Chapter 42
SERENNA
Serenna flew over the Aetherveil, leading their flight forces with Vesryn and Fenn at her sides.
The scattered isles fell away as they climbed toward the crown island, its heights lost in clouds.
Bare spires narrowed to jagged teeth of stone, then vanished altogether, leaving only wind and the burn in her lungs.
Behind them, the cold morning sky thundered with wings.
Zaeryn held the rangers in formation, their dracovae laboring where the air thinned.
Kaedryn flew beside Cinderax at the head of the druids and wraith, obsidian scales flashing in the golden tide of dawn.
Daeryn’s surviving loyalists brought up the rear, their new wings less certain at this height.
The children of earth and starlight threaded through the gaps, bending crosscurrents before they could fracture the column.
Nearly seventy Starshards glinted among their forces, pried from traps on the lower islands, inherited through generations of druids, or carried back by Lykor from the Falling Star Crater.
Only those with ancestral gems remained bound by blood—Serenna had forbidden new wielders from taking up the practice until they understood it, denying the enemy another body to turn against them.
Across the column, clusters of five practiced joining their magic as they flew. Each exchange struck Serenna’s awareness like a match in the dark, prismatic light leaping from gem to gem as the wielders passed the current.
Every wingbeat tightened Serenna’s ribs as the crown island claimed more of the sky. If Veyrix was anywhere, he’d be at its summit. And if the king’s razorwings had discovered this last sanctuary, they’d be hunting the same heights.
Below, a dracovae screamed as a crosscurrent buckled its wings. Zaeryn’s flare of Essence scored a command through the air, and the rangers peeled from the formation to circle below, where the wind loosened its grip on feathered wings.
This was the first divide they’d planned. The children of earth and starlight would open the next reach, then Serenna, Vesryn, and Fenn would take the final ascent alone.
Ahead, the wind folded back on itself, currents colliding until every route upward sealed as quickly as it opened. Serenna pointed toward the knot. “We’ll need the shamans from here.”
Kaedryn drew alongside her, wings strumming a steady rhythm. “My scalebound will hold with Zaeryn while the children of earth and starlight open the sky. We’ll watch the horizon.”
Vesryn’s fingers strayed again to the pouch at his hip, where the leather stretched over the Heart of Stars’ angular facets. Jassyn had entrusted it to them before they took flight, the relic carrying all their hope that Veyrix would be found and freed before the day was done.
“Keep the sky open for retreat,” Serenna said as she hovered. The cold gnawed through the membranes of her wings, finding blood that ran too close to the surface. “If something goes wrong…”
“Define wrong,” Fenn said. “Because my threshold’s considerably higher than yours, she-elf.”
Vesryn rolled his eyes. “Your threshold is a brush with death.”
“If something goes wrong,” Serenna repeated, ignoring them both, “and Veyrix reacts like Skylash did when we freed her in the Maw, get everyone out.”
Kaedryn dipped her chin. “Fly true.”
Serenna returned the nod.
Below, the children of earth and starlight spread across the sky. Power shuddered from their hands into the air, buckling the wind. Currents wrenched apart, opening a single corridor along the island’s spine.
Fenn cracked his knuckles as they angled toward it. “Let’s go free a dragon.”
“Let’s find the dragon first,” Vesryn said, his wing claws clacking. “But I know you prefer courting death with a sense of occasion.”
The bonds brightened on either side of Serenna, their anticipation rippling. She led them into the open path, the three of them ascending the crown island alone.
For a few hundred feet, the funnel held.
Then the ancient winds tightened.
Serenna cast her senses outward. Currents, pressure, and absence etched themselves across her awareness. Veyrix’s druids had twisted the upper reaches into one final defense, its paths splintering into switchbacks before curling toward the island’s roots.
A channel collapsed beneath her. Serenna banked hard, caught the next draft on a snapped downstroke, and cut through a gap already sealing ahead.
Fenn’s wing overlapped hers as the gust struck, splitting its force before he slipped back into place.
Vesryn held half a wingspan ahead on her other side, taking the brunt whenever the wind veered.
