Lying here and watching Maire dress for the day should be enough to keep me anchored in the present.
It isn’t.
The morning light catches in her black hair as she sorts through her clothes, and for one perfect second all I feel is that dangerous, fluttering warmth she puts in my chest so easily. Then last night comes back like a blade under the ribs, and the feeling dies just as quickly beneath the weight of the same thought that has been stalking me since she fell asleep in my arms.
How the fuck am I supposed to tell her about me?
Not the pieces she already has. Not the parts softened. The truth. The god I was, the ruin I made, the man she is lying beside without yet understanding the full shape of his sins.
Then she shimmies her skirt up over her hips in a way that is absolutely not innocent, and a smile breaks across my face before I can stop it.
Gods.
There she is.
My mate. My soul’s answer. The woman who echoed the words back to me and caused something ancient and starving in me finally to go still. I am still not used to that. To being chosen so completely. To hearing devotion given back without condition. Tamara never gave me this. Never gave me her throat, her back, her trust in these small, unguarded ways Maire does without even seeming to realize how deeply they undo me.
Maire doesn’t glance over her shoulder, but I know she knows I’m looking. She knows exactly what she’s doing, the little menace.
We are supposed to leave soon. We need to move deeper into the forest and toward the western border before the others start asking questions and slow us down. Time is thin. Sense would say I should get up, get dressed, and keep my hands to myself.
Sense, unfortunately, has never had to live in the same body as my desire for her.
So I push myself up onto my knees and go to her.
My hands find her legs first, slow and deliberate, palms smoothing up warm skin before slipping beneath the edge of her skirt. I tell myself I am only testing the waters. That maybe she’ll swat me away. That maybe she’ll tell me no, and I’ll be noble enough to listen.
I almost laughed at myself for the lie.
Still, under the want, under the smile she always drags out of me, that old hollow feeling opens again in my stomach. Small. Mean. Familiar. The shadow of the worst thing I ever lived through before I found her.
And I know, even with my hands on her and my mouth already curving for whatever smart remark she’ll earn from me next, that the past is waiting.
That if I want to keep this—her, us, this impossible peace—I am going to have to drag it into the light.
So when the memory takes me, it takes me hard.
✦•······················•✦•······················•✦
It should have been quick.
That was the lie I told myself as I came down through the clouds and took mortal shape on the edge of Faerun. Landing near Tsurlagol. Reaching Mirefen. Meeting my companions. Finding Liliana’s lair. Killing her. Then returning to the Starlight Palace with blood on my hands and justice at my back.
Simple and clean.
Nothing that mattered in my life was ever simple.
Mirefen sat half-sunk in marsh and grief when I arrived, a wet little village with sagging roofs, muddy lanes, and the sort of silence that makes the skin on the back of your neck tighten. Darian was in the center of it, pacing like a caged storm. The second he saw me, he snapped around.
“Lendys.”
He did not bow. None of them did. They knew me too well for that when we were alone.
He barked for the others, and within moments Mira, Ilyon, and Seraphine emerged from an abandoned hut with faces grim enough to tell me everything had already gone wrong.
“They took them all,” Darian said before I could ask. “Every child they could reach,” he clarified, the words scraping out of him. “Some taken days ago. Some weeks. A few may still be breathing if we move quickly enough.” His voice was sharp with fury, his hands flexing at his sides like he was trying not to tear the village apart just to give his rage somewhere to go. “Right under our fucking noses.”
“Or made it look that way,” Seraphine said, calm as ever, though her gold eyes were hard. “Darian, breathe. The children could have been illusions, projections, simulacra. If our arrival disturbed the spellwork, they may have vanished with it.”
Darian looked ready to argue.
Ilyon stepped between them with the quiet grace that made him infuriatingly effective in moments like this. “She’s saying we do not know enough yet,” he said. “Not that he is wrong to be angry.”
Mira leaned against the hut wall with her arms crossed, black hair tied high and loose strands sticking to her cheek in the marsh damp. “For the record,” she said, “I think he’s exactly right to be angry.”
That made Darian snort despite himself.
I let my gaze move over all four of them in turn. My closest friends. Ancient things in mortal skin, each of them carrying enough power to break a battlefield open if they chose. Seeing them gathered there should have steadied me.
Instead, it made the dread worse.
“What did the villagers say?” I asked.
Mira rolled one shoulder. “Not much. Most of them barely react. It’s like someone hollowed them out and left the bodies standing.”
“Suppression magic,” Seraphine said. “Or something close enough to it.”
“Convenient,” Darian muttered darkly.
Ilyon handed me a waterskin he had probably taken from some unattended table. “We’ve been gathering what little we can. Children began disappearing weeks ago. Livestock first, then boys, then girls. No one left. No bodies returned.”
“No resistance?” I asked.
At that, all four of them went quiet.
Then Seraphine said, “There was resistance. It just didn’t matter.”
We found the village elder inside a hut that smelled of mold, smoke, and old fear. She sat with her hands folded so neatly in her lap it felt unnatural. Her eyes were flat. Her face empty. She answered questions like she was reciting the weather.
When Seraphine knelt before her and laid glowing hands against her temples, I felt the flare of divine magic move through the room like sunlight breaking over steel.
The effect was immediate.
The woman gasped.
Then screamed.
It was not a dignified sound. Not human in any civilized sense. Pure panic tore out of her as if Seraphine had reached into her skull and ripped the numbness loose with both hands.
