60. Eradin
CHAPTER SIXTY
ERADIN
The chamber stretched up and up, so high the ceiling disappeared into darkness that swallowed light. Empty except for the crystal column rising from the center. Rainbows throbbed through it in waves, echoing the unnatural rhythm of the floor beneath us.
My magic erupted, red lines blazing up past my shoulders in a roar of heat that drove straight through my head. Pain blazed through me, sharp enough my knees buckled.
Fen caught me, his arm around my waist, but I barely felt him. The light was pulling.
My magic didn’t strain toward it. It lunged, the way a drowning person gulps down air, and dragged the rest of me with it.
“Eradin.” Fen’s voice came from far away. “What’s happening?”
I couldn’t answer. My teeth were clenched too tight, my jaw locked against the scream building in my throat.
The thing in the column was alive.
My magic recognized it the way you did the scent of rot or the sound of a predator hunting you in the dark. Ancient. Frantic.
My boots scraped across the polished stone, my body walking forward, yanked by invisible ropes.
“Eradin, stop.” Fen’s grip tightened, trying to hold me back.
I couldn’t stop.
I was hauled closer, out of his arms. Five feet. Three. The light blazed brighter, and the pull intensified until I swore my bones would crack from the pressure building inside me.
My palm hit the surface.
The Oracle recognized my magic the way a starving man recognized meat. A shadow inside the column lunged toward me, its hunger scraping across my flesh.
The images didn’t flood my mind; they smashed through me.
A dragon screaming as its collar flared white, magic ripping from its body in streams that had weight and texture, flowing here, into this column, feeding something that had been eating for centuries.
A rider on their knees. Red lines up their arms. The floor swallowing them whole.
Another.
Another.
Too many faces. Too many open mouths.
Too many to count, overlapping until my mind blurred.
When the next image hit, my palm seared where it touched the column.
And it showed me…
The entity inside wasn’t granting wishes.
She was a prisoner, and prisoners didn’t have the power to give. They could only take.
The elite weren’t honoring this thing. They’d caged her. Chained something vast and ancient and at one time, benevolent, inside, then spent centuries feeding her to keep her docile. Every winner and dragon that died in the trials had flowed here, keeping the prison intact.
Keeping their power intact.
And we’d walked in wrapped in wild magic, bound together by a fragmented pact that made us the perfect fuel.
I finally saw the whole machine and found it as simple as a ledger. The collars bled the dragons. The pillars carried what they bled. The trials culled everything too weak to feed her, and delivered whatever was strong enough to hold her.
Commons were never barred from the machine because they threatened it, but because they had nothing worth bleeding. No dragons, no collars, no magic. Nothing to harvest.
Until me.
The wish was never the prize. The wish was the bait.
The floor beneath my boots glowed, and the Oracle’s desperation tore through me, a wave of feral rage.
The information had cost me. The Oracle hooked deeper, threads of light spreading from my palm up my forearm, burning channels through flesh. I caught my scream in my throat because screaming meant opening my mouth, and I couldn’t afford to lose even that much control.
“Fates,” I hissed.
Fen’s gaze tracked to the left, and he went rigid beside me. He peered into the shadows.
A figure slumped on the floor there, barely visible, folded in on itself.
The person looked up.
I recognized him from a portrait I’d seen once, though that man had been whole. This man’s skin had gone translucent in places, showing a faint glow of light beneath. His eyes were too bright, his pupils swallowed by a shine that had nothing to do with health.
Twenty-three years had changed him into something that wasn’t quite human anymore.
The collar around his throat fluctuated with the same rhythm as the ones the dragons wore. Like them, it had also worked its way into his flesh.
And it connected him to the column.
Jaris Lancifer.
Fen’s father.
His mouth moved, the sound barely reaching us. “Fen. Run.”
Fen didn’t move. Through the bond, I felt his mind try to reject what his eyes were showing him.
