Chapter 6
JASSYN
The Bramblemaw skidded to a halt before Jassyn, talons gouging trenches through the soil. Her jaws gaped wide enough to swallow his torso, close enough that the scent of loam crowded his lungs.
Her fangs drove toward him.
Then stopped.
A tremor ran through the muscles of her neck, rippling under moss and obsidian scales. He sensed starvation steaming from her open mouth, while a deeper command held her bite suspended a finger’s width from his flesh.
Obedience dictated by the Heart of Stars, Jassyn was sure of it.
Vines snapped around him, cinching wings, chest, throat. Thorns needled his skin, each point waiting for the slightest struggle to pierce.
Jassyn’s breath turned shallow. “Okay,” he rasped.
The vines tightened.
He extinguished his power, the glow around him flickering out. “No Essence.”
The pressure eased, but the threat remained close.
Slowly, Jassyn sank his awareness into the soil instead, into the dense network of roots where the dragon’s fear still hummed. He unwound the vines through his connection to the earth, coaxing each tendril loose.
The dragon chuffed as the plants fell away from him, retreating a single step.
“I can mend without Essence,” Jassyn said quietly. “If you’ll allow it.”
He drew from the ivy beneath his feet, pulling on its stored vitality. A muted green glow gathered around his soles, climbed through his legs, and settled into his palms as leaves withered and stems blackened, life reshaping itself into usable power.
The dragon’s claws flexed, sinking into the soil.
Jassyn studied the scorch marks carved across her neck and skull. “What happened?”
She didn’t answer with words.
She answered with everything else.
Images cracked against Jassyn’s mind—too fast, too bright, too many at once. Sensation without structure. Memory stripped of language.
Rainforest heat, thick as a second hide. Her jungle, grown over by centuries of slumber. Then sleep torn open—starlit chains burning through the place of dreams.
Jassyn saw Galaeryn’s face filling her sight. The king’s hand clamped down on her will, twisting until she splintered. Commands poured in where her thoughts used to live.
A portal. Darkness. Stone. Rot coating her throat. Hunger gnawing through her ribs without end.
Stone again. Tunneling. The same order hammered into her mind until her talons obeyed without her permission.
Dig. Dig. Dig.
The mountain groaned with every gouge.
Memory bled sideways. Stone closed in, pressing tighter with each chamber she carved. The mountain became a cage. Then came the two-legged whelps from the stars, always with their burning starlight. Their orders.
She was a dragon. She was…
She didn’t know.
Jassyn watched Kal surface next. The shape of him in a tunnel, the way his starlight shone bright.
She lunged.
Bit.
Crack.
Jassyn gasped, trying to wrench free of the memory.
She held him fast.
Bone split like ripe fruit, blood bursting hot across her tongue. Entrails slid slick down her throat, and marrow followed—sweet, singing through her starved body like sunlight through leaves.
She liked the taste.
The satisfaction struck Jassyn before he could brace, a terrible warmth blooming through every place starvation had gnawed empty.
More lives followed in the dark. Kill after kill, each one faster than the last. Wraith. Rangers. Faces Jassyn knew.
Ice exploded in the tunnel. A figure advanced with frost sheathing his talons, fury rolling off him in waves that burned cold.
Lykor.
Jassyn knew that wrath.
But never like this. Fully wraith. Fully unleashed.
Sunfire followed, bright enough to bleach her sight.
Vesryn.
Flames poured into her skull until the world drowned white and even memory blistered.
Agony. Agony. Agony.
The word was his, the only shape Jassyn’s thoughts could give the pain she’d endured.
He reeled as she released his mind, stomach turning from the phantom taste of blood still clinging thick in his throat.
Kal. Gone that violently. Torn apart by a creature too starved to regret the ravaging.
She’d been forced to dig. Forced to build. Forced to kill.
Jassyn steadied himself against what she’d shown him. “What are they making you do now?”
Pressure bloomed behind his eyes again, slower this time. A seep rather than a strike, images creeping through him with the patience of rot.
Chains rose from her thoughts, grown like roots laced in crystal, winding through her skull. They glowed faintly, starlight drowned in mud. Around her claws, vines coiled like manacles, lashing her to the earth.
In the dark of her mind, Jassyn watched Elashor lift the Heart of Stars.
Remain on these grounds. Do not hunt those who dwell within the estate.
The order sank deep, settling into the bedrock of her bones.
Obey the Vallende line, or bleed.
The garden became the edge of her world. Earth she could touch, but never shape into escape. Death waited behind her fangs, permitted only when the command granted leave.
Starvation remained the worst of all.
No prey had been delivered. She’d tunneled roots beneath the manor. Turned stones under soil. Sent hunger moving through the earth.
No one listened.
They never did.
But this one had. This creature before her, cloaked in the acrid stink of Emberhart flame.
Her attention narrowed. Vines tightened around Jassyn’s ankles, as if measuring whether he would pull away.
“I’m bound like you,” he said. The words barely carried. “I can’t leave either.”
Hunger writhed again—blood bursting across her tongue, jaws closing around a meal that had ended too soon.
She wanted more. The craving pulsed against his mind, primal and impatient.
The dragon stepped toward him. Her head bowed low, nostrils flaring as she drew in his scent.
Scalebound.
Not prey.
The pressure behind Jassyn’s eyes eased.
He staggered as her memories receded like floodwater, leaving him standing in the wreckage of what she’d shown him. His awareness settled back inside its own borders—the ground beneath his feet, green earthen light still glowing in his palms, the Bramblemaw breathing above him.
Her hunger still moved through the soil, gnawing between his ribs now too, grafted there by memory. He could mend her scorched hide, but starvation had no wound to seal. Kitchen scraps might dull the edge for an hour, but the solution to her suffering waited somewhere darker.
