Chapter 29 #2
His voice broke on her name—wild, desperate, fear stripped him of anything but frenzied determination. He cut down one soldier, then another, inching closer with every swing, every snarl, every glamour he threw.
But for every Talon that fell, two more stepped into the gap. The black tide kept coming.
He screamed her name again. Kept fighting. Kept trying.
It wasn't enough.
And Dreadscale.
For one suspended breath, the crowd parted and I saw him.
Primordial and immovable, a force of nature wrapped in scarred flesh.
His dragon tattoo blazed like molten iron, radiating with a power that made the air around him bend.
Soldiers didn't fight him—they slid off him like water from stone.
Blades turned before they could land. Soldiers stumbled back, faces slack with sudden terror, as if their bodies had decided to flee before their minds caught up.
He strode through the melee untouched. Unhurried. Inevitable.
For one mad, desperate moment, I thought—maybe. Maybe by some miracle, he was going to carve through all of them. Maybe he was going to get us out of this.
Then Eryndor's grip wrenched me upward, hauling me through the Flame Gate.
But Dreadscale’s eyes found mine…
Hold on. The command burned through me, silent and absolute. We will find you. Do not surrender.
I held his gaze and the doors slammed shut between us.
And the dark swallowed everything.
I weaved in and out of consciousness. Heavy. Like dragging myself out of deep water.
First, the sound. A resonant, rhythmic thrumming in my ears that slowly sharpened into my own pulse. Too fast. Too loud.
Then the pain.
My skull felt like it had been cracked open and put back together wrong. A dull, grinding ache behind my eyes that made the mere thought of moving nauseating.
I lifted a heavy hand to the back of my head. My fingers found the swollen knot before the pain caught up—a split-second delay before the whole back of my skull lit up white. My teeth clamped together hard enough to crack.
I groaned. My throat was dry as dust. I tried to peel my eyes open. The lids felt weighted, glued shut with grit and exhaustion. I managed a slit.
Cold, damp stone pressed into my cheek. I blinked, forcing my vision to clear. The world spun, tilted, then settled into something grim and solid.
Rough floor. Shadows. The distinct, metallic taste of enclosed air.
I pushed myself up on one elbow. The room swung sideways and my stomach tried to follow. My arms felt borrowed—too heavy, wrong weight, like someone had filled them with wet sand while I was out.
Then the smell hit me.
It wasn’t damp stone or the stale air of a deep underground.
The smell of scorched flesh. My flesh.
The memory crashed in—the chaos, the ambush, the iron disk in Eryndor’s hand—and the throbbing in my skull was instantly drowned out by the screaming agony in my chest.
I wasn't dreaming.
I opened my eyes. The dark didn't lift; it just gained shape. Iron bars. Stone walls.
The King’s dungeon. A place people only mentioned in whispers—because no one who went in ever came out to correct the rumors.
There was a thick, suffocating silence broken only by the rhythmic torture of water hitting rock.
Drip.
Drip.
My torso was a ruin of raw nerve endings.
The Quell-Rune Eryndor had burned into me wasn't just a wound; it was a parasite.
I could feel the magic of it, dense and oily, burrowing into my collarbone, radiating a sick, writhing heat that made me nauseous.
The smell of my own charred skin clung to the damp air, thick and sweet and wrong.
I gagged, trying to turn my head, but the movement pulled at the burn, and white spots fractured in front of me.
Drip.
Drip.
It was the only sound in the world. Louder than the alarm had been. Louder than the screams. A relentless, irregular metronome counting down the seconds of my failure.
Drip.
I tried to grasp my power. Just a spark of Light to warm the shivering that rattled my bones, or a thread of Shadow to numb the pain.
Nothing.
It wasn't just silence. It was amputation.
My marks—a second heartbeat I had lived with my entire life—were gone.
The Quell-Rune bore down on me, suffocating the connection.
But it was doing more than blocking. It was feeding.
A sickness radiated from the brand, seeping into my marrow, turning my blood to slush. I felt hollowed out. Scraped clean.
A shiver racked through me, violent enough to snap my teeth together. My fingers tapped the stone beneath me. Three beats. The old rhythm, hollow against the wet floor. A prayer to no one.
Remember.
For a second, I wasn't on the dungeon floor. I was back at the bonfire.
