The Lost Island (Rise of the Drakens #5)

Chapter One

WREN

The scent hit me first. Salt, yes, but under it, something coppery and burned. The tide had dragged his body into the narrow crescent of sand in between the rocks.

A dead draken had washed up on shore, unfamiliar, and strange in the midday sun. I stared at his scales, a color pattern of dark green and black with hints of purple I’d never seen before. If I blinked and squinted enough, I could almost imagine a young Benedict lying there like a dead fish.

But the draken wasn’t a fish.

The incoming tide washed cool water across my toes just like it did to his, the sun beating down equally on the both of us.

I swatted away the flies that had begun to gather on him, clutching at my swollen belly. I’d been told all the remaining drakens in existence were on my island. Clearly, we were wrong.

Then again, Thad had been out there. He’d been half-draken, but still. Clearly there were still mysteries about my people who didn’t have all the answers for.

You are queen now. You must have all the answers.

Everyone depended on me. I’d been hidden under an enchantment for so long, and when Benedict had finally released me, I had no idea what I’d gotten myself into. Being queen amongst a horde of rowdy, repressed draken males hadn’t been a direction I thought my life was heading.

Yet, here I was.

And now? Now that the war was over, our homeland reclaimed, and my purpose served?

What did I matter to anyone now?

I smoothed my palm over my growing belly. I was important because of the drakling young I carried inside of me—he or she would be the first true draken born in almost a millennium.

And what of after?

A distress call warbled in the base of my throat, but I held it back. Letting one loose now would bring the entire island down on me. I didn’t need that—not yet. The island with its refugee witches and our few drakens were rebuilding step by step.

Every morning I woke to the sound of saws and hammers, voices rising in song and happiness as we rebuilt our world. The drakens were rising … except for this one.

I looked closer, noting the strange draken’s scales were a deep obsidian green, otherwise I would have said his coloring was black as the night. His back spikes weren’t as large as Benedict’s or Kieran’s. His armor—if that’s what it was—had markings I didn’t recognize.

“Gods,” I whispered.

I let out a small call. Not of distress, but of concern.

It took only moments before a reassuring rumble of our bond resonated through my chest. Benedict, Kieran, and Ronan landed roughly on the beach next to me minutes later, sand scattering around them as they stared at what I’d found.

Ronan bent over the body, eyes bright with that sharp scholar’s focus that meant he was cataloging everything, even the horror. His bronze and gold wings glinted as they twitched in alarm.

“He’s not one of ours,” he said quietly. “I don’t … understand.”

Kieran dropped to one knee beside the body, his red wings a beacon as he shook out his wild red hair and drew his dagger, just in case.

“He’s been in the water days at least,” he said. “Burns across the chest. No rot. Lucky he hasn’t bloated entirely yet.”

“That’s impossible,” Benedict said, staying between the body and me.

His voice was steady, but his hands were clenched.

Where Kieran and Ronan were the sun, Benedict was the moon.

His black and purple coloring was a stark contrast to my other two mates.

I wondered whose coloring the baby would have?

“There are no other drakens,” Benedict stated firmly, “and this one doesn’t have the half-breed look like Thad did.”

“Unless somewhere else there are other drakens,” I said before I could stop myself. The wind caught my words and flung them down the beach. “The proof lies before us.”

They all looked at me.

Kieran’s brow furrowed. “Wren—”

“No. Listen.” I stepped closer, ignoring the taste of metal in the air.

“We’ve spent years believing the last of our kind were here and that we were all that remained.

But clearly, that isn’t true.” I pointed at the draken.

“What if others survived the destruction of Lyoness and were scattered and lost?”

Ronan’s gaze flicked to mine, quick and sharp. He was excited. “If there are others—”

Kieran just gawked, gaze going back from the dead draken to us.

Benedict looked simply shocked, as if the possibility had never even occurred to him.

Even the sea seemed to hesitate between breaths, hesitating where the ocean pulled and pushed.

A strange emotion went through that I couldn’t identify—jealousy, fear, or … something else?

Having more drakens was cause for celebration.

For so long, Benedict had carried our extinction like a birthmark: visible, unchangeable.

His species on the brink of disaster, he’d finally fetched me, the last female draken in existence, hidden under an enchantment among humans.