The Bramblemaw lowered her massive head, crystalline eyes leveling with his chest. Vines curled around her talons, moss swaying from the ridges on her back.
By dawn, Farine would discover what Elashor had delivered to the estate—a beast prepared for unveiling. She’d parade this creature by draping the dragon’s scales in flowers, decorating her captivity.
They were both trapped here.
Jassyn severed the thought before it rooted deeper in despair.
“I can mend your wound,” he insisted again. This much, at least, he could do. “And if the Heart that binds you is somewhere inside this estate…” His gaze moved past the garden to the sleeping manor beyond. “I’ll find it.”
A plan coalesced, assembling itself from the pieces he’d already gathered. The servant in the corridor had obeyed a single tendril of coercion. Others would too. He had to believe it.
The estate hummed like a hive, and it didn’t register him as a threat. Just another drone, a decorative ornament moving through its halls, too broken to become dangerous. He could sow commands like unnoticed seeds, order others to search for the relic.
“We’ll find a way out,” Jassyn said, quieter now. “Together.”
The dragon exhaled a low chuff that stirred the surrounding leaves. Slowly, she turned her neck, revealing the worst of the injury.
Scales had cracked and sloughed away, exposing hide slick with a sickly sheen. Heat simmered beneath the surface, old fire buried under living tissue.
Jassyn had seen what sunfire left behind when Vesryn freed Cinderax and nearly scorched everyone else. The magic nested deep in flesh and kept devouring from the inside out.
He laid his palm, glowing with life, against the obsidian plates beside the wound. A tremor rippled through the scales, but the dragon allowed his touch.
Jassyn studied the laceration and understood the cruelty of its persistence. A dragon rooted in soil and life should’ve been able to draw the earth into herself and coax her own hide closed.
Unless she’d been forbidden relief.
Her memory pulsed behind his eyes—Elashor’s will driven through the Heart of Stars after the mountain, punishment for the prisoners who’d escaped, for the raid she’d failed to stop.
The fire would remain, burning to teach obedience.
Jassyn’s fingers curled against her scales.
Then he closed his eyes and reached deeper into the earth. A living pulse rose to meet him, climbing through his bones and into her wound.
Leaves withered around them. Vines blackened. Petals wilted and fell as he drained the garden.
Before death could settle, he sensed the dragon’s power rolling through the roots. Brittle stalks straightened. Green ran through broken stems. New leaves budded, and flowers opened to the dark.
Jassyn poured life into her, and she returned it to the soil. A cycle of ruin and rebirth, again and again.
His arms trembled, sweat trailing down his spine, and he lost track of how many times the earth died and bloomed.
The light in his palms guttered, flared, guttered again, until the last of the scorched scales sealed into glossy black plates. Hide closed beneath them, no longer split and burning.
Jassyn stepped back, heart racing, breath rasping in his throat.
Around them, the garden stood whole and green, keeping no record of what it had cost.
Jassyn stood before the dragon with his hands empty, the last of the light fading from his palms. He’d mended what he could, though her hunger remained.
And he still didn’t know what to call her.
“Do you have a name?” he asked gently.
Perhaps the only thing not yet stripped from her.
The dragon blinked, his reflection fracturing across the crystalline facets of her eyes.
She showed him empty soil. Lightless caves. Roots reaching for water and finding only dust.
The Heart of Stars had burned too much away, searing through the roads between language and thought. Where memory should’ve gathered into a name, only ash remained.
Jassyn’s chest tightened. “If you can’t remember,” he said softly, “maybe I can help you find your way back.”
A rumble stirred in her chest. Her jaws began to part, and Jassyn tensed before he could stop himself.
A single flower unfurled on her tongue, pale and three-petaled.
A trillium.
His lungs emptied.
That flower claimed him still, outlined by scales above his brow. Once, it had been inked there to mark him as Vallende property. Servitude written where every eye could see it. Ownership made beautiful enough for court.
But the dragon couldn’t know what it meant. She had no name left to give, no memory whole enough to shape into speech. So the earth provided what she could not.
A flower offered in a maw built to devour.
Jassyn reached out with trembling fingers and lifted the trillium from her tongue, a mark of bondage returned to him as something tender and living.
“Blossom,” he whispered.
Ridiculous for a dragon, he knew that. Not a name worthy of her might. Too gentle for what she’d survived.
But a placeholder. A promise for renewed life.
“Until you remember who you are.”
The dragon exhaled, and magic spilled from her, rich with root and rain and the deep mineral hum of stone warmed beneath an open sky. It coiled around him the way Cinderax’s flame had, ancient power poised at the edge of his skin, offered and waiting.
For once, nothing was being taken.
Jassyn’s throat tightened.
Then he nodded.
The power moved through him like root through soil, planting deep in his chest where Cinderax’s ember burned.
His wings flared wide behind him. Maroon drained from the membranes in branching threads, and viridian flooded after it, sweeping through the leather in a green tide.
The flame in his chest dimmed, flickered, and dissolved.
What replaced it grew in silence—a seed cracking open in loam, a forest stirring beneath his ribs, roots taking hold in the dark where fire had once kept vigil.
Jassyn didn’t realize he’d moved until his arms closed around Blossom’s snout.
Her scales were cool at first. Then warmth rose through them, slow and steady as a heartbeat through bedrock.
She inhaled deeply and closed her eyes, letting herself be held.
A tear slipped down Jassyn’s cheek.
The estate still confined them. Elashor’s compulsion still waited in the dark of his mind. Farine’s manor still slept beyond the garden, and all its reaching hands would soon begin to stir.
But another captive breathed against his chest now, ancient and alive.
Jassyn held tighter.
He knew what he would fight for.
And how deep he would drive the roots before the Vallendes realized the ground beneath their legacy had begun to rot.