Chapter 21
JASSYN
Everything smelled wrong.
Bruised flowers. Wet rot. The wild green of earth where the Starvault had been only marble, crystal, and control.
Moss pressed into Jassyn’s cheek, damp and cool against skin that burned. Air scraped through his throat, his mouth dry as dust. Cotton-thick fog clotted behind his eyes, familiar enough to name before thought fully returned.
Stardust.
He groaned as he tried to move, pain lancing down his neck as he lifted his head.
One wing sprawled beside him, cramped and trembling where it had caught in the roots.
The other had fallen half over his body, membrane slick with moss and powdered with glass.
Even unconscious, some part of him had tried to shield his body from the room.
The vault had been bright with morning sun when he shattered the urns. Now moonlight spilled through the canopy where the dome had been. Hours had passed, and the estate had remained sealed in silence.
The world spun as he sat up. His wings dragged after him, their weight pulling at the joints between his shoulders. Broken glass clinked, slivers sliding off his chest and arms, the jagged edge of an urn snagging his tunic.
He blinked through the blur until smeared light resolved into shapes.
Trees surrounded him, towering and dripping sap that pulsed faintly in the dark. Vines strangled the broken shelves. Roots split the marble floor, feral growth rioting until nothing the Vallendes had called sacred remained intact.
A laugh cracked from Jassyn’s throat before he could stop it. The Vallendes’ Starvault, their sanctum of power and pride, drowned in moss and bloom by their half-breed.
He slapped a hand over his mouth as another bubbled up. Stars. The drug was still in his veins, splitting his thoughts at the seams.
A presence waited behind him, too vast to belong to a person.
Jassyn turned too fast, and pain spiked down his spine.
Blossom.
The dragon loomed unmoving, crystalline eyes unblinking, still suspended in Elashor’s control.
Jassyn’s pulse lurched. He scanned the vault for Elashor and Farine, but first found a guard sprawled near a buckled shelf.
Drool shone on the male’s chin as one arm lifted, fingers swiping at a floating orb of Essence glimmering above him.
Countless vials of captive power had cracked, freeing hundreds of globes that drifted like loose stars among the vines and trunks.
If the guard was stirring, the others wouldn’t stay felled by Stardust for much longer.
Jassyn braced himself, glass slicing into his palm as he drove his fingers through the moss and into the new soil beneath.
He didn’t feel the cut. Only the frantic need to purge his blood—draw life from the roots, burn the drug away, reclaim enough clarity to survive the vault before it woke around him.
Nothing answered.
Swaying in place, he tried again.
His arms shook as he drove past the drug’s haze, his awareness hooking on a filament of life. It came reluctantly—root by root, green vitality climbing through the slices in his palm and seeping into his skin. Moss blackened beneath his fingers, withering to husks.
His breath came faster with the effort, but he didn’t stop. He drew more life inward, isolating the poison, forcing power through blood and marrow until the Stardust began to burn thin.
The pulse steadied in his veins. Jassyn followed it outward, letting his awareness branch through root and vine.
The estate reached back in broken impressions—moss over shattered tile, roots prying seams from marble, doors hanging crooked, halls drowned in unnatural stillness.
Dust settled undisturbed along the thresholds, no reinforcements marching to the Vallendes’ rescue.
Jassyn couldn’t tell if the quiet meant safety or danger holding its breath. The Vallendes had already taught him what could wait in silence under their roof.
The Stardust receded enough for the wreckage to sharpen. This time, when Jassyn searched the vault, he found Elashor face down on the earth.
His stomach clenched. The Heart of Stars still glowed in the general’s fist, a beacon of all eight colors pulsing like a taunt.
Farine couldn’t be far. With one palm still buried in the moss, Jassyn pushed his awareness through the grove that had grown around the general—towering trunks, hanging veils of vine heavy enough to hide silk, skin, and sapphire eyes.
Sap ticked from the branches. Leaves whispered over broken marble.
She could be waiting anywhere, still close enough to make his body remember obedience before his mind could refuse.
But he had no time to let fear assemble itself while Elashor still gripped Blossom’s chains.
Jassyn lurched to his feet, air rasping through his teeth. His wings sagged behind him, one catching on root, the other striking broken marble. The uneven pull wrenched him sideways, and he caught himself on a fractured pillar before furling them tight to his spine.