My pregnancy was the first spark of hope anyone had dared speak aloud.

Would I be as special or revered if I wasn’t the only one anymore?

What a stupid, selfish thing to worry about. I should instead be worried about the little one growing inside of me and the drakens on my island.

But this dead body changed everything.

“Bring him up to the beach,” Benedict said finally. “We’ll examine him properly. Ronan, you and the healers—”

“No.” The word tore out of me sharper than I meant. “No hall. Not yet. Not where everyone will see. The witches will want to poke and prod and … just no.”

News like this would spread faster than any flame. Hope was dangerous when people were still learning to live without it.

Benedict’s jaw muscles flexed. He knew I was right. “The volcano?”

“We aren’t hiding him, just not letting everyone know right away. We need to ask Meruse if she saw anything. What if there are more? What if someone comes looking for him?”

Kieran was already reaching for the draken. His shoulders were tense beneath his leathers, muscles coiled in ways I hadn’t seen since the war.

As they worked together to gently pick up the draken and roll him over in the sand, Ronan knelt beside the body again, fingertips hovering over the unfamiliar sigil carved into the draken’s bracer.

It was circular: a serpent eating its own tail, but the serpent was split through the center like it was wounded.

“Do you recognize it?” I asked.

“No,” he said softly.

The tide surged once, foam lapping at the dead draken’s talons. For an instant, the light caught on his scales, and they shimmered like emerald glass. Alive. Just for a breath.

The baby squirmed and rolled beneath my palm: a small, deliberate push as if it was answering something older than words.

Ronan noticed. “What is it?”

I swallowed hard. “The baby moved.”

He looked at me for a long moment, grinning. “It will be soon!”

Kieran turned toward Benedict. “What do we do?”

Before Benedict could answer, a shout went up from the cliffs. Then another. By the time I looked over my shoulder, the path was already crowded. Dozens of drakens spilled down the slope, wings catching the dawn light, eyes wide.

We’d been seen.

Word traveled faster than fire.

“So much for keeping it a secret,” I murmured.

Ronan’s mouth quirked grimly. “Secrets aren’t a thing on a small island.”

Voices rose around us as the crowd reached the beach, in shock, fear, and curiosity. A dozen questions layered over one another, each more dangerous than the last.

“Who is he?”

“Was he one of ours?”

“An exile?”

“Could he have served the Overlord?

“Has the sea finally given back our dead centuries later?”

I rolled my eyes at the last one.

Benedict raised his hands for silence, but the mutters rolled like thunder.

“Is it Thad?” someone asked.

My heart twinged at the reminder of the draken who’d left us, the half-demon, half-draken who’d helped us defeat the Overlord and taken over the remnants of his demon army. He’d taken them away from Dorea and through the desert, trying to find a better life for them.

“It has to be Thad!” another draken agreed.

“Yes, it wasn’t enough he’d taken one of our females!”

“Thad did it!”

I frowned. Thad had taken Xana, an unmated female with him when he left the island, but that had been her choice.

“We can’t stand for this! We can’t let it happen again!” yelled one of the younger, unmated drakens.

“No, it is not good,” Wyrren roughly grit out. The Elders looked troubled. I could understand that, but Xana would never mate after the trauma she’d been through. Her absence wasn’t hurting anyone. And as much as I missed Thad and wanted to see him again, luckily this dead draken wasn’t him.

“Hunt him down!”

“Take her back!”

“We need all our females!”

“Enough!” Benedict’s voice cracked through the noise like lightning. The sound carried up the cliffs and across the water. Slowly, the murmurs died.

He looked out over them, the last of the drakens, the scarred, the survivors, and he somehow stood tall enough to make them all believe he was unshaken.

The wind ruffled his hair, throwing it across his face in dark strings.

The tide kept rolling in softly over our feet, washing over my claws and cooling my skin.

“We don’t know who he is,” he said, clear and firm.

“We don’t know what he was or why he came home.

But we will. At dusk, we will bury him here on the shore where we found him.

Until then, the elders and I will learn what we can.

All that matters is that a draken has returned home to us.

That should be honored, no matter what else. ”

Heads bowed and wings tucked.

Benedict glanced toward the oldest among us, the drakens who had seen too many wars and outlived too many names.

“Take him,” Benedict said gently, “with respect.”

