CHAPTER FOUR
Ronan
RONAN D’VYRE HAD ALWAYS PREFERRED THE SKY.
Up here, the world was quiet.
Honest.
It didn’t demand anything of him.
No crown. No throne. No legacy rumbling down the back of his skull.
Just the wind rushing cold and clean across the scarred ridges of his spine where wings unwound in forged steel and shadow-fire.
The air held him the way nothing else ever had.
The only place he felt like himself, or perhaps the only place where he didn’t have to.
In Ryuu, the heir prince in dragon form was a symbol, an acceptance.
Here in Luamis, it only meant danger.
Below, the Light Kingdom sprawled in a patchwork of collapse and aching beauty—forests drowning in silvered mist, villages stitched together by old hope and older memory, oceans throwing themselves against the cliffs like desperate forces.
And there, tucked under a razor-thin crescent moon, cutting through the trees... her.
She was a lone figure in the clearing, half silhouette, half damnation. Moving as if the world didn’t realize she was the thing it should be afraid of, a spark wandering through a forest made of kindling.
She didn’t notice it, didn’t feel how the air sharpened in her wake. How the dark beneath the world stirred when she breathed.
But he did.
He heard it.
Old and hungry, rustling in her shadow, tasting her name.
Ronan had killed darkness once. He could do it again. But this, her, she was not darkness. She was destiny wearing a mortal shape.
And Ronan had learned destiny was inevitability he couldn’t outrun.
Smoke bled from his teeth, curling into the air. He should scorch the realm and silence whatever starvation raked through his blood.
But he didn’t. Not yet.
Every bloodline had been raised on their own version of the tale. Each a gods’ foretelling, bent to suit their truths.
A dozen different narrations. A dozen different lies.
But all of them ended the same—with a monster crowned, Selvarra fractured, and the world in turmoil.
He should destroy that monster now.
Whatever she was, she was tied to him—by fate, by fire. By something older than creation itself. The bond he never asked for. The prophecy that doomed them both before they ever drew breath.
His power roared, a current thick and violent, winding through the air as dark as the obsidian scales sheathing his form.
Lightning split the clouds as the echo rolled through the horizon, his dragon heart beating to her rhythm below.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The sound of destiny tightening its snare.
He angled above the Roux Forest, toward the small clearing cradled inside it. The air there shifted as he descended, crisp and pure, then soured to must, crushed beneath his weight as the ground trembled.
Magic hummed instantaneously through the lattice of his scales, reminding him what he was. What he didn’t need.
Dragons did not require the core’s energy to become everything they had evolved to.
Immortal Fae. Deity made flesh.
The supremacy of his lineage burned not in relics, not in crowns, but in the rush of his own veins.
He had been forged to be a warrior. Bred solely for battle, not for the politics an heir should inherit.
And Ronan’s soul bore the brand of only one truth: fight.
Fight for honor. Fight to kill. Fight to end.
So, for over five hundred years—he has.
The land of Luamis felt strange under him. Ryuu had always been sea and stone. Unyielding, eternal, impervious to flame. Where mountains sat endless and slate.
But here, it was dirt and meadow and trees that leaned too close. It practically screamed inferno.
Only the Indra Mountain stood as parallel, its high, cresting peak a beacon to both kingdoms.
For a moment, the forest was serene. Night insects sang their thin, steady chorus. Pine draped the air in sweetness.
But then bitterness seeped through, curling with a scent, acrid as rot.
He lowered his spike-ridged head, holding back the violence that sat caged in his chest. Dragon-fire would be desolation here. One breath, one plume of flame, and this forest would crumble to ash faster than even the Bale’s hunger could consume it.
A bush shuddered. His gaze snapped left, claws flexing deep into the roots.
Was it her? Was she coming, hunting?
But no viper lashed from the shadows. Only a doe.
It stumbled from cover, each step halting, cautious, blood’s stench unraveling in the air.
It was wounded, badly, still oblivious to the dragon blended into the dim. The doe edged farther into the clearing and with every shift, the wounds became clearer. Slashes carved deep, hide torn, flesh struggling to hold.
He inhaled, eyes tapering, letting out a deep, throaty rumble.
The doe froze, eyes wide in beads of onyx as its stare met his.
It tried to retreat, staggering back, but its mangled leg betrayed it, buckling almost instantly, body crumpling to the ground.
He lifted his head high, tilting it, smoke curling up and around until scales melted to skin. Iridescent black dissolved into tanned, muscled flesh.