Claim the Heart.
Free Blossom.
Run.
The plan fell apart when he thought about the last step. Even now, with the Starvault shattered around him, freedom still stopped at the shackles in his skull. He couldn’t leave while the coercion kept his wings from belonging to him.
So he’d unravel it.
Break into Elashor’s mind while the general still reeled from Stardust. Turn Elashor’s power inward, force him to tear the hooks from—
Essence surged from the right.
Across the vault, a different guard staggered upright—glaive scraping a furrow through moss, a ragged snarl catching in his throat as he swung blind toward Jassyn.
Jassyn reached through the earth.
A vine cracked from the nearest tree, wrapping around the soldier’s throat.
Jassyn yanked.
The guard’s boots lifted from the ground. His weapon dropped with a dull thud, heels kicking at empty air as both hands flew to the vine cinched beneath his jaw. Essence lashed from his fingertips as he raked at his throat, but his power stuttered, his mind still mired in Stardust.
Jassyn tightened the vine.
Through the living coil, he sensed the moment the guard’s heart stopped beating. It was hardly the first life he’d taken—survival had never offered him innocence.
Creation and ruin were both woven into his bones by a dragon who’d trusted a captive with the only gift she had. He could feel how easy it would be to keep going, spreading his awareness through root and vine. Find every life still breathing in the sanctum. Constrict the earth around every throat.
He didn’t.
Jassyn took an unsteady step toward the Heart of Stars glowing between Elashor’s fingers, dragging him closer to the hand that had forced his body into compliance.
A retching sound broke the stillness. Another guard sagged against a tree, trying to rise.
A root unfurled at Jassyn’s call and brushed the nape of her neck. Through that contact, he found the edge of her mind and drove the command in before analysis could decay into hesitation.
“Silence the others before they wake.”
His throat burned as coercion sank in its hooks, making her hands do what he couldn’t stomach himself.
The guard hauled herself upright, limbs stiff as she drew a knife from her boot, head jerking toward the nearest collapsed soldier.
Jassyn didn’t watch, turning his focus back to Elashor.
A root erupted from the soil, snaring the Heart of Stars and ripping it free of Elashor’s grip. Jassyn seized the coil through the earth and wrenched the relic back to himself, the root tearing a jagged furrow through the moss until the gem slammed into his palm.
Jassyn closed his fingers around the Heart. The relic flared with his talents, its facets digging against his skin as Elashor’s command shuddered through it—a spike hammered deep into the vast darkness of Blossom’s mind. Jassyn drove his will into the binding and pried.
Elashor’s magic resisted, strands cinching tighter around her awareness, but Jassyn cut through them one by one, severing each hold that refused to yield, until the last command snapped loose and recoiled through the Heart.
Blossom’s awareness poured into his mind like a forest swallowing a field.
Hunger woke with her, fastening onto the guard he’d left hanging from the tree—the copper tang of blood that would rush from the cooling body.
Then the pressure of her presence broke, and the earth shuddered awake, roots remembering they could move.
She surged forward with a roar that split the canopy.
The earth responded—trees groaning taller, mushrooms erupting in clusters, vines thickening as they bound the fallen.
Moss swallowed weapons, and roots burst through the silver shelves left standing, buckling their polished frames until the Vallendes’ wealth spilled into the dirt.
Jassyn exhaled, but his fingers tightened around the Heart’s glow.
Shattering the relic—freeing Blossom completely—would require sunfire, and Jassyn had never summoned that destruction. The Starvault, broken open around him with Essence drifting loose, was no place to learn. For now, keeping the Heart from Elashor could buy the dragon time to run.
The soldier he’d coerced moved from one dazed warrior to the next through the glade, her knife severing throats. Blood darkened the moss, and as Blossom’s shadow fell over her, the soldier kept walking. The dragon reached the guard hanging from the tree and ripped him from the vine.
Jassyn flinched as bones cracked between Blossom’s fangs, his wing claws curling tight. He tucked the Heart of Stars into his pocket and steadied his breath, then forced himself to face the general sprawled only a few paces away.
Elashor lay slumped and still, fingers curled around empty air. Jassyn drove his will into the earth. Roots burst through the moss and climbed, flowering into spiked, venomous blooms. He held their darts at the general’s throat, death poised inches from his pulse.