Chapter Fifty-Eight #2
Calira’s breaths come shallow and uneven now. Blood spills from the corner of her mouth as Revryn desperately presses shaking hands against the wound in her stomach.
“It’s okay,” he lies frantically. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you, my Callie.”
My Callie.
Calira flinches at the name like it physically hurts her.
For a moment, she just stares at him.
And Seren watches the fight finally leave her face.
Not the Venomshade.
Not The Crown’s Blade.
Just Calira.
Just a girl who spent her entire life being turned into something sharp enough to survive. And gods, Seren realizes with sudden, brutal clarity that Revryn is only getting her back now because she is dying.
Her lips tremble.
“Dad,” she whispers.
Revryn breaks completely. A sound tears out of him that Seren will hear for the rest of her life.
“I’m here,” he chokes out, cradling her closer. “I’m here, baby. I’m right here.”
Calira’s fingers curl weakly into the front of his shirt.
“You came.”
Two words. Two words that break him.
Revryn presses his forehead against hers, sobbing openly now.
“Always,” he says. “I will always come for you. It does not matter the distance; my love can go further.”
But Seren can hear the grief inside the words. Because Revryn had never stopped trying to love her, and Calira had never stopped expecting love to hurt.
Calira’s eyes close slowly.
And this time, they do not open again.
Seren freezes, like an insect pinned behind glass, the world around her narrowed into a single vision. Revryn holds his daughter. The one he has grieved while alive, and regains as she passes.
Every sound mutes, save for the strangled sobs that tear from Revryn’s throat.
Seren watches, stuck in place.
Her heart bleeds, but more than that, it breaks. For the kind of love she’s never known. The kind of endless, undying choosing that she’ll never live out. She hates herself for it. Hates that she’s being selfish in the face of such tragedy.
Revryn sings to her now. A lullaby. He strokes her hair, traces his thumb along the curve of her cheek like a father putting his child to sleep.
Somewhere in the background, chaos detonates. Roars rip through the skies. Buildings crumble. But Seren is trapped in a reality she will only ever watch from the outside.
More roars ring against the periphery of her awareness.
More chaos consumes the surrounding buildings.
It pulls her from the loss, for just a heartbeat, and that’s when she realizes—
FUCK.
Tarrakai approaches at speed, wings pinned back, mouth open, fangs bared. Sound crashes back in, vision crystallizing in an instant, Seren’s instincts sharpen.
He sweeps low, charging straight at her.
Seren runs, breathless and broken, but she runs.
Another roar reverberates off the only building left standing.
And she sees them…
The unit of Caelorian soldiers approaching, swords raised in one hand, Aether shields in the other.
There is nowhere to hide. Virellin is rubble and carnage and fire.
She keeps running, and she smells it first—the sulfur. Then heat licks at her back, her feet, as if it’s chasing her through the carnage.
She half-turns, half-stumbles, and behind her, it is a furnace. A wildfire. Roaring in a channel of obliteration, scorching the soldiers from existence with nothing more than a single breath.
Tarrakai.
Ender of Kingdoms.
Most powerful Melder in history.
He does not merely fly. He dominates. The sky bends around him as though the world itself remembers what he is.
Massive wings beat once, twice, sending shockwaves rippling through smoke and ash as Tarrakai surges upward again.
Dragonfire spills from his jaws in violent torrents, consuming entire battalions in seconds.
Soldiers scatter beneath him like insects fleeing a storm.
No. Not a storm.
A reckoning.
Seren stares upward, breath caught somewhere between awe and terror as Tarrakai tears across the fractured sky with enough force to make the world feel impossibly small.
This is not power as men understand it. Not crowns. Not armies. Not magic stolen through blood and fear.
This is something other.
Something primordial.
History remembered.
Myth made flesh.
The Ender of Kingdoms has returned to the skies of Aevryn, and for the first time in decades, the realm remembers what it means to fear the heavens.
Another dragon sweeps past in a blaze of silver flame, then another beyond it, their roars reverberating through the city like the pulse of something ancient waking beneath the bones of the world.
And gods, for one impossible heartbeat, Seren feels hope. A vast, holy hope.
The kind that reshapes kingdoms.
Tarrakai banks sharply overhead, moonlight glinting across obsidian scales as he unleashes another torrent of dragonfire across the battlefield below. The blast illuminates the city in violent gold, revealing dragons carving through the smoke like living constellations reborn into flesh and fury.
The world is changing. She can feel it happening around her. Like history itself has finally decided to move.
And then… a sound splits through the battlefield.
Magic screaming against metal.
Sharp.
Wrong.
Catastrophic.
Seren freezes.
Every instinct inside her floods instantly with dread.
Something is wrong.
Terribly wrong.