Chapter 14
JASSYN
Jassyn tried to leave Blossom behind in the garden.
More than once.
But she followed anyway.
By the time he reached the last manicured hedges, Jassyn had insisted he needed stealth, that slipping through the estate unnoticed was the best chance to find the Heart of Stars. And that he’d return and sever the chains binding her.
He drew to a halt as Blossom rammed the sensation of devouring into his skull, images bleeding into his mind in shuddering bursts.
Roots fissuring marble. Fruit left too long in the sun, sweetening past ripeness into rot. Pressure behind his tongue, dirt packed into his molars.
This place could be swallowed whole. Together, they could raze the estate until every polished stone remembered it had been stolen from the earth.
Jassyn clenched his jaw and tried to force the dragon from his mind, but she wasn’t listening.
Blossom’s power shuddered through the ground, and the marble path ruptured. Vines punched through, barbed and slick with sap. One snapped forward, crimson petals flaring wide to reveal a needle-fanged core. It struck with venomous speed, burying a darted spine in the soil beside his boot.
A demonstration.
How to make root obey like a weapon. How to rip stone from elven order. How to bloom ruin through a foundation and call it a reclamation.
Jassyn swallowed the taste of dirt and kept moving.
They emerged from the hedges into the sweep of a marble colonnade, its archways marching in pale succession toward the estate’s inner court.
Ahead, two guards turned at the thunder of Blossom’s approach. Essence surged around them.
Jassyn braced. There’d be no turning back now.
The guards rushed forward, shadows flaring in twin spirals.
Behind him, Blossom stamped one claw.
The ground swelled. A thick root cleaved the marble in front of their charge. Stone buckled, catching their boots. Their bodies pitched forward as vines snapped around their ankles, pinning them to the earth.
Jassyn’s fingers twitched but he kept them at his sides, channeling his reach through soil and vine. Two blood-bright flowers unfurled, rearing like serpents. He latched on with thought, tilting their petals toward the guards the way blooms track the sun.
They snapped forward. Barbed darts fired from their centers, guided by the sharp hook of his control.
One pierced the hollow below a guard’s chin. The other buried itself in the second’s throat.
Both soldiers thrashed against the roots, boots drumming marble before the venom stilled their hearts.
Blossom didn’t give Jassyn time to reckon with what he’d done. She advanced, talons sinking into earth, and her certainty pressed through him, obscene in its simplicity.
Carrion, still warm.
The Heart had forbidden hunting, not scavenging.
Armor shrieked as vines burrowed under the plates and wrenched steel from flesh. Barbs scraped through straps and buckles before Blossom’s fangs punched through what remained.
Ribs crushed in her bite. Spines shattered like reeds beneath her talons. Blood sluiced over petals unfurling under her claws.
Jassyn breathed through his nose.
One or two soldiers at a time, he and Blossom could manage. But one scream echoing through a window—one servant portaling to Kyansari for reinforcements—would end them.
He severed the thought and strode on. No spirals. Only forward.
The sun slanted through the marble arches veined with captive Essence. Shadows pooled below them, a mouth leading into the estate’s throat.
Blossom couldn’t follow inside. Her neck would never pass through the estate’s doorways, let alone—
A growl rumbled behind him, vibrating through the soil.
The ground split open beneath an arch. Marble plates cracked apart and tipped inward, vanishing into the churned loam below. Roots erupted through the breach, coiled around the pillars, and dragged them down. Stone supports buckled and sank, swallowed by the earth.
Jassyn stumbled back as the entryway fractured.
“Wait!” His voice broke as he spun on the dragon. “You can’t bury everything. I won’t be able to find the Heart.”
Essence thundered through the estate’s walls—alarms flaring, panicked voices ricocheting through the halls, shouts ringing like struck bells.
So much for slipping through unnoticed.
Blossom prowled toward him, fangs still dripping blood. Her tail lashed, scattering roots and flinging soil in thick clumps. Each step drove another tremor through the ground. Jassyn flinched as a nearby pillar groaned and crumbled further.
Blossom lowered her massive head and shoved her skull against his chest.
Then she showed him.
Passage. Talons digging through a mountain’s gut.
Stone folding. Soil yielding. The shape of this elven estate unmade into rot—galleries rearranged by moss, corridors split open, walls pulled from their foundations by roots.
A corpse dragged through the dark. The taste of marrow where no sun had ever touched.
Jassyn’s breath snagged as his own hands entered the vision, ripping open paths. Hallways shifting. Entrances caving. Traps blooming like orchids.
A house built of stone could be unbuilt by earth. She’d carve through the manor until the Heart beat in his hands.
Jassyn staggered when Blossom released his mind, her satisfaction sending tremors through his ribs. The earth steadied, but the roots held, pressing against the estate’s foundation.
Waiting.
Breath shallow, he turned toward the shattered archway. The screaming had mattered when silence was still possible. Now it only measured how little time remained.
Jassyn stretched his awareness outward, delving through the tangle Blossom had torn from the ground. He wove root and vine over the fractured marble, lashing a narrow path across the split threshold. The earth held under his boots as he crossed into the broken mouth of the entry hall.
The first wave of servants poured toward him in blind panic, nearly trampling him as they fled the shaking walls. Cracks raced through the marble, stone splintering underfoot.
Jassyn braced, Essence coiling toward coercion.
Then the first of them saw Blossom behind him.
The stampede reversed. Bodies collided, turned, clawed past one another to veer down a side corridor—anywhere that wasn’t the dragon blocking the door.
Blossom drove her snout into the opening.
Roots punched through, cinched around splintered pillars, and pulled. Stone screeched against stone as the archway widened around her skull, walls splitting and folding back. Vines raced after the fracture, ribbing the ceiling, shouldering the weight of the floors above.
