughs, settling beside me with a cup of tea. These morning gatherings have become routine over the past week—the three of us claiming a corner of the great hall before the dragons descend and turn breakfast into a spectacle of competitive eating and loud opinions.
“So,” Selene says, her tone shifting to something deliberately casual. “How’s training going?”
“Fine.”
“Just fine?” Aisling raises an eyebrow. “No progress? No breakthroughs? No... moments?”
“What kind of moments?”
“The kind where your trainer is standing very close and your heart does something stupid.” Aisling’s expression is perfectly innocent. “Hypothetically.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course, you don’t.” Selene exchanges a look with Aisling that I’m clearly meant to see. “Just like I didn’t know what I was feeling when Drayke spent three weeks teaching me defensive stances and I couldn’t stop noticing how his hands felt on my shoulders.”
“That’s different.”
“Is it?”
No words come to me. Because the truth is, I have been noticing things.
The careful way Zyphon moves around me, always giving me space to retreat.
The patience in his voice when I lose control and he talks me back from the edge.
The way his shadows reach for my fire like they’re trying to protect it, even when I’m the one throwing flames at his head.
“The denial phase is adorable,” Aisling says to Selene. “Remember when I was in the denial phase?”
“You threatened to stab Rurik with a scalpel.”
“Multiple times. And yet here we are.” She gestures vaguely at herself. “Mated. Happy. Occasionally still wanting to stab him, but in an affectionate way.”
“There’s an affectionate way to want to stab someone?”
“You’d be surprised.”
Selene snorts into her tea. I find myself smiling despite my best efforts not to.
“For what it’s worth,” Selene says, her voice gentling, “no one’s expecting you to figure out your feelings on a timeline. Whatever happened between you and Zyphon before—whatever’s happening now—that’s yours to navigate however you need to.”
“We’re just here to make inappropriate comments and offer unsolicited opinions,” Aisling adds. “It’s a service we provide.”
“How generous.”
“We’re givers.”
The conversation shifts to lighter things—Rurik’s latest attempt to convince Aisling that setting things on fire is a valid form of stress relief, Drayke’s ongoing territorial behavior whenever another dragon looks at Selene too long.
I listen more than I contribute, but the warmth of it settles into my chest anyway.
This easy back-and-forth. This assumption that I belong at this table, in this conversation, in their lives.
A week ago, I would have been waiting for the trap. Now, I’m starting to believe there isn’t one.
“I should go,” I say eventually, rising from the table. “Training starts soon.”
“Have fun,” Aisling calls after me. “Try not to set anything important on fire.”
“And if you have any ‘moments,’” Selene adds, grinning, “we expect a full report.”
I’m still shaking my head as I cross the courtyard, their laughter following me into the morning light.
I’m thinking about Zyphon—about the dream, about the memories, about the confusing tangle of feelings I’m no longer sure how to name—when the sky tears open.
Shadow dragons pour through the rift.
Dozens of them, maybe more. Their darkness swallows the morning sun, turning dawn back into night. They move wrong—flickering between spaces, there and gone and there again, making them nearly impossible to track.
Lakhu’s forces. He found me.
Alarms shatter the quiet. Shouts echo from the walls. Dragons burst from windows and balconies, shifting mid-leap, their roars shaking the stone beneath my feet.
And I’m standing in the middle of the courtyard. Exposed. Vulnerable. With enemies between me and every possible shelter.
No choice, then.
The shadow-flame comes easier now—a week of training has given me something approaching control. Dark fire blooms in my palms, hungry and eager, responding to the threat with an intensity that should frighten me.
It doesn’t. Right now, I’m too busy being terrified of everything else.
The first shadow dragon dives for me.
I don’t think. Don’t plan. Just react—throwing shadow-flame upward in a desperate arc, not expecting it to do anything against a creature made of darkness.
The fire cuts through it like a blade through silk.
The dragon screams—a sound that reverberates in my bones, wrong and hollow.
My shadow-flame tears through its darkness, unraveling the magic that holds it together.
It dissolves mid-dive, shadow bleeding into smoke, and I’m left standing in the courtyard with my hands on fire and my heart pounding out of my chest.