When Fenn yielded a span of sky, Vesryn filled it, and the old friction between them became formation.
Below, the children of earth and starlight vanished into the haze of distance. Gusts tore loose through the forced corridor, unmaking the routes around them. Serenna tucked her wings close and sheared the gale aside, holding open pockets of calm barely large enough to slip through.
With every wingbeat, the thinning air scoured Serenna’s throat, leaving each inhale stranded high in her chest. The Aetherveil’s chain fell away like scattered rubble, its largest islands reduced to pebbles before they disappeared completely.
The southern horizon darkened at the edges, swollen with a storm.
A shadow passed over them.
Serenna’s scales cinched tighter. Above, a wind glider hovered in the open air, the pearly sheen of its body catching the dawn. Where a Starshard had once glinted in its skull, flesh had sealed over an empty scar.
More gliders moved through the upper reaches, the ten they’d released scattered in loose clusters. Broad wings swept in measured strokes, their bodies rising and settling with eerie grace, each turn tracing no discernible pattern.
Fenn’s wing claws curled as he tracked the nearest. “They don’t know they’re free.”
The gems had sustained them for countless centuries—perhaps the only reason the creatures still moved through the sky.
Serenna’s fingers lifted toward her own Starshard. They’d given the gliders freedom and no promise that they would live to keep it.
The creatures banked through a languid arc around them. Serenna braced, every membrane in her wings waiting for the wrench of stolen sky. But the gliders drifted aside in succession, opening a path between them before settling back into their wandering course.
Serenna continued upward, the currents drawing tighter and faster with the climb. The sky twisted into a vortex, shrieking along its rim. Her wings hammered against the spinning wall, membranes pulled taut enough to burn, each turn rattling her skull.
She sank her awareness into the wind, but the vortex ground against her hold until the strain bit through every joint. Her grip broke, and she dragged Essence through her Starshard instead.
Fenn’s and Vesryn’s gems flared with hers. Prismatic light lashed between them, closing the circle.
She honed their gathered magic to a spearpoint and struck.
A punch of force detonated outward. The funnel buckled from the blast, a breach ripping wide for a single wingbeat.
Fenn didn’t wait. His claws locked around her and Vesryn, and the world tore sideways.
They snapped through. The wind spun shut, sealing the breach like water closing over a sinking hull.
Serenna’s wings swept for resistance and found none. She dropped before lurching into a hover, every muscle still braced against the gale raging behind them.
That flare of Essence had burned bright enough to betray them across half the Aetherveil. Serenna scanned the horizon, but saw nothing beyond the storm that had swallowed more of the south, its dark edge creeping closer.
The island’s summit spread before them, vast and suspended above a shifting floor of cloud. At this height, the sky burned an unforgiving blue, the sun stripped of haze and merciless over a place the realms had forgotten.
Crystal had grown through the earthen isle like coral in a reef, the same Aelfyn architecture that had chained Cinderax under the lake and sealed Skylash inside the Maw.
At the center of the island, the dragon waited.
Serenna stopped breathing.
Entombed in crystal, Veyrix was twice Skylash’s length. The prison had seized his serpentine body at the edge of flight, haunches braced and wings pinned tight to his flanks, every line of him still straining toward the leap.
His jaws gaped open, fangs bared around a silent roar, its violence trapped forever in his throat. Crystalline eyes stared unseeing.
That was the worst of it. They remained open to a sky he could never reach, its endless blue laid before him as another cruelty.
Wind still moved around him. Currents bent toward his body and died, seeking the dragon the Aelfyn had trapped a millennium ago.
Serenna couldn’t look away. She leaned toward him with the wind, grief folding through her as her boots struck the glassed earth, Vesryn and Fenn dropping down beside her.
Vesryn circled the dragon, drawing the Heart of Stars from the pouch at his hip. The relic blazed between his fingers, the full spectrum of his talents spilling through his palm.
They gathered in the dragon’s shadow, where silence held the shape of a scream.
