Chapter 6
ESME
Istare after him, still feeling the presence of his touch like a phantom on my skin.
Hesitantly, I start to follow, and the tunnel soon opens abruptly into a space so vast I stop dead in my tracks. The breath I was holding hitches in my throat, vanishing into the muffled silence of the cavern.
The ceiling arches hundreds of feet above, lost in a soft, amber luminescence that seems to bleed directly from the stone—perhaps some kind of preservation charm.
Terraced galleries are carved into the circular walls, rising level after level, connected by thin, spiraling stone stairs.
Every inch of those galleries is packed.
There are thousands of leather-bound tomes, scrolls tucked into honeycombed alcoves, stone tablets etched with runes that hum with a faint, rhythmic power, and bundles of papyrus so fragile they look like they might dissolve if I breathe too hard.
The scent is overwhelming—a heady, intoxicating mix of old parchment, cedarwood, dried ink, and the sharp, clean smell of mountain. It’s the scent of history…. kept safe from time.
“One could argue this is where our journey began,” Dayn muses quietly from behind me. “In a library.”
I turn to face him, the memory of that shared evening sifting through Heathborne’s restricted section flickering back to life—the dim aisles, the whispered arguments, the way that night changed everything. It feels longer ago than it should.
“Dayn,” I whisper, my voice barely a thread in the immense quiet. “What is this place?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. He walks forward into the center of the floor, where a massive circular rug—woven with scenes of dragons and humans standing in a peace that feels like a fairy tale—lies beneath a heavy oak desk.
The desk is cluttered with open manuscripts and a set of silver inkwells.
“Where I went when the world decided it didn't want the truth anymore,” he replies, voice low. “I’ve been gathering these since before the first fire was lit in the Blood Wars.”
“Your… true hoard,” I murmur.
Apparently, he wasn’t exaggerating. Dragons really do hoard knowledge. Brynn would have a field day.
I walk toward the nearest shelf, my fingers hovering just an inch from the spines. I see titles in languages that probably haven't been spoken in a millennium. I see maps of cities that I don’t recognize, probably now simply dust and legend.
This feels like more than just a collection.
I look at the desk again, at the way the chair is pulled out, at the small stack of personal journals bound in dark green leather.
“Books,” I say softly, turning back to him. Not gold. Not jewels. “You’ve been hoarding us. Our history… All of it?”
“As much as I’ve been able to.”
I think of every argument we’ve had about my people’s version of history, his every confident insistence that the truth was messier than I wanted to believe. Maybe he wasn’t just bringing in his own bias. Maybe he really does have the proof?
Dayn lifts an ancient wooden dragon from the desk, thumb tracing its worn scales fondly. The carving is small enough to fit in his palm. “Fire takes everything eventually,” he says, voice distant. “But ideas die first. Once forgotten, they're truly gone.”
“So you built this fortress of books. Does anyone else even know it exists?”
“Byzu does.” The muscle in his jaw flickers. “He assisted me before we retreated underground.”
Cold washes through me. “Byzu? Then Anees might—”
“No.” Dayn sets the dragon down with deliberate care.
“Arrynth told me that Anees used compulsion on Byzu to extract specific information—darkbloods, me, the Ides.
This library wouldn't have registered as important.” His gaze slides away, shoulders tensing at the mention of his brother.
“Speaking of the Ides...” He looks back at me, amber eyes refocusing.
The reminder lands heavily. We have work to do. But I still have a few questions.
I turn from his intensifying gaze and gesture at the endless shelves. “Quite the collection. Did you just... help yourself to whatever caught your fancy?”
He frowns. “I curated.”
“Semantics,” I say, though my smirk softens the accusation. “But why build your own library? I thought your people keep their own extensive archives.”
He traces a finger along the edge of the desk. “This was meant to be neutral ground. Helena and I dreamed of creating such spaces, where both our kinds could meet as equals. Where knowledge wasn't weaponized, just preserved.”
“But it never happened,” I say.
His expression darkens. “Wars happened before it could.”
I lean against the desk, studying the shadows beneath his eyes. “You and Helena... it feels like there's more to that story than you've told me.”
Dayn's gaze drifts to a leather-bound journal.
“We met during that tenuous window before the wars, when peace seemed possible. Helena had just risen to power in Darkbirch, and I represented the dragons in the diplomatic talks.” His mouth curves in a ghost of a smile.