Not possible. The thought careened through him, frantic, searching for another explanation. Any explanation. His father was dead. His body had burned in a pyre. He’d spent most of his life building himself into someone who wouldn’t fail the way Jaris had.
Except Jaris hadn’t failed.
He’d been taken.
His grip on my hand went slack.
“Father?”
The word came out broken, years of grief and rage and endless love compressed into two syllables.
He locked his knees, and his hand found mine and gripped so hard my bones ground together. I was the only thing keeping him upright.
“I tried to stop them. After I won, I tried.” Jaris traced a finger along the collar. “But I couldn’t.” His eyes closed. When they opened again, they held agony. “I’m so sorry, son. The… The wind doesn’t care if you’re scared.” He swallowed hard. “But I’m scared.”
A phrase so like my mother’s, yet different. I’d heard it before. Where?
I couldn’t think about it now. Because a glow was building beneath my boots in the same pattern that had swallowed Reece’s body, a web of light growing brighter by the second.
My boots oozed down into the marble.
The stone pulled at me, recognizing my wild magic.
The perfect replacement for whatever Jaris had become.
The Oracle wanted to claim us as anchors.
The scale pendant flared beneath my tunic, so hot it should’ve burned through fabric and bone. But it didn’t, because the heat was Selira’s essence, concentrated and feral, remembering what this thing was and what she had done to dragonkind for longer than humans had words.
The Oracle felt it too.
Her pull stuttered.
Then she pushed back.
The heat from the scale and the Oracle’s hunger slammed against each other inside my chest.
I cried out, doubling over. Fen’s arm locked around me.
The roots of light beneath my boots flickered, recoiling, then surging again, as if it couldn’t decide whether the scale was prey or predator.
She decided.
The roots pulled back. Whatever lived in Selira’s scale, the Oracle had tasted it and didn’t want more. She couldn’t consume it the way she had everything else. And if she couldn’t consume the scale…
True bonds, Jaris had tried to tell us. It can’t take what’s been given.
The word arrived like my mother’s hands on a wound. The scale wasn’t armor. It was a thing Selira had chosen to give me, freely, and freely given was the one language this cage had no meaning for.
With her retreating, I thought we had a chance. But the Oracle surged back, stronger and angry now, and the floor blazed so bright I had to close my eyes to keep from being blinded.
My shriek rang out.
Fen’s horror slammed into me. He needed to reach his father and pull him free. That determination collided with his need to protect me. He was tearing himself apart trying to choose.
“If the Oracle wants an anchor,” he growled, “it can take my soul and my kingdom, but it will never have you.”
A glow rippled across Jaris’s collar. Each flash of light sent magic from his body into the column, a steady stream that had been draining him for years.
He’d be dead if the Oracle wasn’t keeping him alive so she could keep feeding.
“She needs stable anchors,” Jaris gasped out. “I’m not enough. The other one is not enough. The collared dragons…burn out too fast.”
“She has a name.” Lyndie's blade dipped, the first time it had wavered.
Jaris stopped straining against the roots.
“I know,” he rasped. “I know her name. An anchor doesn’t die.
It holds. It’s the chain they feed her through.
She stays caged, she stays fed, and the crown keeps its miracle.
” His too-bright eyes found mine. “Twenty-three years. I watched the race through her light.”
The floor yanked harder.
My magic responded despite my terror, surging toward the column, eager to be used. It would pour itself into this thing and become part of the cage.
I could feel what would happen if I let go. If I stopped fighting. The Oracle would weave itself through me the way she had with Jaris. I’d become a conduit, feeding her forever. Alive but not living. Screaming but never heard.
And Tolross would die because I’d never be granted the wish.
Lyndie stayed outside the glow’s reach, still clutching the blade.
The least terrible way. She hadn’t been talking about Vella at all.
“How long have you known what this place was?” I growled.
“Longer than I’ve known you.” Her blade hand didn’t waver. “It’s been burning through stolen souls for centuries, because they feed it prisoners. It needs an anchor that won’t break.” Her gaze flicked to my blazing hands. “So I found it someone it couldn’t shatter.”
