Chapter Twenty-Four
Legend
Thyrix is dead.
The images running through my head strongly capture him as her favorite little fire-breather.
I wish I knew that. I wish I knew him.
My chest caves in, grief, sadness—it all feels the fucking same. I pull her under my arm, kissing the top of her head. “We need to find Arabella.”
Haide doesn’t answer, and that alone terrifies the shit out of me. When does she ever not answer? When she’s fucking hurt beyond repair.
“And I’m gonna kill her.”
Ben crashes through what’s left of the roof, and I move before the dust can even settle. Stone and splintered wood scatter across the floor where the table used to be. His massive head swings, scales scraping against loose beams as he angles toward Haide.
I pivot with him, positioning myself between that mouthful of teeth and her out of pure instinct. I don’t give a single fuck about the logic of standing between a dragon and his target when I’m half his size.
Then a voice slips into my mind.
Through her.
A channel I didn’t know existed cracks open, and Ben’s voice shudders through both of us, raw and too human for that body. “The wall of dark water around Valeryth killed Thyrix.”
Haide’s grief detonates through the bond first, sharp enough that my knees go soft. My breath stutters, and I reach for a chair to steady myself when it almost knocks my ass clean out.
Fuck.
My hand finds her, fingers hooking into her shoulder and dragging her against my side with more force than the moment probably calls for, considering her connection to the dragons.
“How?” Haide’s voice splits in the middle of the word. She steps forward, fists tight at her sides, smoke curling up from her knuckles in thin threads. “How the fuck is that possible? They’re indestructible.”
Ben doesn’t answer. Nobody answers.
The silence is broken only by the slow crumble of rubble from the ceiling that shatters against the floor. Magic stirs through the dark air, smelling of gasoline and hellfire. “Settle, baby. I can almost taste you.”
“No. Thyrix was mine.”
Grief slams through me again, hot and blinding. My jaw locks, a hiss escaping between my teeth.
Smoke thickens around her shoulders and hands, but I pull her in closer, brushing my lips against her head.
“They are not indestructible,” Mother says. It shouldn’t be shocking that she’d be the one with answers. The woman has been walking this earth entirely too long.
Relaxed and unfazed, she leans against her chair at the far end of the table, leaving the silence out in the open for fuck knows what. Theatrics.
“Then what the hell killed him?” I ask.
But her attention is on Haide, which instantly puts me on edge.
“Magic did not arrive fully formed,” she explains, and her voice drops.
Gentle, but always threatening. “At the beginning, it was carried. By creatures. One for each element: fire, earth, water, air. Over generations, through exposure and conflict and the slow mutation of blood, magic fractured. Branched. Became what you know now.” She pauses.
“But two elements never fully lost their original form. They evolved, yes, but they kept the core of what they were. Because they were always in opposition. Always canceling each other out.” Her gaze stays fixed on Haide. “Fire and—”
“Dragons and Sirens.” Haide says it quietly, but the smoke continues to curl around her hands, heat waves rolling off her.
“Sirens.” I’m moving before I decide to. “What are you saying? Sirens haven’t existed since—”
“The texts I found.” Creed’s voice cuts under mine, flat and focused, and he’s already pulling back through whatever mental filing system he keeps.
“The elemental opposition. I read it as theoretical. Historical,” he says it more to himself, as if realizing yet another mistake, which is pretty on-brand for him lately.
Knight looks around. “What do Sirens have to do with whatever Arabella sealed Valeryth behind?”
“Everything.” Mother raises her hand in that way she did when she ruled the kingdom. It’s the specific power to shut everyone up while reminding them exactly who they’re fucking with. It works. Immediately. Even on me.
She lowers her hand.
“The water surrounding Valeryth is not ward magic. It is not Stygian or Argent craft, and it is not anything Arabella constructed by herself.” She rolls her eyes.
“You give her far too much credit. What Arabella used to trigger it carries the elemental signature of water in its oldest, purest form. The same source. The same lineage.” She looks at Haide again, and her voice stays even.
“The only force that has ever been capable of killing a dragon.”
The rubble shifts somewhere along the walls around us, and Ben’s wings drag over the carnage.
Haide’s throat moves.
I see the exact moment the full weight of Mother’s words click into place behind Haide’s eyes.