The walls shook as Blossom forced herself through the widened archway behind him.
Jassyn cut down a corridor, his pace quickening as vines buckled the floor in uneven jolts.
He tried to follow the directions he’d ripped from the guard, but the estate bent wrong around him.
He lost his way once, then again, before snagging a fleeing servant by the arm.
His control lanced into her with surgical force, stripping out the knowledge he needed.
The Starvault sanctum. Deeper in the estate.
He released her. The servant blinked, dazed, her eyes landing on the dragon. Then her knees gave out, dropping her hard to the floor, pulse fluttering at the hollow of her throat.
Blossom’s jaw unhinged a fraction, sap glistening between her fangs.
Jassyn stepped away from the servant’s crumpled form and met Blossom with a sharp shake of his head.
Nostrils flaring, she chuffed. Vines tightened around the broken stone, creeping toward the servant.
“She’s not a threat,” Jassyn murmured. “Some of them just live here. That doesn’t mean they had a choice in this life.”
The floor caved in Blossom’s wake, marble breaking open to packed soil. Behind her, walls buckled, pillars bowed, and archways split, everything built to endure remembering the earth.
She prowled forward to follow him, her hunger insistent.
Denied, not forgotten.
Jassyn pushed deeper into the estate, through rooms where ruin kept changing shape.
One chamber had drowned in plaster powdering from the ceiling, furniture dissolving into mold.
A ballroom gaped open, overtaken by fungus, its long tables split down the grain, their legs already swallowed by the ground.
Silence thickened, broken only by the groan of settling stone, the scrape of Jassyn’s boots on what remained of the marble, and the slow grind of Blossom’s claws through the broken floor.
Farine should’ve sent guards by now. Or yanked on his leash. But Jassyn felt no pull, no thread of coercion cinching tight around him.
Maybe silence had explanations. Servants had fled. Guards would be regrouping. Kyansari reinforcements had yet to arrive.
Still, his beastblood shivered to the surface, prickling along the nape of his neck.
Marble gave way to a narrowing tunnel, damp growth racing ahead along its walls. At the far end, sunlight gleamed.
The passage opened into a vast circular chamber. Above, a vaulted dome of seamless crystal curved like a looking glass aimed at the sky. Light poured through and fractured as it fell, casting a thousand shards of color across the polished floor.
Jassyn went still as he took in the Starvault, where the Vallendes hoarded evidence of their dominion. No soldiers had lined the way to the chamber. The memory he’d ripped from the first guard had shown ranks of them, armed and stationed along the walls.
Behind him, Blossom released a low grunt. Her crystalline eyes roved the chamber as her head lowered, nostrils flaring against the polished floor. She pressed the sensation into his mind—the scent of steel and sweat.
Every hair lifted along Jassyn’s arms.
Guards had been here. But where were they now?
Silver shelves rose in concentric tiers along the edges of the chamber, spiraling upward toward the dome.
Jassyn felt the pressure of power before he understood it—thousands of vials in disciplined rows, glass stoppered and sealed, each containing measured Essence.
Refined and bound, enough to fuel wars if the elves ever faced true resistance.
Ledgers and scrolls lined the lower tiers, marked with family names. Jassyn recognized the taxonomy without needing to read a single page.
Lineages. Breeding records. The knowledge of how to build creatures like him.
Across the polished floor, hundreds of crystal urns rose as tall as his chest, brimming with Stardust in obscene abundance. Enough to drown an entire realm in rapture or ruin.
And at the center of the chamber, a pedestal stood bare.
Jassyn’s pulse kicked faster. The Heart of Stars should’ve been there, waiting among all this hoarded power.
An illusion rippled.
And by then, it was too late.
Kyansari soldiers flickered into existence, tearing free of glamours he hadn’t felt through the magic already choking the chamber. They appeared one after another, until two dozen closed in around him, steel and Essence sealing the way out.
Jassyn went cold as Blossom roared behind him, the sound rattling the dome overhead.
Too many for coercion.
The ranks parted and Farine stepped forward, sunlight clinging to her like a coronation, her eyes already locked on him, glacial and triumphant.
Beside her stood Elashor, the Heart of Stars blinding in his grasp. The moment he lifted it, Blossom’s roar strangled into silence.
No.
He’d been so close.
Hadn’t he?
Or perhaps they’d simply allowed him this much. Permitted the ruined corridors, the broken foundations, the brief bright lie that destruction meant progress. The estate could be rebuilt. The servants replaced. Hope was easiest to break when a prisoner had almost reached the door.
Coercion clamped over Jassyn’s mind, tightening like a hand around his throat. His limbs locked, refusing him.
Panic surged feral—his or Blossom’s, he didn’t know—and thought splintered.
Jassyn lashed out, telepathic Essence flaring wild, clawing for control, for one unclaimed corner of his own mind.
Elashor’s command crushed the strike.
Jassyn’s magic buckled against it, chains yanked taut from the inside.
So he turned inward, past his locked limbs, past the compulsion, reaching for the wild tangle of Blossom’s gift.
The bite of root and rot. The snarl of earth buried in stone.
If this was the end, he wouldn’t kneel for it.
He’d take everyone with him.
No time to plan. No time to think. Jassyn slammed his will into the earth before they could strip him of it forever.
The sanctum cracked. The floor detonated upward, marble shattering as roots tore through the ground in jagged spears.
The urns.
Enough Stardust to poison the air.
Before Elashor could stop him, Jassyn drove the roots through the vault in a chain of violent blooms, bursting urns apart and flinging Stardust into the air in choking plumes.
Jassyn had no choice but to inhale with everyone else.
The drug burrowed into his lungs.
His knees buckled, thought shearing loose as the vault tipped sideways. White flooded the edges of his vision before everything went dark.