The words hit, a slap across the face.
“You let me save your dragon.” My voice came out flat, shock turning the rage into something feral. “I trusted you.”
My ruined hands were shaking. I made them stop.
“You watched me nearly kill myself breaking your dragon’s collar, and you knew it was for nothing,” I snarled.
“Not for nothing.” Lyndie’s gaze didn’t waver. “Grimstone’s free. That part was real.”
“But we’re not free. You fed it a friend.”
“I fed it the only person who might survive it.”
“Alone?” Fen’s voice could have frozen the veins in the walls. “You learned all this, steered all this alone?”
Her silence was the loudest answer she’d given so far.
Fen’s fury ignited. He’d killed for me in a garden. He’d do it again here, injured shoulder and Oracle be damned. But killing Lyndie wouldn’t get us out, and we both knew it.
“This isn’t about the wish, is it?” The pieces were clicking together, each one worse than the last. “There’s no banished family. No mourning mother you want to save. You don’t need a wish.”
“I do need to save my mother.”
“Your sick mother.” I threw her own lie back at her. “The seamstress.”
“She was right.” Her voice frayed. “Nothing up here cares.”
I swore I found pleading in her eyes. Did she truly think I’d forgive her for what she’d done?
“There’s so much more to this than you understand,” she said.
Fen’s eyes met mine, cold fury meeting my exhaustion.
I watched him make the choice. Not for her. For me.
He nodded once and turned his back on Lyndie completely, giving her nothing, not even his anger.
I loved him for it.
The glow intensified, spreading up my legs, wrapping around my thighs. The pull on my magic doubled, and I gasped, my knees giving way.
I’d said it myself at the fire. The trials weren’t testing us. They were selecting. I’d just never guessed what for.
Fen caught me with an arm around my waist, but he was shaking too. The floor had him. It had captured us both.
Jaris’s body jerked, his muscles straining, but he couldn’t rise. Roots of light connected him to the floor, dozens of them, spreading from his collar into the stone beneath him.
“True bonds.” The word tore out of him. His hands clawed at the roots connecting him to the floor, trying to pull free, trying to get closer. “It can’t take what’s been—”
The collar blazed white.
Jaris’s mouth snapped shut, his throat working. His eyes met Fen’s, trying to communicate what the collar wouldn’t let him say.
Roots of light spread up my legs. The Oracle was making room for more anchors.
We had minutes before we joined Jaris.
The scale burned, wild magic meeting ancient hunger, and for an instant, I felt Selira outside, her fury blazing through the bond. Her absolute refusal to let this thing take me.
Her claws raked stone. Once. Twice. The doors shuddered. When she roared, the bond between us pulled taut, a rope stretched to breaking.
“Eradin.” Fen’s voice dragged my attention back. His beautiful gray eyes still held a scrap of hope. “Whatever you’re thinking about doing, do it fast.”
The roots of light reached my knees.
There was one chance.
And Lyndie knew. She flicked her eyes from the scale at my throat to the blazing lines on my hands.
I wrapped my hand around the scale, letting the heat sear through my skin, and I pulled the talon-blade from its sheath, keeping it close by my side.
And then I did what was either the stupidest or smartest thing I’d ever done.
Every part of me that wanted to survive shouted not to.
But this creature had known nothing except theft for centuries. Taking was all they’d left her.
Maybe the one thing a prisoner of thieves had no defense against was a gift.
I stopped fighting the pull.
I let my magic pour out, every last bit of it, flooding the Oracle with enough force to make the column scream—
And I sent Selira along with it.
Eeek! I’m sorry about that cliffhanger.
Now I’ve left you wondering what happens next.
Will Fen and Eradin escape the Oracle?
Will they free her?
And who’s been killing people for all these years?
Find out in Wildheart, the conclusion to the Kingdom of Stolen Wings Duology.