Vesryn ignited Essence. Power ruptured through his Starshard, and Serenna felt the summons tug at her gem, his magic seeking hers. She reached back without thought, opening to the pull as Fenn’s magic joined the current.
Their circle flared to life as Vesryn raised the Heart toward the dragon. His magic burned brighter, each surge tightening in his control before he drew in more power.
Illumination began its climb beyond any safe threshold, past the place where light became heat, where heat became starlight that didn’t belong to this world. Pressure packed behind Serenna’s eyes as prismatic radiance trembled around the Heart.
She tensed, her body remembering the Bramblemaw den.
How the stars had descended in the Aelfyn tomb, that terrible looseness of her soul lifting from her bones while Vesryn clawed her back from the gravity of the spiral.
Every instinct screamed to pull away, to smother the circle, to stop the magic before it consumed them.
Instead, she fed their current harder.
Essence whirled through the linked gems, and the force narrowed to a white point in Vesryn’s grasp.
Sunfire erupted from the Heart.
Vesryn’s jaw locked. Veins of white and gold seared into the crystal encasing Veyrix, flooding through the Aelfyn’s chains. The prison groaned. Hairline fractures raced outward, weeping radiance through the ancient cage.
Glass shattered, shards catching the sunfire’s glow as they spun away. A tremor traveled through Veyrix’s obsidian scales, stuttering along a body held rigid for centuries.
Then lightning split the sky.
Vesryn killed the sunfire as the bolt cleaved the magic between the Heart and Veyrix’s prison. The backlash slammed through Serenna’s Starshard and buckled her knees. Fenn caught them both and warped clear before the next strike burst the glassed earth where they’d stood.
Skylash descended in a storm of sparks. She struck the summit hard enough to jar Serenna’s teeth, her gaze locked on Veyrix. Her violet eyes swept the fractures smoking with light.
Then she hurled herself at the prison.
A roar tore from her, a thousand years of grief and fury breaking open. Lightning hammered the crystal. Her wing claws ripped trenches through the glassed surface, fangs gouging the weakened seams until sparks sprayed around her.
Each impact tolled through the summit and climbed Serenna’s spine. The crystal held, strong enough to cage a tempest dragon and withstand the fury of his mate.
With a hiss, Skylash whirled on them, eyes seething with sparks. “FREE HIM.”
Before the snarl left her throat, Vesryn reignited their circle. The linked Starshards converged in a single violent pulse. The pull hooked through Serenna’s chest, Essence surging before she could brace. Sunfire lanced from the Heart once more and slammed back into the crystal.
Skylash’s lightning chased it through the fractures, widening every break until both powers tore deeper into the cage.
Clouds massed along the southern horizon and pressure prickled across Serenna’s skin, gathering beyond the pulse of Essence. Skylash’s lightning already tore through Veyrix’s prison, yet the storm kept building.
Serenna drove more power through her gem until its facets burned against her skin.
Crystal cracked around Veyrix’s haunches. Vesryn held the Heart between both hands, narrowing the blaze into each fissure. The prince who’d nearly incinerated them while freeing Cinderax now wielded sunfire like a blade, carving where once he would’ve detonated.
The crystal veiling Veyrix’s eyes split.
White pupils contracted to vertical slits, and bewilderment surfaced behind them. His gaze moved, sweeping across the ruined island before lifting to the sky still held beyond his reach.
Then confusion ruptured into rage.
Wind thundered from him with enough force to shear them off the island, fragments spinning through the blast.
Serenna threw herself flat, wing claws screeching across the glass as Fenn and Vesryn struck the ground beside her.
Skylash bellowed.
Veyrix wrenched his jaws free from the crystal. A thousand years of silenced rage answered her in one ruinous roar.
The southern storm reached them in a roll of thunder, its black front heaving above the clouds and dragging winter over the summit.
Ice struck Serenna’s cheek. She touched the sting, her fingers coming away wet and freezing.
Then a deeper roar split the sky, ancient and bitter with frost. Her beastblood knew the dragon before her mind did.
And the cold that followed carried the weight of a king.