Chapter 25
SERENNA
Ayla’s cell stank of damp stone and the acrid musk of a body devouring its last reserves. Water seeped down the walls in mineral streaks, each drop loud enough to count.
By the time Serenna, Fenn, and Vesryn had returned from the meadow and settled the three hatchlings back into their makeshift nursery with the others, half the morning had slipped away.
More of it had dissolved in the search for Lykor, who had buried Ayla in a chamber no corridor reached.
When they’d finally found him with Jassyn, Lykor had torn open a portal to Ayla’s cell with a snarl and sent them through with a curse.
Ayla sat hunched on bare rock under Vesryn’s orbs of illumination, her face pared to bone. The torn hem of her tunic strained across the impossible swell of her belly while her ribs jutted sharp above it—her body withering away to sustain months of growth the king had compressed into days.
A flicker of compassion stirred, thin and unwelcome. Serenna smothered it. Ayla was dying, and Serenna needed what she knew before starvation finished its work.
“Can you get her something to eat?”
Fenn nodded. “I’ll see if Koln hunted anything from the deeper caverns.”
He opened a portal and slipped through, leaving Serenna with the steady drip of water, her sister’s ragged breathing, and Vesryn’s silence at her shoulder.
The prince’s alarm cinched through the bond, a cold knot of dread tightening with her own. His eyes flicked to her, waiting for her lead.
“We can’t keep her like this,” Serenna sent through the bond.
“If we keep her tethered,” Vesryn said, “she could be moved where a magus can monitor her.”
“I saw what the king did to you at Centarya,” Serenna said aloud, forcing her eyes to Ayla’s. “I need to know how he altered the child.”
Ayla bared her teeth and shoved herself to her feet, limbs trembling with the effort. “He didn’t touch my daughter.”
“He called her a vessel,” Serenna pressed. “He intends to give the Aelfyn bodies.”
Ayla’s nostrils flared, her stare pinning Serenna with all the violence she could no longer deliver. “He sped her growth. Nothing more.”
Serenna’s molars ground together. The king’s violation had carved Ayla to tendon and angles, yet she dismissed the indignity like it barely mattered.
Vesryn crossed his arms. “And if the Aelfyn arrive? What exactly is he expecting to happen?”
Ayla’s attention cut from Serenna to Vesryn, as if measuring what silence would cost before she spoke.
“The Aelfyn can’t cross the expanse in the flesh. What arrives will be power alone. They’ll need vessels to claim if they mean to become anything more than starlight.”
“But the host…” The word Galaeryn had used turned rancid on Serenna’s tongue. “What happens to a child born for that purpose?”
Ayla’s hand drifted to her belly. “They could inhabit her body before she ever has the chance to become herself.” Her fingers splayed across her middle, whitening at the knuckles. “That was the point.”
Serenna suppressed a shiver as she imagined an infant drawing her first breath, but when the child’s eyes opened, an Aelfyn regarded the world through them.
A portal unfurled beside Vesryn. Fenn stepped through with a tray braced across both forearms, steam lifting from roasted meat and wild mushrooms seared dark.
Ayla lunged before he’d crossed half the cell and wrenched the tray from him. Her fingers shook, hunger stripping her past pride. She collapsed against the wall and tore into the food, shoulders curved over the tray, appearing ready to bite any hand that reached for it.
“You’re cooperating too easily,” Serenna said as Fenn returned to her side. “What are you after?”
Ayla sneered between bites. “A few days.”
“Then you need us after all.”
Ayla straightened the golden collar at her throat, making an ornament out of it. “Your people dragged me into the safest place left in the realms. I see no reason to object.”
“So you get our protection from the king.”
Ayla’s mouth curved. “Captivity has its conveniences.”
Serenna stepped closer. “You stood beside him while he used everyone else.” Disgust heated her throat. “Why does it matter now that the body he means to take is your daughter’s?”
Ayla’s eyes snapped up from the tray. “This child is all I have left of Mishryn—she’ll carry a fragment of her Essence.” Her voice caught, the break swallowed with the next mouthful. “I refuse to let him take the last piece of her.”
Conviction burned too fiercely in Ayla’s gaunt face for Serenna to tell where certainty ended and desperation began.
Perhaps her daughter would inherit Mishryn’s power.
Perhaps Ayla had forged the belief because nothing else could keep her standing.
Either way, the child already belonged to a bloodline she’d never chosen—a fate Serenna knew from the inside.
“Let’s move her,” she said to Fenn and Vesryn. “To the cavern Daeryn set aside for the families.” They could keep her alive without trusting her.
Vesryn nodded, already tearing a portal open.
Fenn stepped forward to help Ayla rise, but she scowled and braced a hand against the wall, forcing herself upright before he reached her. She pinned the tray against her middle and swept past him through the rift.
Serenna followed. Warmth chased away the cell’s damp chill as she emerged, moss yielding beneath her boots.
Trees climbed toward the cavern’s vaulted roof, hammocks of woven vine strung between their branches.
A small pool steamed at the center, its depths luminous with glittering light.
Families had made a refuge inside the earth, and Serenna delivered venom into its heart.
Ayla carried what remained of her meal deeper into the chamber, winding between the scattered children as though they were only stones in her path.
Serenna glanced toward the tunnel’s mouth, where a silent line of wraith and druids stood watch, weapons at rest while crimson eyes tracked every movement.
“She’ll be secure here,” Vesryn murmured.
“I’ll set my sisters to shadow her,” Fenn said. “Discreetly.”
Ayla crossed the chamber and claimed a cradle of braided roots. She settled into it, arranged the tray across her lap, and resumed eating.
“I won’t be long,” Serenna muttered to Vesryn and Fenn. “There’s one more thing I need from her.”
