Chapter 17
LYKOR
Lykor’s fists locked at his sides as Galaeryn crossed the atrium toward him.
The king moved through the library with effortless grace, crystal-edged armor drinking the firelight through the windows, rings glinting with Essence across his fingers.
His face remained too smooth. Too young.
The same ageless mask that had loomed over Lykor while he lay chained to the marble slab in the prisons.
His magic twitched to rip open a portal, but he strangled the impulse just as fast. The king would shred the rift before he even formed it.
Resisting would end as it always had when Lykor had been stupid enough to try in the dungeon—with Galaeryn peeling him apart until his body learned obedience while his pride snarled under it.
The king halted at the window. Beside him. Close enough that the Essence thundering off him crawled across Lykor’s skin as if hunting for a way in.
The stolen talents Lykor had ripped from those in the palace still circled above, faint as sparks beside a sun.
“I suspected this was your doing.” Galaeryn swept a pale hand toward the city, where a wraith blazed past, hurling fire at a lower tier. “It took you decades longer than I expected before you mustered the nerve to strike.”
“And yet you stand here.” Lykor bared his fangs. “Spectating.”
Galaeryn exhaled, the burning city reduced to an inconvenience. He reached into the pouch at his waist and drew out a Heart of Stars.
Lykor’s hackles rose as all eight colors ignited the Heart. Scales rippled down his forearms, locking over skin in obsidian plates. His beastblood knew which dragon this controlled before his mind did.
Rimeclaw.
The Heart’s core spun with fractured radiance, staining Galaeryn’s knuckles with broken light. “The beast will extinguish your rebellion soon enough.”
On the southern horizon, darkness swallowed the stars.
The Tidecrasher descended.
Even through the blur of night, Lykor saw the veil of rain trailing from those vast, tattered wings. The limp was gone from Rimeclaw’s flight, though the wounds Skylash had carved still scored his membranes. Galaeryn must’ve mended the Tidecrasher only far enough to keep his siege engine airborne.
Ice and rain fell in curtains, sluicing over the rooftops, snuffing the blazes his warriors had set. Obedience made weather. Every fire drowned under a tide stolen from the dragon.
“I hadn’t anticipated seeing the rise of dragons in this century,” Galaeryn murmured, turning the Heart between his fingers. “I suppose I have your fixation to thank for their return.”
“Aesar’s interest.” The correction scraped between Lykor’s teeth before he could stifle it. “You never could accept what you did to him.”
Galaeryn’s attention slid to Lykor.
Lykor searched those silver eyes for the male who’d once walked this library with his sons, turning pages of ancient texts with careful hands, naming constellations as if they were kin.
He found nothing.
Aesar’s memories knew that male. Lykor saw only the ambition that had consumed him—the scholar replaced, the father burned away, the king left standing with the Tidecrasher’s prison clutched in his fist.
“Aesar could never see the end.” Galaeryn gave the name no weight, a footnote already filed. “Only what was in front of him.”
The part of Lykor that had guarded Aesar for a century wanted to lunge for Galaeryn’s throat. He shoved the urge away and held still, frost snapping across his clenched fingers.
Galaeryn would keep talking. He always did. In the prisons, Lykor had learned the king liked his grand designs witnessed, even if the only witness was chained to a marble slab and bleeding.
“I’ve always been patient,” the king continued. Right on time. “Two of the dragons have already been brought to heel. The others will when the stars deem it time.”
Rimeclaw’s roar broke across the horizon, deep enough to rattle the windowpanes. Lykor’s talons punched into his palm. Violation carried through the sound, command driven into every scale. The Tidecrasher should’ve belonged to the deep, to frost, to the old violence of the sea.
Galaeryn had bent that vast body into rain over rooftops, into cold sent down to smother flame.
“You pity it.” Galaeryn’s disgust sharpened every word.
Lykor ground his teeth. He’d learned silence was invitation enough.
Galaeryn’s attention raked over the scales on Lykor’s arms, the frost sheathing his fists, the druid gift imprinted in a body the king had tried to perfect. He sneered.
“That bestial corruption you’ve soiled your pristine blood with?” Galaeryn said, the words hissing with the first real edge Lykor had heard from him. “I’ll rise to the Aelfyn without fouling myself. Pure and worthy.”
Lykor’s beastblood snarled beneath his ribs. He kept his face still and hunted the crack—the king’s composure had a seam, and it ran along the word pure.
He’d heard fragments of Galaeryn’s plans before, divulged between his own screams. The king had never hoarded truth, perhaps because he considered himself beyond consequence.
“You still believe they speak to you.” Lykor held his gaze. “That their ancient kind waits among the stars.”
He let the accusation stand, bait sharpened for whatever vanity Galaeryn might spill. Vesryn and Serenna both claimed to hear the Aelfyn’s whispers as well, when sunfire burned through them.
But only Galaeryn had crowned himself their chosen.
“They’re out there.” The gleam in Galaeryn’s eyes brightened, silver catching light that wasn’t in the library.
“But they’ve fallen far from their former glory.
Those who came to this world failed to return with its power.
” Galaeryn’s gaze drifted past Lykor, over Kyansari’s drowning fires, over the rooftops soaked beneath Rimeclaw’s rain.
“The dragons will be my offering—every crude element this world has bred.” Only then did he look higher, past the city, past the smoke, to the sky.
“Then I’ll ascend to my seat among the starborn. ”
Lykor went still. Vesryn had spoken to Aesar of the Bramblemaw den, where buried Aelfyn had whispered of denied ascension, of returning to the stars.