The elders motioned for the younger guards to help lift the fallen draken. Sand scattered as they shifted and did their best to carry the body away on a hastily woven stretcher, scales glinting darkly under the sun.

Around us, rumors began to whirl again. They were quieter this time, carried by the wind. Hope, disbelief, fear. Every emotion born from the same impossible truth.

When the last of the crowd drifted back up the hill, Benedict turned to us. “The old ruins,” he said softly. “Now.”

We followed him through the winding path past the rebuilt walls where our new banners snapped in the wind. Sand gave way to thick ferns and tall grass, then tall trees that bent inwards with their own weight. The island felt suddenly smaller. It was like the air itself had drawn tight around us.

The elders were already waiting in the shell of the former palace where they liked to spend their days: old stone, half-repaired, its sides still scared from magma and the eruption centuries ago.

Their wings folded close to their bodies, their faces unreadable.

The old stone surrounded us as if the memories from a society removed from us could suddenly give us answers and bridge the gap between our lost generations.

Kieran helped me to the edge of a half-collapsed, old wall and lowered me to sit comfortably onto it. Ronan hovered at my shoulder. Benedict paced the stone platform, his claws wearing grooves in the hard floor.

Benedict began without ceremony. “You’ve seen him. You’ve seen the markings.”

Elder Thane inclined his head, scales pale with age. “He bears no sigil I know. No house, no creed. The armor looks southern, but not any kingdom I remember before the war.”

“Southern …” I mumbled, thinking hard.

“There are no other drakens. We were it,” Benedict stubbornly insisted, staring down at the body like it was personally responsible.

“Then how do you explain him?” Ronan asked quietly. “Those wings weren’t made for short flight. He came from somewhere.”

Silence.

I glanced at everyone.

“Have you never considered drakens may have survived the eruption or maybe a wayward soldier got captured centuries ago? Even separated, they could have been subjected to the Overlord’s curse all the same, just like us.”

Kieran jerked, making it obvious that no, he’d never entertained such a notion.

“As king I would know—” Benedict began.

I cut him off. “If the king at the time—your father—was trying to survive the devastation of feeling almost his entire people killed at once, don’t you think it’s possible he might have missed a few here and there? Or perhaps once other drakens are far away you can’t sense them any longer?”

Being queen, like Benedict, I had a bond with the draken people that kept them constantly on the edge of our consciousnesses.

Kind, but heavy, Elder Thane’s gaze lingered on me . “If others survived …”

“Then there are other drakens out there,” Benedict said.

Kieran crossed his arms. Ronan’s brow furrowed into deep lines over his eyes, considering this possibility.

I glanced between them, confused. “Why are you all upset? This is good news, is it not?”

They eyed me like I was nuts.

“What if they try to invade us?” Benedict bit out. “Or challenge me to rule?”

“Or come after you?” Kieran cut across him.

“It would be interesting, at least,” Ronan muttered.

I rolled my eyes and sighed.

Males.

“I think you’re missing a crucial detail,” I said slowly.

They blinked at me.

“If there are drakens alive out there,” I continued, “then there could be other females out there.”

Everyone stilled, the weight of my statement crashing on all of them at once.

“Oh. Fuck.”

“Fuck, indeed,” I grumbled, pressing my palm to my belly. The child inside shifted, a subtle reminder that whatever came next wasn’t just about the past, it was about the future. “If there are others, we must find them and meet them, and at least offer them a home here.”

“Offer? They belong here. I am their king,” Benedict insisted.

“Here we go,” Ronan huffed.

Kieran shot Benedict a glare. “I’m sure we can negotiate, all things considered, especially if we can all help each other.”

I sighed.

“We’ll meet again at dusk,” Benedict said to the Elders. “We will bury him and we will tell the others what we know. No lies. No panic. Just truth.”

“And if they ask what that truth means?” Ronan murmured.

Benedict’s jaw set. “We tell them what we always tell our people.”

Kieran raised a brow. “Which is?”

“That we endure,” Benedict said, “until we understand.”

I looked around the room at the men I loved, at the elders who had guided us through ruin, at the faint light slanting through the broken ceiling, and I felt it again.

It wasn’t fear, but something deeper and older.

The quiet, living tremor of a world about to expand.