Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
NASYRA
The dream starts the way dreams do—without warning, without logic, slipping from warmth and safety into something darker.
One moment, I’m in Zyphon’s arms, his shadows wrapped around me, his heartbeat steady beneath my cheek. The next, I’m standing in a forest I haven’t seen in three centuries.
But this isn’t like the fragments that have been surfacing—hazy images, disconnected feelings, impressions that dissolve when I try to examine them. This is clear. Vivid. Real in a way that makes my skin prickle with dread.
I know this place.
The trees are ancient, their canopy so thick that only slivers of moonlight reach the forest floor. The air smells of pine and something else—something metallic and wrong. And walking beside me, his hand gentle on my elbow, is Balroth.
My brother.
He looks younger than I remember—or younger than I’ve been remembering, at least. His smile is warm, reassuring.
The same smile he gave me when I was frightened as a child, when storms shook the manor and I crawled into his bed for comfort.
The same smile that made me feel safe in a world that didn’t always welcome Fire-Bringers.
“Just a little further,” he says. “I found something you need to see.”
I trust him. Of course, I trust him. He’s my brother, my blood, the only family I have left since our parents died. We grew up together. Fought together. Protected each other from a world that didn’t always want Fire-Bringers to thrive.
Why wouldn’t I follow him into the dark?
The clearing opens before us, and the wrongness hits me like a physical blow.
There’s an altar at the center—flat stone carved with channels that gleam in the moonlight. Figures wait in the shadows, their forms indistinct, their presence radiating a cold that has nothing to do with temperature.
Shadow Clan. I recognize their magic even before I see their faces. The same darkness that Lakhu wielded, the same cold hunger that drove him to resurrect me.
I try to pull back. Try to retreat into the forest, to run, to get away from this place that feels like death given form.
Balroth’s grip tightens on my arm.
“Balroth?” My voice comes out small. Confused. “What is this? What’s happening?”
He doesn’t answer. Just keeps walking, dragging me toward the altar, his grip iron where it was gentle moments ago. And his smile—
His smile hasn’t changed. That’s the worst part. He’s still smiling at me with the same warmth, the same reassurance, even as he delivers me to my death.
“No.” I dig my heels into the earth, fire flaring at my fingertips. “Balroth, stop. What are you doing?”
“What I should have done years ago.” His voice is calm. Almost kind. “What I’ve been planning since I realized you would always be more than me.”
The Shadow Clan members close in around us. Hands grab my arms, my shoulders, forcing me toward the altar. My fire flares wildly, but something is suppressing it—wards, maybe, or magic I don’t understand. It sputters and dies even as I scream.
They strap me down. Cold stone against my back. Leather bindings cutting into my wrists, my ankles. I’m crying, tears streaming down my face, my voice breaking on my brother’s name.
“Why?” The word comes out broken. “Balroth, why?”
He leans over me, and for one terrible moment, I think he’s going to apologize. Going to say it’s a mistake, that he didn’t mean it, that someone is forcing him to do this.
But he doesn’t.
“You were always the special one.” His voice is soft, almost tender.
“The powerful one. The one everyone loved, everyone praised, everyone expected great things from. And me?” A bitter laugh.
“I was nothing. Just Nasyra’s brother. Just the one without power, without magic, without anything that made me worth noticing. ”
“That’s not—I never—“
“You didn’t have to.” He straightens, and the warmth bleeds out of his expression, leaving something cold and satisfied behind.
“Everyone else did it for you. But then I found people who valued what I could offer them. People who saw my potential. And all I had to do...” He gestures at the altar, at my bound body, at the Shadow Clan waiting with their blades. “Was give them you.”
The blade catches moonlight as it descends.
I scream when it bites into my arm—not just from pain, though there’s plenty of that. From the wrongness of it. The way my power responds, rushing toward the wound, being pulled from my veins in rivers of light and heat.
They’re draining me. Not just my blood—my fire. My magic. Everything that makes me what I am, flowing out of me and into the channels carved in the altar, feeding something ancient and hungry.
The pain goes beyond physical. It’s like having my soul ripped out piece by piece, each fragment torn away, leaving emptiness behind. I feel myself becoming less with every heartbeat, my power bleeding into the stone beneath me.