Her whole body goes still, the air in this ruined garden hitting temperatures that you could cook in.
Her fingers curl into fists at her sides, and something shifts in her expression.
It’s lethal, dark, and drips of every feral instinct that lives inside of her.
There she is.
She’s gonna burn that bitch to the ground.
And we’re all gonna help her.
“She orchestrated her parents’ deaths.” I had suspected as much, but it’s clear now. “They must have had some tapped Siren magic in their bloodline. Killing them would have released it to their heirs, like the power of our fallen kings strengthening our soils here in Rathe.”
“Just another way the ‘bond’ to a royal helped her with her plans.” Mother smirks. “Your ties to her and you setting foot on their grounds likely helped her draw on it even more.”
My insides twist but I force the feeling down.
The map Mother conjures floats above what’s left of the table, holographic and pale blue, crackling at the edges where the ceiling used to be. Valeryth sits at its center, ringed by a band of dark water that pulses even on the projection.
“We go through it,” Haide says. “Hit the water line with everything we have, the dragons push from the air, I take the front—”
“No,” I interrupt, the word flat and final.
Her jaw is set the way it gets right before she does something catastrophic and calls it strategy. “I wasn’t asking.”
“I know you weren’t.” I move around the rubble between us, keeping my voice controlled and my hands at my sides. Because the bond is already running hot, and if I touch her right now, this conversation ends in a completely different kind of wreckage. “That’s the fucking problem.”
“Thyrix is dead.” She says it like I need the reminder. Like his name isn’t already burned inside me where the bond lives. “He is dead, and Arabella is sitting inside those walls right now, and every second we stand here arguing—”
“The water isn’t a ward.” I point at the projection. The dark band pulses again, slow, patient. “It’s not something you break through with enough firepower. Creed, tell her.”
Creed’s been quiet since Mother spoke, which is its own kind of alarm.
He looks up from whatever corner of guilt he retreated to, and his voice comes out low.
“The elemental opposition isn’t a metaphor.
Siren-aligned water in its oldest form doesn’t just resist fire.
It consumes it. The more heat you push into it, the faster it feeds.
” He pauses. “Thyrix didn’t die because the water was strong enough to kill him.
He died because his fire made him the perfect fuel. ”
Ben’s dragon form shifts somewhere in the wreckage overhead. I wonder if he still thinks about burning Knight to a crisp. I would.
Haide doesn’t look away from the projection. “So, we go cold. We go at night, we—”
“You are fire,” I say the words slowly just in case she’s having a slow fucking day and isn’t hearing me.
“You and every dragon you command. Your power doesn’t have a cold setting, Haide.
The Drakaryth’s flame isn’t something you dial back.
It’s what you are. And that water was built to drown exactly what you are. ”
Her temple jewel pulses once, red, and she rounds on me with the full weight of it, grief and fury running together until I can’t tell which one is hers and which is mine. Both. It’s both.
“So, what’s your plan?” Her tone is threaded with warning. “We watch the rot take Rathe? We let her sit in there and pick off the rest of them one at a time, because going after her isn’t safe?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“That’s exactly what you said.”
“I said stop being fucking stupid.” Goodbye control. “Charging a Siren water barrier with a fire-born army isn’t a plan; it’s a funeral. Thyrix’s body isn’t even cold and you want to line the rest of them up behind you and walk into the same trap that killed him.”
Haide takes a step forward. I don’t move back.
“Don’t.” The ache is evident in her word before she locks it down, the bond shuddering between us like a band about to snap. “Don’t stand there and use him to stop me.”
“I’m using him to save you.”
“I don’t need—”
“I get it,” I hurry. “You were born on Exile alone. You walked into Valeryth alone. You pulled yourself through shit most wouldn’t survive, alone.
Every time there’s a wall you decide the only option is to throw yourself at it—and you survive.
I get it. But I am telling you that this particular wall will not leave anything behind that you can survive. ”
I swallow, the ache in my chest sharp as fucking ever. “Need me. Fucking, please. I need you to need me.”
Knight shifts his weight near the far wall, a slow movement, probably deciding whether to intervene. London has gone still beside him, watching the space between us with tight focus. Always on alert.
Zev’s spread across a chunk of fallen stone with his arms folded and his expression doing something infuriating: tilting his head. “She usually wins these,” he says to no one in particular.