“My mother's influence. She believed in diplomacy.”
“And what about your ‘secret deals?’” I ask. I remember him mentioning them to me only briefly in Draethys’s Repository. “You said you made certain alliances specifically with my ancestors the Salems, like Helena, outside of general treaties formed with darkbloods.”
Dayn’s hand stills on the green leather journal, his silhouette a sharp, brooding cut against the amber-lit shelves.
“The treaties were for the masses, Esme,” he says, after a pause.
“They were fragile things, built on the shifting sands of public politics. Helena knew, as I did, that they could shatter at the first spark of greed, and that a storm was on the horizon. So we made pacts that weren't recorded in any official archives. Pacts even her husband didn’t know about. Pacts of blood and silence.”
“You mean blood oaths?”
He walks to a recessed alcove and pulls out a thin, silver-bound cylinder.
He unscrews the cap, sliding out a scroll that has its own subtle luminescence.
He unrolls it, and I see two signatures at the bottom: Helena Salem and Daynthazar of House Draxion.
The ink isn't ink at all—it’s dried blood, one dark and thick, the other shimmering with a faint, draconic gold.
“Yes. In an effort to forge closer ties, we exchanged secrets from our respective sides. Secrets that would have earned us both executions for treason.” His gaze flicks to mine. “Hence the need for personal pacts.”
I frown. “And is that why you have such a fetish for forging them with me—even one-sided? That very first mark you put on me…”
A faint smile curves the corner of his mouth.
“Was indeed one-sided,” he agrees. “And I had the advantage of knowing how to manipulate your blood rather intimately, thanks to my prior connections to your bloodline.”
I glance at my wrist where he first stamped his runes. The marks are still there. I just don’t notice them much anymore—not compared to the bond. “Noted,” I mutter. “You know that doesn’t make it sound better, right?”
Dayn nods. “I know.”
Our gazes lock across the library floor. The silence between us feels not uncomfortable, but watchful. His amber eyes search mine as if looking for something hidden beneath my surface. I shift under his scrutiny, still unsure what he hopes to find.
“So, the reason we’re here,” I start cautiously, taking a tentative step forward.
He nods, watching me closely. “You want to fully recover from the Ide trials. To be yourself again.”
Or as much of myself as I can be, in the circumstances… I nod back.
“And after that?” His question hangs in the air, quiet yet somehow amplified by the vastness around us.
I draw a careful breath. The truth is… I am not sure.
Being away from Darkbirch, currently without my coven's direct influence, I feel like I exist in some undefined middle space—not exactly bound by their authority, yet still tethered by a sense of duty to my people that feels nearly as binding.
Darkbirch would expect me back. They always do.
And I’d go. I always have.
Except now there’s this faint, nagging unease I can’t explain—a current of doubt that whispers through my veins, a sense of restlessness whose origins I can’t exactly pinpoint.
I don’t know what it is. I only know that, somehow, the thought of walking back into my old routine doesn’t sit comfortably like it did before.
Dayn’s eyes never leave mine, while the cavernous library seems to contract around us.
“I’d first need to get the lay of the land,” I say, steadying myself. “See exactly what’s been happening in our absence.”
He nods. “Logical.” And then he says nothing more, instead moving toward a shelf of books.
I follow him, wondering what he’s about to fish for.
“So… if you’ve alphabetized none of it, how do you know where to find stuff?” I ask.
“I remember where I put my things,” Dayn says, his hand hovering over a row of spines bound in what looks like some kind of iridescent dragon-scale leather.
“That why you always seem to find me?” I mutter.
Dayn’s mouth tilts. “Possibly.”
He pulls a thick, heavy volume from the shelf. Its cover is a deep, bruised purple color, inlaid with silver filigree. He carries it to the massive oak desk and clears a space, his movements focused and almost reverent.
I stand beside him, watching as he carefully unclasps the silver latch. The pages inside are vellum, thin as a dragonfly’s wing, covered in dense, spidery script and intricate diagrams of… the soul—depicted as a complex web of intersecting ley lines and harmonic nodes.
“Soul-Tuning,” he reads, his voice dropping into a scholarly cadence that does something strange to my insides. “Volume four: Resonance and Interference.”
“Tuning?” I murmur, my eyes scanning a diagram surrounded by jagged, dissonant vibrations. “Like a piano?”