The leather sails along his spine vanished, now inked across his shoulder blades and down the carved lines of his back. Obsidian curls draped thick and low across his forehead.
The dragon was gone. Only the man remained.
Except for his eyes. Those same jade flames stayed, fixed on the doe as it lay unmoving in the dirt, breath slowing, chest stuttering.
The stench enhanced, until it coated more than his tongue, leeching down his throat.
Steel hissed from its sheath as he knelt beside the animal, its blood slicking the ground, oozing dark.
Not red, but black. Oily.
His jaw tightened, one hand steady on the hilt. Without hesitation, he drove the blade through its heart. The doe shuddered, a soft breath spilling in relief.
He pulled the blade free, wiping its serrated edge along the clean fur until the steel gleamed again. Bending lower he studied how the wounds were wrong, too rugged and messy. Even the jagged teeth of his dagger had cut a cleaner line.
He dragged a hand over one of the slashes, fingers dipping into the grooves, tracing the ridges until they aligned almost perfectly with his touch.
It hadn’t been steel. Not even carved bone. No predator had done this.
Claws would have cut smoother, deeper, would have known where to pierce to end the suffering quickly.
He ripped his hand back, smearing the blood and clotted flesh across his pants in one motion. But the impressions remained, clear as scripture.
A Fae had done this.
Ripped and mangled, trying to peel the flesh from bone. And they had almost succeeded.
Ronan’s pulse slowed, calming even as his thoughts refined, dark as the blood still seeping into the dirt.
The Bale was already draining Selvarra of its roots, its marrow. Every kingdom felt the choke of it. But this... this savagery was different. A more sinister force pressing overhead.
A haunting power.
The forest exhaled, all too quiet now.
He rose from his crouch, blade still wet in his hand as he turned the steel once, twice, letting moonlight catch on its teeth. His eyes lifted, scanning.
No wind stirred. No insect dared chirp. The night hushed itself into a taut silence, a bowstring drawn too tight.
He felt it then, the pressure, the weight of eyes he could not see; a gaze dragging across his scales beneath his skin.
Every instinct honed, his hand flexing around the hilt, smoke threaded at his fingertips, ready to burn the world down if it moved.
But there was nothing.
Only the taste of pine and iron. No lingering shadows but the endless trees.
Yet, Ronan let the stillness stretch until it threatened to choke him. Only then did he finally sheath the dagger.
But the hair along his neck still prickled, his own darkness unwilling to settle. Someone had been here, was still here. And they wanted him to know it.
That stench of forest and death shifted, cut clean by frosted mint as a sudden wind whisked through the branches. A white owl ghosted down from the sky, wings stretched wide, landing above him with silent grace.
Late, as always.
Ronan straightened, crossing his arms as the bird launched once more, shifting midair. Feathers rippled, bones snapped and reshaped, light twisting until a body dropped before him.
One breath, creature. The next, Fae.
Elysian.
He moved like he once remembered being something else. Someone freer.
His hair, white as snow, was knotted back, while his pale skin was covered by an ivory jacket that he smoothed with a languid hand.
Like vanity even here in the rot.
The unnatural hue of his eyes was aglow, the whitish blue cold enough to burn. Like they could never fully settle here, on a continent that had stolen him.
He stalked forward, every step unhurried. “You weren’t exaggerating. She certainly moves like she’s part of the dark.”
Ronan’s eyes tracked the shifting tree line, each drift of shadow like a breath he couldn’t quite take. “She is.”
Elysian glanced alongside him. “You do realize this is starting to look more like obsession than strategy, yes?”
Ronan huffed, tugging the cuffs of his sleeves higher. “The only obsession is to free...” He didn’t need to say anything further; they both knew what lie he would spit. He said the most truth he could instead. “To free Selvarra. And it is not an obsession. Only essential.”
“Don’t talk as though I have never yearned for the taste of freedom, Ronan. Have you forgotten my own shackles?”
“Those were burned.”
“Only to be reforged as loyalty,” Elysian countered.
Ronan turned toward him fully then, his stare saying what his pride wouldn’t: Do you truly believe yourself bound to me? A slave instead of a brother?
Elysian’s smile was muted, wry, but there was warmth behind it as he perceived what Ronan didn’t say.
“Freedom is where your soul can expand. Where your blood can breathe.” His eyes tracked the sky, then further beyond it.
“Mine may never thrive here, not on this cursed continent, but it is close enough.”