55. Chapter 55
DREADSCALE
Umbra banked east as the sun bled into the horizon.
Her wings carved through clouds stained crimson and gold, each downstroke carrying us further from the King's glittering lie and deeper into the wounded heart of the realm.
The air thinned as we climbed—cold and sharp, the way it should be, the way it had been for centuries before fae decided to cage the sky in palace walls.
Freedom.
The word pulsed through the bond. Umbra's joy at being airborne again, at feeling wind beneath her scales with me astride her. She'd tolerated staying near the palace for my sake. For Amaria's. But dragons were not built for tolerance.
Neither was I.
But freedom had a cost this time. I had left a girl with a fading mind in the care of a boy with a steady heart, and the only thing I could offer either of them was a dog and a door I walked through.
Three days out from the capital, the land began to change.
The forests thinned. Rivers ran sluggish and grey, their waters clouded with something that made Umbra rumble uneasily. Farmland gave way to scrubland, then to stretches of earth so barren nothing grew at all.
The southern territories. The "sacrifice zones" the court never mentioned.
The displacement has to go somewhere.
Maxx's words echoed in my memory. The princess's miracles. The stolen pain. All of it funneled away from the capital through a network of void-iron conduits, dumped into corners of the kingdom too poor and too powerless to matter.
I needed to find where it landed.
The first site was a village.
Or it had been.
Umbra circled twice before descending, her claws finding purchase on a collapsed roof that crumbled further beneath her weight. I slid from her back and stood in what remained of a market square.
Empty. Silent. Houses with doors still open, meals rotting on tables, beds unmade. No bodies. No blood. Just... absence.
The void-iron rod stood in the center of the square.
Twelve feet tall. Humming faintly. Runes carved along its length that pulsed with a bilious sheen. I clasped the metal. The hum intensified. Through the bond, Umbra hissed—a warning, a plea.
Pain.
It radiated from the rod in compressed layers. The accumulated suffering of everyone the princess had "healed," funneled here and left to rot.
The villagers hadn't fled. They'd been consumed.
I pulled my hand back. Stared at the empty houses. The abandoned lives.
This is one site. How many more?
The answer came three days later.
Umbra smelled it first—her head swinging north, nostrils flaring, then a keening sound built in her chest that I'd never heard before.
What is it?
She didn't answer. Just changed course, wings driving harder, faster, carrying us toward a distress call only she could hear.
We flew through the night.
By dawn, I understood.
The valley stretched for miles.
From above, it looked almost peaceful—a basin cradled between mountain ranges, mist curling through the low places, the first light of morning painting everything in shades of grey and gold.
Then the mist cleared.
And I saw the bones.
Dragons. Dozens of them. Skeletons intertwined, wings draped over one another.
Mirror-Fires don't die together by accident. When one falls, the other waits—years, centuries, however long it takes for the soul to return. They mate once. Not once per lifetime. Once across all of them.
These had fallen together.
I dismounted. Umbra's claws dug into the scree, and a low, vibrating whine built in her chest—a sound I hadn't heard since she was a hatchling.
"Stay," I ordered softly.
She didn't argue.
I walked down alone. The valley floor was littered with obsidian glass, eggs, hundreds of them. The shells were dull, stripped of their reflective sheen, staring up at the sky like blind eyes.
The Obsidian Cradle. This place was supposed to be a myth even among my own kind.
The one place in the realm sacred enough for Mirror-Fire pairs to descend and lay their clutches.
Here, in the silence of the earth, parents would breathe their fire together to wake the eggs.
Here, the timeline wasn't just seen, but born.
And the King had turned it into a graveyard.
I walked toward the nearest pair. Their skeletons were interlocked in a final, desperate attempt to shield their clutch. And there, rising from the center of the nest, was the void-iron spike.
It hummed with a low, dissonant tremor.
I touched the snout of the larger male. The bone was grey, pitted with the unmistakable corrosion of Veil Sickness.
I knew him.
Storm-Caller. He had flown over Skal'Varin when I was a boy—the one who taught the younger drakes how to ride the thermal currents. He had vanished fifty years ago. Presumably to find his mate.
He had found her.
I looked at the smaller skeleton beneath his wing.
Her skull was delicate, her body curled around the corrupted eggs.
They hadn't just died. They had been poisoned.
And they had stayed—even as the air turned to rot, even as the sickness ate the flesh from their bones—they hadn't left their eggs.
They had stayed, shielding the future of our species until the very end.
A bond has been made that death nor ego can sever.
The Mirror-Fire bond.
The King will answer for this.
I stepped over the shattered remains of an egg. Obsidian mirror reduced to jagged black glass.
The Void-Iron hummed its sick, steady rhythm.
The King's 'miracle' was still working. And my people were paying the price.
I would make sure they paid theirs. The King who ordered the lie.
The Princess who performed it. And if I find out Eryndor knows about it as well, he will be buried next to them.
Anyone who built their throne on the bones of dragons was going to fall.
A sound broke the silence.
Weak. Rasping. Coming from somewhere to my left.
I turned.
She lay in the shadow of a fallen elder—a young dragon, not yet a century old, her scales the pale blue of winter sky. Her eyes were open. Aware. Fixed on me with an intelligence that hadn't yet faded.
But it was fading—the light dimming, the fire dying, her chest rising and falling in stuttering gasps that grew further apart with each breath.
I knelt beside her and her thoughts brushed mine. Fragmented. Confused. A jumble of images—flying with her bonded, hunting in mountain passes, the sudden weakness that had driven her here, the hope that had turned to horror.
Help, she managed. Please.
I had nothing to offer her. No way to stop what the void-iron was doing. No magic that could restore what had been stolen.
So I did the only thing I could.
I pressed my forehead to hers. Let my fire flow into her—easing her passing. I held her thoughts in mine and made sure she wasn't alone as the last of her light went out.
Her final breath was a sigh.
Then stillness.
I stayed with her until her fire was gone and the valley had nothing left to say.
Then I rose, walked back to Umbra, and mounted without a word.
My hands were still warm from her. The residue of her fire lingered on my palms like a scald, and when I gripped Umbra's spine ridge to pull myself up, the heat transferred—from me to Umbra.
She went still beneath me. She'd felt it too.
The last warmth of a dragon who should have lived another thousand years, passed between us like an offering neither of us had earned.
She turned south. Toward the capital. Toward the King who had built this machine of death and called it peace.
You break the court, I'd told Amaria. I'll find what's left of the sky.
There was nothing left.
Umbra's wings beat against the dawn. Below us, the graveyard disappeared into mist.
I had come here looking for what remained of our kind.
Now I knew.
The fae had built their peace on a pyre of dragon bones. Had called it progress. Had toasted to it in crystal halls while one of our sacred nesting grounds choked on their runoff.
A kingdom that thrives on killing dragons does not get to remain a kingdom.