Ayla’s Starshard was in Serenna’s fist before she’d fully chosen to draw it. The gem hummed against her palm as she crossed the cavern. Ayla froze mid-bite, a strip of meat suspended before her mouth, her attention fixed on the crystal.
“There are a hundred things I could force you to do. Each worse than the last.” Serenna tightened her grip until facets bit into her skin.
“But I won’t. Because I’m not you.” Her stomach twisted, but her voice held.
“Your pregnancy doesn’t erase what you did.
Not after you made me slaughter those children in the Coliseum and taught me exactly how disposable lives can be. ”
She lifted the shard, its fractured light passing over Ayla’s face. “Tell me what happened to the five hatchlings your army stole. Are they alive?”
Ayla met her stare, then lowered the tray beside her and leaned back into the roots. “The king has no use for dead dragons.”
Relief hooked through Serenna, barbed and cruel. So the hatchlings lived because Galaeryn meant to chain them. But every Heart already had a fate. Three had shattered when Cinderax, Skylash, and Blossom were freed. One still held Rimeclaw. The last remained in Kaedryn’s keeping for Veyrix.
“How?” Serenna demanded. “He has no relics left.”
Ayla’s mouth tightened, irritation piercing her composure. “Elashor’s forces were excavating a crater—the Falling Star Crater. The king believes it holds more Hearts.”
Serenna’s grip locked around the gem. Before she could ask what Ayla meant by more, Vesryn’s voice broke through the bond, sharp enough to scatter her thoughts. “Serenna. We might have a…situation.”
Across the cavern, Fenn had a male pinned by a tree, his wings spread to cage him. A female stood a few paces off to one side, an infant clutched to her chest. Vesryn lingered nearby, watching with his arms crossed.
The gold at the male’s throat drew Serenna’s eyes before his face did.
Saundyl.
Serenna’s blood went cold. Vesryn had told her that Lykor had pulled her brother from the sea and his family from the prisons. But knowing hadn’t prepared her for seeing him whole and unscathed, his wife and son with him.
Serenna cursed under her breath and left Ayla, sliding her sister’s Starshard back into her leathers as she crossed the cavern.
Fenn didn’t turn as she approached, but his wings folded and vanished, making space for her the way he always did. His blade dug under Saundyl’s chin, forcing her brother’s head back until his heels lifted from the ground.
“Do you know how the wraith settle a debt?” Fenn growled, his pupils narrowed to draconic slits. “You turned her over to the elves. I haven’t forgotten how many times I watched her bleed because of you.”
Fenn angled the weapon, turning Saundyl’s face toward her.
“I see you at least got what you wanted,” Serenna said.
Beyond Saundyl, his wife tightened both arms around their son. Borrowed clothes hung loose from shoulders sharpened since Serenna had last seen her. Even so, Saundyl and his wife had been fed and sheltered, allowed to move through the caverns under watch.
More mercy than her brother had granted her.
Serenna’s nails bit into her palms. “You stood over me on that deck and bound my wings in shadow while I screamed.”
Behind her, Vesryn stood motionless, but a wave of anger rippled down the bond.
Serenna stepped closer. “I want to know which part of that was duty and which part was you.”
Saundyl’s gaze flicked toward his wife and son, offering them as his defense once more. When he looked at Serenna again, his eyes gave her nothing.
“You were going to die on that ship,” he said as a dark bead of red welled at the dagger’s tip. “Every soldier wanted your wings mounted on the mast. I made certain they delivered you alive.”
For a moment, the memory of salt in her eyes and her blood on timber crowded out the cavern walls.
“So you kept me breathing only for Ayla to torture me instead?”
A muscle jumped in his jaw, but he said nothing.
“We could’ve helped each other.” Asharyn might still stand. Five hatchlings might’ve never been taken. “But you have your family again. What is it like, getting everything you wanted without losing anything that mattered?”
“You think I lost nothing?” His answer rasped past Fenn’s blade. “Every day I kept silent stripped something from me. Every order I obeyed. Every time I held my son before Elashor took him, knowing he might forget me if I died before the next dawn.”
Serenna uncurled her hands, crescent marks throbbing across her palms. “Don’t offer me your guilt as a wound. You watched them drag me away and never moved.”
His gaze dropped to the roots at his feet. “Let us return to Vaelyn,” he said at last. “Please.”
Serenna laughed, the sound brief and disbelieving. “So you can trade our location for the king’s favor? Sail more ships under his banner? No.”
Saundyl’s head snapped up. “You think I want his favor? Mother remains compelled and alone. She obeys whatever commands Elashor left with her and carries another of his children while the court pretends either was her choice.”
Serenna went still. Saundyl had told her in Vaelyn weeks ago, and she’d set the truth aside for the ruthless work of surviving.
Elashor had tried to force the same on her with Jassyn. She’d been spared only because Ayla regarded her as property. But no one had stepped between Elashor and her mother.
Serenna had narrowed the war to those standing beside her. Guilt lodged in her chest, but any attempt to reach her mother in Vaelyn now could expose all those hidden in the caverns.
Saundyl had seen their numbers, their refuge, the families sheltered within it. She wouldn’t let that knowledge reach the elves.
She laid her fingers over Fenn’s wrist. The tendons in his forearm remained taut, his pulse striking hard against her touch. The dagger stayed at Saundyl’s throat.
Then Fenn drew it away, leaving a shallow score beneath Saundyl’s jaw. Her brother stumbled back, one hand closing over the cut.
“You’ll stay here under guard and answer every question we ask.” Serenna’s anger had run cold enough to steady her voice. “You’ve seen too much to walk out of this mountain free.”