Chapter 37
JASSYN
The island Jassyn had chosen for the council hung at the Aetherveil’s eastern edge, a shard of ancient stone where the world gave way to wind, cloud, and the long fall.
He kept to the center of the isle, where illusion maps hovered above a table he’d coaxed from the rock that morning.
His shaman blood had spoken through living things—root and branch and bloom.
Blossom had taught him to reach deeper, into the bones beneath, until the rock shuddered awake under his palms.
Without her, the earth had fallen quiet, stripped of the deep hum that had once traveled with her footsteps and the flowers that had opened in her wake. Jassyn pressed his palms flat to the table, searching the bedrock for an imprint of her passage.
He peeled his hands from the stone before grief could calcify. Not here. Not now.
Druid and wraith scouts had delivered three reports since dawn, each one redrawing the human army’s position in the Everglow Rainforest. Their findings became turquoise threads weaving from Jassyn’s fingers, moving away from the dark scar of the Falling Star Crater, which Lykor had studied with such savage stillness that morning.
“Do we approach the crater from the northern ridge or the lake?” Kaedryn asked, wings furled tight to her spine. Her guildmasters waited beside her, their arguments suspended on his answer.
“The ridge,” Jassyn said, weaving the luminous route over higher ground. “The lake puts us in line of sight of the Drowned Spires.” He glanced at Koln. “Send a squad of wraith after nightfall to scout the crater’s rim. I want confirmation of what’s waiting there before we commit any forces.”
Koln nodded, adjusting his eye patch.
Trella banked over the island, wings thundering hard enough to lift Jassyn’s curls. From the saddle, Zaeryn cast down a leather satchel on braided ropes of force and released it without breaking the dracovae’s turn. Trella wheeled back toward Naru, where another ranger circled above.
The conversation closed over the interruption.
Kaedryn turned and started disputing supply routes with her guildmasters, their words sheared by the wind.
Koln opened the satchel and muttered as he rifled through Zaeryn’s report before laying the newly recovered Starshards across the table.
Each had been salvaged from the defenses dismantled among the upper islands.
The sun burned low, copper deepening to crimson along the horizon. Serenna, Vesryn, and Fenn still flew the upper currents with the rangers, searching for Veyrix until the failing light grounded them. But finding the dragon wouldn’t matter until they claimed another Heart.
Jassyn’s illumination flickered, his fingers stilling over the map’s crater. The absence he’d kept buried under reports and formations all day widened like a fissure through every careful calculation.
He glanced up and scanned the crown isle, cataloging rangers, druids, and magus.
No Lykor.
Jassyn turned back to the map without seeing it, his hands closing into fists. Lykor said he was going to check the perimeter before seeking out Fenn. That had been hours ago.
Everything collapsed into a single fact.
Lykor had never gone to Fenn.
Jassyn had known, perhaps since before the sun reached its zenith, though he’d refused to acknowledge it. All afternoon, he’d folded maps over it and written formations across it, because naming it meant admitting Lykor had lied and entered the mines alone.
Jassyn stared at the crater blazing at the illusion’s heart, flight paths drawn around it, wraith scouts staggered along the rim, forces committed in measured stages so every life had a path back out.
Lykor had stepped beyond them all and left his own off the count. Like Jassyn’s careful planning meant nothing.
He should’ve known from Lykor’s face that morning, from the way his jaw had ground hard enough to crack teeth.
He’d tracked the illusion like a captive predator pacing the bars while Kaedryn debated formations and the rangers argued flight corridors, every added precaution tightening the cage around him.
Lykor hadn’t seen strategy. He’d seen delay.
The luminous map hovered, faithful to a plan that no longer mattered.
Lykor would’ve torn open a portal as close to the crater as he could, then flown the remaining distance. Without telling Jassyn. Without a single soul at his back.
Jassyn crossed the isle. Conversation dwindled behind him as Kaedryn broke from her guildmasters and moved to intercept him.
“Continue without me.” His voice held steady while the rest of him shook. “Koln has the updated formations. Send the wraith scouts as planned.”
His guards moved to follow. Jassyn stopped them with a lifted palm, the symmetry turning his stomach as he mirrored Lykor’s recklessness with his own.
At the island’s edge, stone surrendered to empty sky.
He hauled on the portaling talent borrowed for the war and tore a rift open. Kaedryn shouted his name, but Jassyn shifted into wings and plunged through.
The portal cast him high above the Everglow Rainforest, well north of the Drowned Spires. Opening a rift any closer would’ve announced his presence.
His stomach pitched as a gust tore through his wings, the canopy leagues below. Beastblood flooded his limbs, snatched the anger already burning, and honed the world to wind and pursuit.
Jassyn caught a current and angled south until the trees blurred.