“Zev.” Haide’s voice.
“Just noting historical precedent.”
I bare my teeth. “Wanna become another statistic? Or maybe you wanna be like Ben over here and—”
“There’s one issue,” Silver interrupts. He’s standing at the edge of the projection’s light, his gaze moving across the holographic map with the expression he gets when he’s already three steps ahead of the rest of us. Which is always.
“The dark water is not impenetrable. The Siren signature is ancient, which means it predates the current magical infrastructure. Predates Argent craft, predates Stygian’s flare.
It operates on harmonic resonance, meaning it reads the frequency of incoming power and calibrates its consumption accordingly.
” His finger traces the pulsing border on the projection without touching it.
The whispers in the air and humming. How the fuck did I miss this? Arabella was always humming.
“Fire reads hot,” Sinner keeps going. “Dragons read hot. The water eats the frequency and converts the heat to, well…mush. The more power you send at it, the denser the barrier becomes.” He finally looks up, as if we can understand his physics-meets-magic mumbling.
“But harmonic resonance requires a key frequency to calibrate against. A foundational note it was tuned to.”
“And?”
“Ancient Siren magic doesn’t tune to power alone. It tunes to place.” Silver meets my gaze. “It requires an anchor. A source it recognizes as older than itself.”
The map pulses.
The dark water breathes as if it’s alive, and I stare down at the palace where I know Arabella will be holed up.
My jaw tightens.
Silver nods, speaking the words I really hoped he wouldn’t. “Exile Island.”
No.
Yes.
The voice moves through the bond, only it ain’t Haide’s voice. My Ethos has been watching our exchanges, holding on to the perfect moment where logic stacks up.
“The land that made our mate.” My demon speaks. “It holds what you need.”
The muscle in my neck twitches. “Absolutely not.”
“Legend—” Creed starts.
“Exile is a prison.” I turn on Silver instead, because he presented it and he can defend it. “It is an island designed to hold the worst of what exists in this world. We send her back there, we send the dragons back there, and we’re handing Arabella the exact outcome I’m sure she wants—”
“The barrier is around Valeryth.” Silver doesn’t raise his voice. “Not Exile. She’s safe there.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know what you fear,” he responds swiftly. “They are not the same thing.”
“What if this time it takes her soul and traps it? Or takes our bond?”
The bond flares.
She survived Exile. She was made by it. The answer is buried in what she left behind.
I want to reach through the bond and strangle him.
If you do, the Nightkin mutters, make sure you do it naked, since she prefers us both that way.
Haide hasn’t moved. She studies the map, her features slowly going slack. Grief runs underneath her, and fury is still heavy. Then, her eyes turn to stone, her plan set. Whatever she’s just figured out makes sense to her in a way nothing I say will change.
“The soul stones,” she says quietly.
Creed goes still.
“They’re on Exile.” She doesn’t look away from the projection.
“The dragon soul stones. If the Siren magic reads frequency, if it needs something older than itself—” She stops.
Her temple jewel pulses, red, steady, like a second heartbeat finding its rhythm.
“The stones predate everything. They predate Argent magic. They predate whatever Arabella triggered.”
The map flickers.
And across the pale blue projection of Valeryth and its surrounding sea, a thin wet-black stain bleeds outward from the dark water border, slow and spreading, the same way it did here in the royal garden.
Rathe as we know it is at risk here, even though everything I gave a fuck about was already.
I turn my attention from the map to Haide. “How the fuck am I supposed to protect you if you don’t fucking listen?”
“You aren’t,” she whispers, soft but I know better. “You fight beside me.”
My kingdom. My mate. The dragons, one of which she’s already lost. The trap she’s willing to walk into with her eyes open because that’s the one dance she knows every move to.
“She’s right. The land holds what you need,” the Nightkin says again. “The power that the island contains is unrivaled, just as our mate is meant to be.”
I exhale.
Every god in existence has to be laughing their fucking ass off right now, waiting to see what we do next.
“If we go to Exile,” I tell her, because this is the first of many arguments I’m bound to lose against her, “and what we need isn’t there. And the fucking place clings to you like a stage ten curse, then what?”
She lifts her chin. “It won’t.”
My brows lift. “Yeah? How are you so fucking sure?”