Chapter Thirty-Three
ELYSSARA
My ruined body sharpens in an instant.
Ronyn.
“Fuck,” Kael mutters gruffly, shucking the blankets, already on his feet.
We dress without thought, only action, and I throw my hair into a tail, securing it with a leather strap.
“It’s the Flame-heart—I fucking know it,” I curse. I knew this wasn’t the end of what the Heart of Ashara would do to him. I knew it would come at a cost.
“We’ll handle it, El,” Kael assures, but I feel a trickle of panic through the tether which does nothing to soothe my frayed nerves.
We rush through the door, where Therion paces the platform in the treetops. He’s restless, disquieted.
But he casts his eyes over both of us, attuning to us, and a faint smile tugs at his lips. Fucking Aetherstrides and their senses.
“I guess you didn’t need me, after all,” Therion teases Kael, which earns him a sharp shove in the chest.
What the fuck does that mean? Need him for what?
I push down my curiosity—I don’t have time.
“Take us to Ronyn,” Kael commands, letting the taunt go.
But Therion’s already moving. He bounds down the steps from Kael’s room nestled in the trees like the graceful warrior he is. I follow, but my legs almost give out, still trembling and weak.
I force strength into my stride, but I stumble and trip down the stairs, anyway. I don’t care—I need to get to him.
Kael moves like he always does; powerful, controlled.
His muscles tense and strain as he leaps, his boots finding the ground.
He lands with the lethal grace of a duskprowler.
He spins, hand outstretched, waiting for me.
The moonlight glints off his god metal swords, and his muscled arms strain against the leather barely holding them.
I reach for his hand, leaping the last few steps.
Then, we run.
My boots collide with the forest floor, urgent and desperate, careening into the night. All pleasure forgotten in an instant.
Because the Final Gate can’t have him. Not when he’s only just come back to me. Not my Ronyn.
My chest heaves, and my legs blaze with heat as I push harder to keep up with Kael and Therion.
Thornewood rushes past me in a blur of greenery, light and wood. A kaleidoscope of myth and ethereal beauty nothing more than a second thought as my focus sharpens into the pointed tip of a blade.
That’s when I see it—
Jax, Merrik, Rubi, Seren, Daelen, and Correk surround a figure that writhes on the ground, kicking and snarling like a possessed beast.
Their weapons are drawn, aimed and ready to wield.
We slow our pace, not wanting to startle anyone.
Therion edges forward, axe drawn and held high above his shoulder.
“What the fuck?” Kael whispers as he follows Therion’s lead and prowls towards the group with a predator’s gait.
“It’s Ronyn. He’s not himself. Something else controls him,” Therion murmurs back.
That writhing creature is Ronyn?
“Approaching,” Therion announces just loud enough to warn the group, and they nod, never taking their eyes off the creature—Ronyn.
We join the group circling Ronyn, his form rigid, yet contorted. He twitches and moves with a jaggedness that looks preternatural. Inhuman.
My breath hitches at the sight of his misshapen body.
This can’t be happening.
But Ronyn stops.
He drags his hands across the earth to pull them in front of his gaze, inspecting them with confusion. As if his own body is foreign to him.
Then, his voice changes.
It drops into a low, rasping growl. “You are not worthy of my soul, mortal. Weak, frail human with lacking intelligence.” The voice rips from his throat in an insulting snarl. But it’s not Ronyn’s voice. It’s something other.
“My only question,” Daelen’s voice interjects, “is: what the fuck?”
Ronyn cries out in pain, or anger, or both—I’m not sure. His chest stretches open, and his arms shoot out on unnatural angles, contorting into shapes of anguish. Shapes that shouldn’t be possible. Shapes that remake a person.
“Do something!” I cry, not talking to anyone in particular. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to help.
“Rubi, can’t you put him to sleep or something?” Seren begs, crossbow trained on him, though her finger is nowhere near the trigger.
“Oh yeah, sure,” Rubi snaps sarcastically. “I’ll just go whip up a tonic to feed to the thrashing lunatic.”
“Something is changing,” Therion breathes, analyzing Ronyn with a sharp eye, not a shred of panic in his gaze.
“What is that on his shoulders?” Rubi asks through gritted teeth, narrowing her eyes on the dark patches that stretch and expand across his back.
Kael huffs a sound of realization. Training his eyes on the patches, as Ronyn struggles and grunts at the contortion. “Scales,” Kael finally breathes in an awed tone.
Nehvara’s words from our visit to Cindralis barrel into me like a shooting Star—sharp and hot.
You must find the Flame-heart a worthy vessel to take form within.
“It’s awakening within him,” I murmur, watching as the patches unfold into jet-black scales that gleam under the night sky.