He flew until the rainforest gave way to scrubland, his rage burning down to coals. Fear rose through the time already lost. Every hour Jassyn had spent planning was another hour Lykor had vanished deeper underground.
He drove his wings harder.
A white shimmer kindled against the setting sun. Jassyn flared his dragonsight, drawing the distance into detail.
Ships crowded the lake around the Drowned Spires, their masts bristling against the horizon. Supply barges rode low among them, hulls heavy with the makings of the king’s next campaign.
It would have to wait.
Jassyn veered east. The ground resolved into a scarred plateau, the crater carved through its center.
Essence raced along switchback scaffolds as scores of soldiers streamed between platforms. Patrols fanned across the rim while others hauled bodies from the upper works and dragged supply carts aside to clear the descent.
Jassyn’s heart plunged faster than his altitude.
Whatever Lykor had found below, the king’s forces were now closing in.
Jassyn banked toward the northern rim and slipped over its crest, letting the ridge rise between him and the crater’s glow. Dusk swallowed him as he dropped along the outer slope. He struck the shale hard, loose stone skidding beneath his boots, and dispelled his wings as his palms met the earth.
He hauled on Blossom’s gift, and her power poured through his hands, sinking past soil until it snagged in the bedrock. Green tendrils drove downward from his fingertips, prying fractures through the stone as his awareness raced along their branching paths.
Jassyn pulled the earth apart around his body and drove himself into the opening. Soil and shale streamed past his shoulders like dark water around a prow, roots bracing the narrow hollow as he descended. Once he passed, they drew stone and earth closed behind him so no one could follow.
He steered the tunnel deeper, igniting illumination as darkness pressed closer with every span.
Crystal threaded the stone in veins lit from within by Essence. Dead roots lay petrified into dark arteries, fused to glasslike panels joined at angles too precise for the earth to have formed.
Jassyn sent his awareness ahead through the roots, dividing telepathy among dozens of searching tips that slipped through the narrowest fractures in the rock.
Lykor.
The name traveled deeper through every tendril.
Ahead, the crystal veins thickened until no stone remained between them.
His roots struck the crystalline wall and recoiled. The impact snapped through his arms and set his teeth humming with a resonance he knew from the Maw, from Skylash’s prison, from lightning screaming through glass.
Aelfyn architecture, beyond his understanding, crafted by hands a thousand years gone.
Jassyn turned the roots against it anyway.
They struck again. Cracks raced from the impact as the flawless surface gave with a groan, splitting wide enough for soil and roots to bore their way through. Green threaded the breach, claiming purchase where nothing living had grown.
Jassyn sent his telepathy through the roots until it struck a banked inferno. The contact seized his whole body—that snarl woven into silence, the shape of Lykor’s mind he would know in any dark.
But another presence had reached Lykor first, and Jassyn knew it wasn’t Aesar. Ancient and ruinously patient, it flooded the channels of Lykor’s mind, driving him away while its will settled into muscle and bone.
Jassyn’s breath caught hard enough to hurt.
He stopped searching and started tearing.
Pressure split behind his eyes, hot blood streaming from his nose. His knees buckled inside the tunnel he held open around himself. Lykor was on the other side.
Jassyn wrenched more power through the earth.
Crystal shattered as roots punched downward, a hundred green fists battering a throat through stone. He fell through, striking the floor on one shoulder, pain flashing white across his vision. Blood pattered from his jaw as he forced himself upright.
Vaulted walls rose around him, crystalline panels strobing with Essence. At the threshold, Lykor stood wraith-still, eyes emptied of focus, hands slack at his sides.
A figure wrought from turquoise light hovered beside him, fingers splayed along his cheek.
Jassyn’s ribs locked around the next breath. Light frayed at the figure’s edges—the same illusion magic Vesryn and Serenna had described from the Bramblemaw den. A preserved Aelfyn projection, sustained through Starshards and touching Lykor’s mind.
Jassyn crossed the chamber.
The apparition turned toward him with a predator’s brief appraisal. It judged him beneath notice, then returned its attention to Lykor.
“Lykor.”
Jassyn’s throat tightened around the name.
Lykor didn’t blink, his chest barely stirring.
Jassyn reached for his arm, the skin against his fingers ice-cold.
The figure’s hand remained against Lykor’s cheek. Jassyn pressed his palm to Lykor’s temple, setting his touch against its claim, and threaded telepathy through the contact.
The ancient will had driven both Lykor and Aesar deep, remaking every passage in its wake. Lykor’s presence blurred at the edges, his familiar fury dimmed to a failing ember as the intruder replaced him piece by piece. Soon, there’d be no one left to save.
Jassyn reached for that heat with deliberate care, coaxing Lykor forward until his own will found his body again.
The illusion’s light pulsed.
Lykor struck, his claw raking across Jassyn’s chest before he registered the swing.