A thread of ugly hope twisted in Lykor’s chest. “You’ll leave this world behind?”
“Behind?” Galaeryn scoffed and lifted his empty palm.
Illumination spiraled from his fingertips, stars unfurling into constellations, a galaxy blooming in blue whorls.
“Beneath. This world is only the first altar. Once I rise, it’ll keep breeding power.
I’ll return to reap what ripens.” The galaxy rotated slowly over his palm.
“Why be satisfied with one throne when the universe waits endless above it?”
Beyond the window, Rimeclaw circled over Kyansari’s outermost tiers. Rain drove with him, street by street, turning wraith fires to steam. His warriors broke formation beneath the deluge, wings scattering through the palace spires.
None of the wraith turned to battle the dragon. They knew better.
“Then why are you still here?” Lykor muttered.
Galaeryn closed his fist, collapsing the stars. “My work isn’t finished. I won’t risk crossing the expanse until I am more than flesh. Until the stars dim beside me.”
Lykor almost laughed. Madness, polished into arrogance.
Still, one fact remained—for all the power the king had amassed, it wasn’t enough. Yet. That was the only reason any of them still drew breath.
Galaeryn tilted his head. “I intended for you to be the first vessel. Where Elashor has only ever been a blunt instrument, you were forged for divinity, shaped to bear what would break lesser bodies.” He studied Lykor, his attention a scalpel drawn over every scar.
“But refinement requires time. More than I granted you.”
Refinement.
That was what Galaeryn had called the marble slab. The spikes. The channels carved through Lykor’s skull until obedience lived in his marrow.
Lykor’s lip curled. The prisons split open behind his eyes. The endless cycle of it. Elf to wraith and back to elf. His magic ravaged and rebuilt each time the king wanted to test how much more the vessel could hold.
He shoved the memory back to where it belonged.
“The wraith escaped before your refinement was finished.” Lykor watched the king’s face. “And you never came looking.”
“I knew you’d serve your purpose.” One corner of Galaeryn’s mouth lifted by the smallest fraction. “You woke the first dragon.”
His purpose.
The floor seemed to tilt under Lykor’s boots.
Cinderax, freed from his chains. The raids that had bolstered the wraith into more than scattered survivors. The armies that had never gathered to crush his people before they learned how to strike back. The dungeons he’d believed he escaped because the king had failed to break him.
Every freedom Lykor had mistaken for defiance shifted beneath him, spoiled by the shape of the king’s design.
Lykor kept his voice level. Barely. “You can’t tell me you planned that.”
“I planned you.” Galaeryn nodded toward the talents Lykor had siphoned, still orbiting like moons with nowhere else to go. “What disappoints me is that you haven’t claimed that power. You could return to what you were. An arch elf. Whole.”
Lykor didn’t bother pretending the thought hadn’t crossed his mind. But not for the reasons that motivated the king. “I am what I choose to be.”
Galaeryn lifted his brows. “How I made you, then.”
Lykor’s talons sank deeper into his palm. Blood warmed the inside of his fist, but the pain never reached him. Rage devoured it first.
The king stepped closer, silver eyes too bright. “Did you ever wonder why I left you with the strongest talents? Power to portal away from the dungeons. Rending and force and shielding to survive the wilds.”
Lykor’s jaw ached from the pressure of keeping it shut. He had wondered for years. Obsessively.
“It’s almost sentimental,” Galaeryn murmured, “the way you insist on being less than what you could become.”
“Perhaps refusing your version of greatness seems small beside your conquest of the stars.” Lykor met the king’s gaze, unflinching. “But the refusal is mine.”
“Then it’s time to remind you of the purpose you were made to serve.”
Lykor went still.
His purpose—to fit the king’s twisted image.
Every second he stayed gave Galaeryn another chance to drive coercion back through his skull.
He had to go. Now.
Survive. Find Jassyn.
No time for strategy. No version of this ended with Galaeryn dead and Lykor standing over him. If Lykor fought, he died. No, worse—he lived long enough to be taken.
Lykor reached for the Essence orbiting above him. Every stolen talent he and Vesryn had ripped from the palace had whispered all night to be claimed as his.
He seized them all at once.
Then drove the unstable hoard into Galaeryn’s chest. Power burst between them in a blinding flare, buckling the air and bleaching the atrium white.
Lykor didn’t wait to see if the king stumbled.
His wings burst from his spine as he drove a blast of force through the window. Glass shattered outward in a razored sheet, and Lykor warped through the fracture before Galaeryn could reclaim him.
Wind slammed into his chest when he reappeared above Kyansari. Rain knifed across his face as rooftops spun below, steaming under Rimeclaw’s deluge.
Behind, the palace held its silence. Galaeryn stood at the broken window, watching his vessel run.
Letting him go.
Every freedom he’d ever claimed now wore the king’s shadow.
Across the capital, wraith wheeled through the smoke, the Essence they’d plundered whirling around them in glowing orbs. Their flames died almost as soon as they struck. Rimeclaw skimmed over the city, rain pouring from his wings, flooding the rooftops and streets.
He couldn’t help Rimeclaw. Not tonight. The promise festered, a debt collecting interest in blood. But that wasn’t Lykor’s only failure.
Elashor had never been here at all. The palace had been a husk with nothing but dust and a king who’d been waiting. If any trail to Jassyn still existed, it lay wherever Vesryn’s portal had opened.
Lykor gritted his fangs and beat his wings into the rain. He’d sound the retreat and drag his warriors back to Asharyn—the only move the king had left him.