“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; fuck that,” Daelen quips drily, though his face is humorless.
“I am worthy,” Ronyn counters, as if in conversation with himself, but I don’t miss the pained agony of his tone. “I’d lay down my life for her and everyone she loves.” He’s talking to no one. Or… someone. Tarrakai.
And he’s talking about me.
For Tarrakai to awaken in dragon form, he will need a worthy vessel—someone brave, who holds love for the Dravari line, loyal. Nehvara’s warning from Cindralis collides with my panic.
Ronyn is the worthy vessel.
And then, his body twists.
The sound is the first thing—bones splintering like tree trunks in a storm, the wet crunch of marrow snapping and remaking itself. Ronyn screams, his voice jagged and broken, until it fractures into a guttural growl that doesn’t belong to anything human.
His spine arches, bending wrong, too wrong, until I hear vertebrae grinding and popping.
His chest heaves, skin stretching, tearing, and then the scales erupt—black and gleaming like oil under moonlight.
They spread down his arms in a rush, each one bursting through his flesh with a sickening rip before hardening into armor.
“Leave him!” Therion bellows in warning. “Do not interfere!” His eyes lock on mine in warning, because he sees the way my fist clenches at my side, the way my jaw grinds, desperate to go to him. Aching to rescue him from the torment.
Though I don’t know what I could do.
The smell hits next—iron-rich blood and something older, volcanic. Charred and fiery.
“Fuck—this is not fun!” Ronyn’s voice bursts through the agony, strained but still so him. “Why does it feel like my organs are at war with each other?”
But then another voice overlays his, darker, ancient, vibrating through the marrow of the world itself: “This body is too small for me. This vessel is unworthy.”
The ground convulses. Trees shudder. And somewhere, somehow, I know what it is.
Awaken the Flame-heart and all will be restored in time. Not today, and not tomorrow, but soon. Nehvara warned me—she told me what would happen when the Flame-heart awakened. And here, I stand on the edge of its rebirth.
Power ripples through the soil beneath my boots, through the marrow of my bones. Not just Ronyn’s awakening—something older, vaster. But I know—the lost city stirs.
Cindralis is rising.
It’s as though two hearts beat at once: Ronyn’s fractured cry, and the slow, colossal pulse of a city rising unseen, unfelt by eyes, but undeniable in the soul.
The Stars themselves seem to recoil, making space for what has returned.
Cindralis awakens with Tarrakai, just as Nehvara warned—stones grinding, the earth’s bones shifting, the mountains groaning awake after centuries.
“Cindralis,” I whisper, awed.
“Tvira!” Rubi cries out, desperate and raw.
Ronyn snarls, half in pain, half in protest. “Oi! I’m right here, thank you very much. And I rather like my vessel, if it’s all the same to you!”
His jaw snaps wide, teeth lengthening into fangs, his scream warping into a roar that shakes the canopy.
Wings tear from his back with a wet crack, unfurling in a rush of night-black membrane that blots out the moon.
His hands—no, claws—dig into the dirt, leaving deep gouges as his body elongates, stretches, becomes something gargantuan.
We stumble back, desperately trying to make way for the mammoth beast he’s becoming.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
The forest bends to him. The sky parts for him.
And then, silence.
Where Ronyn once writhed, a dragon towers—scales like obsidian, eyes burning molten gold.
Tarrakai reborn.
“Holy fuckin’ Stars,” Merrik curses, eyes pinned on the beast before us.
Jax doesn’t blink. Only looks at Ronyn with something between awe and terror.
The voice that fills my tether is doubled—one soul ancient as the Stars themselves, the other Ronyn, still infuriatingly light and cavalier.
“Kneel before Tarrakai, soul of fire, Ender of Kingdoms,” the dragon bellows into the tether.
And then, layered right beneath it, Ronyn’s familiar drawl: “Don’t forget the first god metal archer of Aevryn. If they’re gonna bow, it may as well be to both of us. We’re kind of a pair now, right?”
The sheer absurdity of the two voices sharing one mind, one mouth rips a shocked laugh from me. But my skin prickles, because I know what this means.
The Flame-heart has awakened. And the realms will never be the same.
“We are no pair, mortal. I tolerate your existence so I may use your vessel as I please. Nothing more,” Tarrakai snarls.
“I think you’ll find I’m impossible not to love. You’ll come around,” Ronyn counters nonchalantly, unfazed and unoffended by Tarrakai’s brutal dismissal.
I laugh. Because it’s all I can think to do. Ronyn still exists. He still lives.
“He wants us to bow before him,” I breathe to the group, but no one moves. No one even registers I’ve spoken.