Balroth watches. He doesn’t look away, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t show any sign of the brother who used to hold me when I cried. He watches with the same cold satisfaction as the Shadow Clan members, and something inside me breaks in a way that has nothing to do with the blade.
This is worse than dying. This is knowing that the person I loved most in the world orchestrated my death. That every smile, every kind word, every moment of apparent support was a lie covering jealousy so deep it became hatred.
“Zyphon.” I gasp his name between screams, reaching for the bond I can feel forming between us—incomplete, unclaimed, but real. “Zyphon, please—“
I feel him respond. Feel him fighting, somewhere in the distance, tearing through Shadow Clan forces to reach me. He’s coming. He’s coming, and maybe—
But I can feel myself fading. The life bleeding out of me with every pulse of power they drain. The world going gray at the edges, sound becoming muffled, the pain becoming distant.
He won’t make it in time.
The realization hits with a grief so profound it eclipses the physical agony.
I’m going to die here, on this altar, betrayed by my own blood.
And Zyphon is going to arrive too late, and he’s going to blame himself, and I can already feel the darkness waiting to claim him—the curse they’ve prepared, the punishment for loving me.
“I’m sorry.” The words slip out, barely audible, meant for a man who can’t hear me. “I’m sorry I couldn’t wait for you.”
And then—
Silence.
Darkness.
Nothing.
But the dream doesn’t end there.
I’m floating above my own body now, watching from somewhere outside myself. I see the moment Zyphon bursts into the clearing—not the dragon I know now, aged by centuries of grief and curse, but younger. Fiercer. His face twisted with a desperation that makes my heart clench even in death.
He sees me on the altar. Sees the blood in the channels, the life drained from my body, the stillness where movement should be.
The sound he makes isn’t human. It’s not dragon either—something beyond both, a grief so vast it tears the air apart. The Shadow Clan members scatter, but Balroth doesn’t move fast enough.
Zyphon kills him with his bare hands.
I watch it happen—my brother’s death, the death I was raised to believe was murder. But it’s not murder. It’s execution. Justice. The righteous fury of a man who just lost everything, visited upon the one who stole it from him.
Balroth doesn’t beg. Doesn’t apologize. Just dies with the same cold smile on his face, satisfied even in death that he’d finally won something. Finally mattered.
And then Zyphon gathers my body from the altar. Holds me against his chest, his arms wrapped around me, his face buried in my hair. The curse is already taking root—I can see it, shadows crawling up his arms, sinking into his skin, the price the Shadow Clan has extracted for his love.
He screams. Screams until his voice gives out. Screams my name, over and over, as if he can bring me back through sheer force of will.
He can’t.
And I realize, watching from wherever dead souls go, that I’m about to leave him alone with grief and a curse that will consume him slowly, painfully, for the crime of loving me.
I wake screaming.
Shadow-flame erupts from my skin, uncontrolled, wild with the grief and rage pouring through me. The room fills with dark fire, consuming the air, licking at the walls. Somewhere in the chaos, I hear Zyphon calling my name.
He reaches for me—I feel his hands on my shoulders, trying to anchor me, trying to pull me back from the edge of destruction.
I flinch away.
Not because I’m afraid of him. Because I’m afraid of myself. Afraid that if anyone touches me right now, I’ll shatter into a million pieces and never find my way back together.
“Don’t.” My voice comes out raw, broken. “Don’t touch me. Please.”
He freezes. I can feel his confusion, his pain, his desperate need to help. But he stops. Pulls his hands back. Gives me the space I’m begging for, even though I can see how much it costs him.
The fire keeps burning. I can’t control it. Can’t think past the memory of Balroth’s smile, his cold words, his satisfaction as he watched me die. My brother. My blood. The person I loved and trusted more than anyone in the world.
He sold me to monsters. Led me to slaughter with gentle hands and reassuring words. And I trusted him. I walked into the dark because he asked me to, and he—
A sob tears from my throat. Then another. The shadow-flame flickers, responding to my grief, and somewhere in the distance I hear doors opening, footsteps running.