CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Verena
WHEN THE KNOCK CAME LATER THAT MORNING, I’d expected it to be someone stealing Ronan away to yet another meeting.
Now that he had returned to Sahfyre, Aero refused to let him miss any.
Obrann had declared war. And Ronan had answered.
He had written a response for Aero to send back to the king, never telling me the words, but I knew enough. Elva and I were not for sale.
The reply should have come within half a day.
It never did. Ronan knew what that meant.
As did Aero. And by the dreadful look on Aelora’s face when I passed her in his office just now, so did she.
Her eyes were bloodshot, hair tangled as though her own fingers had waged war on it.
The regard she leveled at me told me all I needed to know.
But it wasn’t her choice to make. It wasn’t mine either.
I had tried to give myself up. To surrender to the twist of fate. But Ronan refused.
So, war was coming. One way or another.
Sylen led me through the corridors, my steps padding across the charred floor. Pillared dragons lay in perfect symmetry along a balcony as we passed them, stone wings flared, their stares cast outward, guarding the sea.
Two doors waited for us as we slipped back inside the palace walls. The one on my left stood slightly ajar, silhouettes leaking through its seam, voices murmuring low and urgent within.
Sylen rapped her knuckles against the door on my right, so soft it barely stirred the mirrored surface. “Ms. Willa, I have Ms. Vale.”
Faint steps rustled beyond before a click sounded, and the door crept open where a small hand braced against its frame. Willa’s face peeked through the gap, washed in a porcelain tone, framed by a halo of white curls that tumbled in ringlets.
Her eyes bore into me, silvered and devastatingly innocent, fringed by lashes like spun ivory and brows fine as frost. Freckles spattered across her cheeks in constellations, sparkling dimly as though starlight had chosen her skin as its canvas.
She looked impossibly young and pure. And so easy to break.
Sylen bowed to us both before retreating, her footsteps vanishing down the corridor. Willa said nothing, only opened the door wider, a silent invitation.
Her chamber was smaller than mine, tucked a few stories higher, where the sea’s intimidation dulled to a distant murmur instead of a roar. Still, a chill ran down my spine, reaching over my arms until my skin pebbled.
It was frigid in here.
A flameless fireplace sat pushed into the stoned wall. No scorch marks. No lingering smoke. The walls were lined with mosaic tiles, soft beiges and tender blues stitched up toward a painted ceiling.
I wrapped my arms around myself, rubbing for friction, for heat, for anything to chase that cold. Willa only watched, blinking slow, like the world moved at her pace.
“So...” I finally spoke. “I’m Verena.”
Her head tilted one way, then the other, observing me like I was the strange thing here. The anomaly. “I know who you are.” It came out airy, a whisper spun into shape.
“Right.” Of course she did. She had summoned me.
I cleared my throat, eyes drifting around the room, desperate for a clue, a reason I was here.
I leaned in, playful on the surface, sharp underneath.
“Is there something you think I can help you with, or was this just…curiosity?” I winked, letting the grin pull wide.
Her lips perked up, her white satin gown flowing out with each step forward. “Come.”
Slipping past me, she moved toward the sea-lit balcony where two cushioned chairs sat side by side, thrones facing the restless horizon.
I followed to where the Sapphire Sea churned far below, its rage rising to meet the fire in the sky. Salt and flame, colliding until they became one devastating exhale.
A kaleidoscope of dragons wheeled overhead, wings and firestorm, sparking the air to life. Their screams carried joy, celebration that their prince had returned.
The stone railing glided beneath my fingertips as I took in every detail of each cyclone of scales, searching for the shadow of one in onyx, knowing I would not find him.
Willa drifted barefoot across the narrow balcony, hands clasped behind her back, eyes locked on the line where sea met sky. “Thank you,” she said. “For having the dragons save me.”
A crimson dragon plunged over the cliff’s side, wings banking hard, body plummeting toward the rocks below. At the last moment it leveled out, sea spray exploding beneath its claws.
I reached across the bond. Blocked.
“That was their choice,” I said, eyes still following the dragon’s flight. “Wise as it was.”
Wind battered the cliffside, dragging strands of hair across my cheeks. I kept it down anyway. For once, I wanted to feel like someone else, someone who could afford to dress in moonspun fabric and slippers. Someone who would let her hair run untamed and not pay for it.
Another dragon rose from below, sapphire scales flashing until the sunlight found the violet hidden beneath.
Shadows trailed its ascent, swallowed whole as it crossed the rim of the cliff.