Heat on my face. The crackle of dry wood. Brannick’s shoulder pressing warm and solid against mine. The taste of roasted meat, rich and savory, still lingering on my tongue. "Took you long enough, little flame," he’d said.
Back in the cell. The taste of meat was gone, replaced by the tart tang of blood where I’d bitten my tongue. The warmth was a lie. The stone sucked the heat from my body, greedy and endless.
How could we have been so stupid?
Remember.
Maxx winking at me over Serenya’s head. "To the Scion of the First Scar." The music. The laughter. We were gods. We had rewritten reality.
Foolish girl, remember.
We were children playing with fire in a room full of gasoline.
"Scion," I whispered. The word made heat flush up my neck, mockery.
The King was right. The Rupture. That’s what I was. I hadn't saved anyone. I had led the wolf straight to the flock, opened the door, and poured him a drink.
Drip.
Drip.
I curled tighter into myself, knees tucked under my chin, trying to hold the broken pieces together. Somewhere above me, they were hunting the others. Were they dead? Was Brannick’s laugh silenced? Was Maxx broken?
The thoughts came faster. Meaner. Each one harsher than the last, and I couldn't outrun them lying on a floor. I wasn't the weapon Kaelen promised. I was the curse the King had named me. Everyone I touched burned. Everyone I loved bled.
Then a sound cut through it.
Not the drip. Footsteps—multiple sets, measured and rhythmic, metal striking stone. And beneath them, a lighter drag. Something—someone—being hauled.
My heart slammed against the brand like it was trying to escape without me.
The footsteps stopped outside the door.
I dragged myself up. My arms shook, my branded chest screamed, but I forced myself to my knees. If they had come to end me, I wasn’t dying lying in my own waste.
The door opened and light spilled into the cell—harsh, blinding lantern light.
I squinted against the glare.
The captain of the Black Talons emerged first. The one who'd measured Serenya's worth by what I had left to lose.
Behind him, two guards dragged something between them. A figure. Small. Stumbling. Dark hair matted with blood, a dress torn at the shoulder.
Serenya.
The air left the room.
She wasn't fighting. She hung limp in their grip, her head lolling forward. Her wrists were bound in heavy iron cuffs that looked too big for her delicate bones. There was a bruise blooming dark and ugly across her cheekbone—the shape of a backhand.
"Serenya!" The scream tore out of me, savage and jagged. I lunged for the bars.
The captain didn't even glance at me.
"Level four. Isolation," he said to the guards, voice flat and bored. "King wants it loud enough for the Rupture to hear."
The guards shoved her forward, parading her past my cell like a trophy. She stumbled, lifting her head. Her eyes met mine—glassy, unfocused, filled with a terror so profound it stopped my heart.
"Amaria?" she whimpered. A broken sound.
"Let her go!" I hammered my hands against the iron bars. The Quell-Rune flared hot on my Marks, punishment for the surge of emotion, but I didn't care.
Then I saw him.
Standing further back in the corridor, half-swallowed by shadow.
Eryndor.
Just the Crown's perfect weapon, standing where the male used to be.
"Eryndor, look at me! Look at me!"
He briefly gripped the red, worn thread around his wrist until his knuckles turned white. But he didn't move. Didn't stop the captain from dragging the only person I had left into the depths below.
Her sob echoed down the stone corridor, fading into the dark.
Eryndor watched them go. Then, for a heartbeat that stretched into eternity, he looked back at me.
His attention drifted over my shaking hands, the tears tracking through the dirt on my face. His jaw worked. Then—a microscopic shake of his head.
It wasn't anger. It was dismissal. Pathetic, the gesture said. Look at you. Breaking so easily.
It was the look of a male who'd been right about me all along. I wasn't the Scion. I wasn't the cure. I was exactly what the King said I was—the Rupture wearing skin.
I was poison.
Poison to Serenya, who was bleeding because of me. Poison to the Veil, which I had arrogantly thought I could heal when all I ever did was tear it further. I was a threat to his people—to the order he had sworn his life to protect.
He gave me his back. And then the dark took him. The lantern light faded. The footsteps receded.
Drip.
Drip.
I slumped against the hard iron, the silence rushing back in to crush me.
I didn't pray for a way out. Monsters don't get rescued. They get put down.