Chapter 13 Nizzus
NIZZUS
The world around me burst into motion: shouts echoed, wings unfurled, and feathers sliced through the air in perfect rhythm.
The space that only moments ago had felt steady beneath our feet now thrummed with urgency.
Power thickened in the air, crackling like static along my flesh as instincts kicked in across the group.
But I didn’t move.
Everyone moved as one, their training almost military-like in precision as I stood frozen in the middle of it all, my feet welded to the stone beneath me.
My breath stuttered in my chest.
I wasn’t an angel. I didn’t have wings meant to snap open with the kind of swift grace the others wielded. Mine were different—tied to something ancient, primal. Bone, muscle, instinct. And right now, those instincts weren’t pushing me to act, they were screaming for me to stay still.
To survive.
The word Dominion rang louder in my head than the chaos around me.
I had never seen one. Not in person. But I knew what they were. I’d studied the histories, committed every harrowing account to memory, read and reread the words of those few who survived. The slaughter of the wyverns hadn’t been a myth but a method: a deliberate cleansing.
The creature now waiting for us at the castle had once stood at the center of the purge.
“—all wyverns were ordered to shift to human form!” Gabe’s mother’s voice cut across the hall from the entry.
The warning scraped down my nerves. My wyvern inside me stirred at the word shift—a flinch, a coil—then went still with a low, instinctive dread.
Stay small. Stay unseen. Survive.
I tried to shake myself free, to pull out of the fear that had me paralyzed.
Move, Niz. Move.
Feathers brushed my shoulder; someone’s wingtip clipped my sleeve and I startled, heart punching uselessly at my ribs. Kieran’s presence steadied me, warm at my side, but the fear had already cinched tight, a trap sprung around muscle and thought.
My mind raced to every reason this was happening.
Every warning that had been passed down.
Every line of text I had studied like a religious tome.
The old stories weren’t just history. They were memories—etched into the bones of my people, carried forward through silence and hiding and the fear that, one day, the Dominion would return to finish what it started.
And now it had.
Strong hands suddenly hooked beneath my arms. Ronan.
The jolt of my feet lifting from the ground ripped a breath from my chest—sharp and unsteady—and the floor that had anchored me vanished as my body was hauled upward.
“Don’t shift.” Ronan’s voice pressed in close to my ear, low and steady in that way he used when chaos was seconds from breaking loose. “We don’t want them seeing a wyvern.”
That we landed somewhere deeper than the panic could reach. Just enough to knock something loose. To remind me I wasn’t completely alone in my fear and that I still had all of them.
He didn’t wait for permission to push forward.
Ronan’s wings surged once, then again, and the ruined Placement Hall dropped away beneath us. I felt the rush of air slice past as we cleared the shattered ceiling. My legs dangled beneath me, useless, as Ronan carried me through the sky with steady strength.
The wind hit hard against my face, pulling at my clothes and burning in my lungs, but the sharpness of it gave me something real to hold onto.
Below us, Alfemir blurred into motion—rooftops, battlements, streets filled with soldiers and angels alike.
The city was fully awake now, responding to the presence of something that had no business lording over it.
Ronan’s arms were locked beneath mine, his grip steady. His wings beat with precision, a steady rhythm that cut through the panic like it wasn’t allowed to stay. I hung from him, completely in his grip, but my trust in him was absolute and kept me grounded.
Being carried like this was humiliating, but it worked.
“Breathe,” Ronan said again, calm, even. “You’re fine. Eyes up.”
Each wingbeat forced my breath back into my lungs. Each exhale reminded me I was still alive. I latched onto that rhythm like a lifeline and let it drag me out of the worst of it.
After a long moment, I lifted my head, the movement stiff and slow, every muscle reluctant. But the moment my eyes found the sky ahead, the breath I’d just reclaimed vanished all over again.
The castle rose into view, carved from the same pale stone I’d walked beneath only hours ago—but now it looked different. Smaller somehow. Fragile in a way it had never seemed before.
Above it, casting its shadow across the entire eastern side of the structure, was a figure I knew only from history books and passed-down warnings.
The Dominion wasn’t just large—he was impossible.