I tracked them both, the sapphire and its counter, watching the way they cut through the gloom, streaks of fire and color slashing a canvas of storm.
They teased the sky like it belonged to them.
A twinge wound through my wrist when a gust came off the sea, sharp with burned magic, and beneath it, something heavier, older. A memory refusing to fade.
It was the same scent that had clung to my lungs the day Ronan burned half of Csolenia to the ground. It drifted over me now like a phantom.
Had it followed me here, whispering that nothing stays buried? Or was it rising from across the cove, where scorched land masqueraded as black sand?
“Do you know what happened here?” I turned to her. “When King Rhydan died?”
Her lashes lowered, her voice a thread nearly stolen by the wind. “Fed by their hand. Bred by their fire. They waited, not to strike, but to be believed.”
I exhaled sharply. Gods damn these Veyari and their riddles. “What are you saying? That Sahfyre was betrayed by its own blood?”
When she spoke again, it wasn’t just her voice. It was a layered chorus through her small frame. “The shadows walked beside the jewel, and no one thought to check its twin.”
Another chill needled down my spine. The words meant nothing, and yet, the way she said them, it felt as if they meant everything. Maybe in Ryuu, they did.
Jewel. Twin. The only jewels I knew of were—
“The divinity stones?” My eyes narrowed. “Are you talking about the stones forged by the gods?”
Something shimmered, a vortex swirling in her eyes as my hand slipped from the railing. It had iced over completely.
“Not jewels of stone,” she said. “Anomalous iridescence.”
Of course. A law written into their blood—answer all life-or-death questions in coded puzzles.
I huffed warm breath into my palms, turning the words over, chewing them like glass. Jewel. Twin. Iridescence.
My mind went stupid places first. Eyes, maybe, sharp as gems. Or even teeth, glinting in a predator’s grin. Eggs? Gods, no. Gold, perhaps, a palace dripping in it, or some beast hoarding it in the dark.
None of it fit. None of it breathed like truth.
Walk beside, Willa had said. Beside. Not stone. Not gold. Not egg. Something that moved, something alive.
My heart stuttered. Scales.
A jewel not carved from stone but grown. Shed.
What dragon would they even call a jewel? Ronan? Absolutely not. He was far too brooding, too smoke and shadow. My mind rifled through the skies I’d seen these past days, searching the rare flashes, amethyst, molten gold, a pearl hide maybe. Nothing settled. Nothing clicked.
Until the word anomalous gnawed its way back through me.
Rare. Unnatural. Like a fucking dragon the color of dusky rose. Aelora.
But if she was here, and important enough that Ronan had forbidden me to touch her—
Wonderful. There were two of her.
I moved from the rail just as a pine-shaded dragon burst from the depths, its armored belly pulsing with an inner glow.
“Aelora has a twin?” I had to yell over its rise.
Willa blinked. “Had a brother. One she was bound to with a devotion deeper than fire.”
The world tilted beneath me. My hand shot for the rail, steadying again as my thoughts reeled. Ronan had said Aelora was bred, crafted to stand against whatever slept beneath our core. But he never mentioned two. Never said she had lost half of herself, a twin torn away, leaving her split.
The look in Aero’s eyes flashed back, that guarded grief I hadn’t wanted to name.
“What happened to him, to the twin?” I gasped when my feet slid out from under me, the entire balcony floor slicked with ice. I balanced myself before her eyes lifted to mine.
“He defied the path written. Reached for a fate that did not belong to him. And the cost…” Her words fell colder than the frost. “The cost was everything. Body. Flame. Even his name. Erased. Gone where no dragon dares to follow.”
It felt less like an answer, more like a curse still ringing through the world. There was only one reason a dragon would suffer such an end. Only one act that could stain their blood beyond forgiveness.
He had turned on them all.
“Did the twin kill Rhydan?”
Willa didn’t answer.
In the space of a thought, an unseen pull caught behind my eyes and wrenched, dragging my eyes skyward. Wisps of thick charcoal smoke poured from me, spiraling down from the bond.
Memories, not mine, unleashed, blinding and brutal, and when I blinked, I was there, across the cove from where Willa and I stood, walking its scarred land.
Except it wasn’t tainted yet. Because it was his eyes I saw from, Ronan’s, witnessing history burn.
I blinked again and I was in the war room of Sahfyre, all obsidian flame. I could feel the winged weight along my shoulder blades beneath the leathers. The power in Ronan’s core was immense, so damn heavy it pressed against mine, yet even here, even in history, he suppressed it all.