I did that. My fire did that.
No time to process. Another dragon swoops low, its claws raking toward my head. I duck, roll, come up throwing fire. This time I’m more deliberate—targeting the construct’s core, the place where the shadow magic coalesces into something solid. The dragon shrieks and dissolves.
A third attacks from behind. I spin, shadow-flame flaring—
And stop.
Because between me and the attacker, something massive has materialized from the shadows themselves.
I’ve seen dragons before. Bronze and gold and red, scales catching sunlight, power written in every line of their bodies.
I’ve never seen anything like this.
Zyphon’s shifted form is darkness given shape.
Obsidian scales veined with glowing violet, pulsing with an inner light that seems to breathe.
Wings that spread wide and blot out the sky, absorbing light rather than reflecting it.
He’s smaller than Drayke’s bronze form, built for speed rather than brute force, but no less terrifying for it.
His eyes burn. Ancient. Knowing. Fixed on the shadow dragon with predatory focus.
He tears the attacker apart with claws that trail darkness. The shadow dragon doesn’t even have time to scream before it’s nothing but smoke and memory.
Those burning eyes turn to me.
Something in my chest clenches. Recognition, bone-deep and inexplicable. I’ve seen this form before. I know the way he holds himself, the pattern of the violet veins, the precise angle of his wings. The knowledge lives in my body even though my mind can’t place it.
He makes a sound—low, rumbling, questioning. Checking that I’m unharmed.
I nod. Don’t trust my voice.
He turns back to the battle. And somehow, impossibly, I find myself turning with him.
We fight.
Not together, exactly—I’m on the ground, he’s in the air, and we’re not coordinating in any conscious way. But our powers know each other. Recognize each other. Move in patterns that feel rehearsed even though we’ve never done this before.
My shadow-flame covers his flanks when he engages a cluster of enemies.
His darkness amplifies my strikes, making the fire burn hotter, cut deeper.
When a shadow dragon dives for my blind spot, his tail sweeps it aside before I even register the threat.
When one gets behind him, my blast of fire turns it to ash before it can sink its claws into his scales.
It’s instinctive. Wordless. Two halves of a broken whole, fighting as one.
A shadow dragon swoops low, its claws extended toward me. I duck, roll, come up with fire already forming in my hands—but Zyphon is there first, his massive jaws closing around the creature’s neck. He shakes once, hard, and the dragon dissolves into smoke.
Our eyes meet. For a heartbeat, everything else falls away—the chaos, the screaming, the thunder of wings and the roar of fire. There’s just him and me, and the strange, undeniable rightness of fighting at his side.
Then another wave of attackers descends, and the moment shatters.
I should be terrified. Should be questioning how I know exactly where he’s going to be, how my fire anticipates his movements, how we slot together with the ease of partners who’ve trained for years instead of days.
I don’t have time to question anything. The shadow dragons keep coming.
The courtyard becomes a war zone.
Drayke’s bronze form dominates the sky above the fortress, fire pouring from his jaws in streams of molten gold. He fights with controlled fury—every movement precise, every strike calculated. Shadow dragons break against him and burn.
Rurik is chaos incarnate, his red-gold scales flickering with constant flame. He laughs as he fights—actually laughs, the sound echoing across the battlefield. Shadow dragons flee from him as much as attack him, their darkness no match for fire that burns with the intensity of a sun.
Auren moves with cold efficiency, picking off enemies that get too close to the fortress walls. His fire is precise, surgical, nothing wasted. Every blast finds its target.
And the Fire-Bringers—
Selene fights from the eastern rampart, her flames forming barriers that shadow dragons can’t cross. She’s protecting a cluster of human servants who couldn’t reach shelter in time, her fire a shield between them and the darkness.
Aisling has taken a position near the armory, her fire supporting the dragon warriors who swoop past her position. Every time one engages an enemy, her flames join the assault, precise bursts that turn the tide of individual fights.
They’re not helpless. Not weapons being wielded. They’re warriors, fighting alongside dragons as equals.
Everything Lakhu told me was a lie.