Wings stretched wide enough to span the full length of the outer walls, each one layered in white so pale it looked untouched by ash or earth.
Light didn’t just fall over those feathers—it refracted around them, like it had to ask permission to touch him.
Every beat of Ronan’s wings carried us closer, but I didn’t need a better view to feel the danger we were in.
Even from a distance, the Dominion’s armor drank in the daylight like it didn’t belong to this world, a jagged silhouette of gold. He towered over the castle as if it were nothing more than a plaything. Four angels tall, at least. Maybe more.
Every detail from the preserved texts sharpened into perfect clarity. The scale. The stillness. The silence that pressed against the air like a held breath waiting to collapse.
I had never seen a Dominion before. But the fear curling through my chest wasn’t just mine—it was generations deep.
I clenched my hands into fists and tried to breathe through the chill pressing in beneath my ribs. I couldn’t afford to freeze again. Not with Kieran just behind me. Not with the others already shifting into formation ahead.
Pull it together.
I set my jaw against the throb of panic and kept my eyes on that impossible white span of wings.
We landed so hard that the stone underfoot jarred up through my legs, the impact echoing in my knees as Ronan released me and stepped forward.
My breath came rough and shallow, chest tight from the flight—but the instant my feet were on the ground, the world itself came to a standstill.
The air went strangely quiet for a moment, just long enough for tension to coil again, before a voice boomed out from above us, so loud and deep it seemed to vibrate in my bones.
“Who here is in control? Step forward now.”
The Dominion’s voice didn’t just echo through the castle grounds. It pressed down with every syllable threaded with a suffocating power that made the atmosphere feel too dense. Heads turned all at once across the crowd gathered before the castle and as they looked toward us.
The silence deepened as all eyes landed on our group and Kieran stood at the center of it.
She straightened slightly beside me, her chin lifting, a flicker of response moving through her posture before she even took a step. I knew that shift. The one that came right before she took responsibility for something no one else wanted to carry.
And then the Dominion’s gaze found us.
It was like the heat was sucked out of the air in a single instant as his attention locked in.
I watched his eyes drift over us, over the black feathers that were impossible to ignore in the bright afternoon light, stark against the backdrop of a city that once declared them defectors. The Dominion’s expression shifted, his mouth tightening slightly as fury pulled taut behind his stillness.
“What is this?” he demanded, his voice now sharper, clipped at the edges like a weapon. “What happened here? Why are there fallen among your ranks?”
The words weren’t meant for me, but they still hit like a crack of thunder. His power rolled through the courtyard. I felt it in my gut, and my limbs, and most of all in the way Kieran started to move beside me—one small step forward, her body angled to shield the others behind her.
I reacted without thinking. One moment I was drowning in my own fear, and the next, it was gone.
Not pushed aside. Not dulled. Just gone, like a thread pulled loose and yanked clean from my chest. The panic that had locked me in place only moments ago didn’t matter anymore.
The Dominion’s rage, the threat hanging in the air, even the memories clawing at the edges of my mind—they all fell away beneath one thing.
Her.
The woman I loved was about to step forward into the crosshairs of a creature powerful enough to erase entire bloodlines from existence, and my body moved before my mind could catch up.
A rush of heat surged through my limbs, startling in its intensity.
My pulse kicked hard, not with fear this time, but with something far more primal.
Protective. Every instinct sharpened, my awareness narrowing to her breath, the subtle movement of her frame as she shifted through space, the curl of her fingers at her sides as she prepared to speak.
I couldn’t let her walk into that storm. Not alone. Not first.
My hand closed around her wrist, grounding both of us in that single point of contact.
My fingers tightened just enough to stop her forward momentum, the heat of her skin jolting through me like it was the only real thing in the world.
Kieran turned, surprise and confusion creasing her brow as she looked back at me, but I didn’t release her. I didn’t speak. I just held on.
It didn’t matter that my legs had nearly buckled minutes ago. It didn’t matter that I’d been carried through the sky like something helpless, dangling and frozen. That fear didn’t live in me anymore—not where she was concerned.
I would stand in front of that Dominion myself if it meant keeping her out of his line of sight.