“No,” the elder choked, clawing at her own dress. “No, no, no, put it back, please, gods, put it back—”
Seraphine caught her wrists gently. “Look at me.”
“They asked for it,” the woman sobbed. “They asked to forget. We all did.”
The magic had not forced the request from them, not entirely. Fear had done most of the work first. Whatever spell followed only sealed the cowardice they had already chosen because remembering meant admitting what they had survived by allowing.
“Taken where?” I asked.
Her eyes found mine, and I watched the exact moment she understood I was not a man.
I had seen that look before. Relief. Terror. Hope that was too broken to trust itself.
“The woods,” she whispered. “The deep hollow east of the fen. They take the children when they’re still good for use.”
The phrase hit the room like a blade.
Good for use.
Darian swore under his breath, vicious and low.
Mira’s mouth went flat with disgust. “Well,” she said softly, “now I want to kill all of them twice.”
The elder started crying harder. “When the children are used up, they come for us next. Or they would have. We asked to stop feeling it. To stop seeing it. Please...”
Seraphine held her a moment longer, then looked at me over the woman’s bowed head. She did not need to say anything. I could already feel the answer settling into my bones.
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We left Mirefen armed with direction and murder in our mouths.
The forest east of the village was wrong from the first step. Too quiet. Too wet. The trees stood black-gray under the dim light, and every branch seemed to lean away from the hollow ahead, as if even the woods knew better than to touch what waited there.
We moved fast and quiet, slipping between roots and shadow.
For a while no one spoke.
Then Mira, because silence had never sat well on her, glanced over at me and said, “So. Are we pretending this ends with a clean execution and a dignified report, or can I be honest and say I’m hoping to beat one of them to death with another one?”
Ilyon sighed. “Must you always sound delighted when discussing violence?”
“Only when it’s earned.”
Darian grunted. “If what’s in that lair is as bad as I think it is, I’ll hold one still for you.”
That got a low laugh out of Mira.
Even Seraphine smiled faintly. “How reassuring that we all process horror so gracefully.”
I looked at them and said, “Liliana dies. If her brood is in there and complicit, they die too.”
Ilyon’s silver-gray eyes flicked toward me. “And if we find proof that the bloodline is entirely built on this?”
“Then I keep the promise I already made.”
No one asked me to clarify.
They all knew exactly which promise I meant.
We found the lair mouth buried in roots and stone, half-hidden in a slope choked with bramble. The smell hit first.
Death.
Acid.
Alchemy.
Rot so thick it sat at the back of the throat like grease.
Darian pulled his sword free without a word.
Seraphine drew in a breath through her nose, then cursed softly. “Children.”
I heard it then too. Not voices. Not clearly. Just the thin, broken sound of pain carried through earth.
We went in.
The tunnel walls were slick and scored, marked by claws, acid, and old scorch. Corpses lay near the entrance—villagers, by the look of them, and two armored adventurers who had died hard and badly. Farther in, the warnings turned theatrical. Severed limbs. Melted armor. Bones placed where mortals would see them and understand exactly what lived below.
Then we reached the first chamber.
Four children hung from iron hooks.
Or what was left of them.
Acid had taken their skin in long dripping sheets. Their ribs were open to the air. Organs spilled in ruin onto the stone beneath. For one suspended heartbeat, I even stopped.
Mira turned away and vomited.
Darian stood perfectly still, which was always more frightening than movement.
Seraphine went white with fury and crossed the room immediately, hands already glowing as if instinct still wanted to heal what was beyond healing.
I stepped forward and laid judgment over the dead instead. Not punishment. Not yet. A blessing. I would not leave their souls in that place to rot into something twisted.
Behind me, Ilyon said very quietly, “Someone laughed.”
Every head in the room turned.
There it was again—faint, amused, disappearing down one of the deeper tunnels.
That was enough.
We ran.
Past cages where children still lived and wished they didn’t. Past work-tables cluttered with glass, bone, notes, restraints. Past vats that hissed softly in the dark. Past the evidence of Caelovar’s bloodline—venom resistance trials, draconic breath conditioning, alchemical corrosion, and the slow reshaping of flesh to become more dragon-like.
Caelovar’s name had appeared in enough of the records by then to make the shape of him clear: one of Liliana’s green-scaled sons, more scholar than butcher only in the way a scalpel is more elegant than an axe.
The farther we went, the less human my companions looked. Darian’s eyes were already taking on the hard metallic shine of his true nature. Mira moved too fast for mortal muscle. Ilyon’s composure had gone cold and lethal. Seraphine’s magic lit the walls in bursts of gold-white as she marked every chamber we would need to return to.
Then we entered the final hall.
Caelovar stood at its center beside his twins.
Liliana’s son, then. One branch of the brood given flesh and command, standing in the middle of the ruin he had helped cultivate.
He was elegant in the way rotten nobility often is, a narrow face, black hair slicked back, green eyes tired and amused, rings glinting on long fingers wet with acid. Yssera stood to his left, braid over one shoulder, face composed into something almost gentle if you ignored the cruelty in her gaze. Tazrion wore his gloves even there, precise and immaculate, as if presentation mattered in a room that reeked of butchered children.
Between them, on a table of black stone, a boy was still alive.
Barely.
They were pulling him apart while acid ate through his torso in careful, measured stages.
For one second the room held.
Then Darian moved.
He hit Tazrion like a siege weapon, bronze fury in mortal shape, sword crashing down hard enough to split stone when the twin barely caught it. Tazrion gave ground with perfect footwork and hissed, “Well. That was rude.”
Seraphine vanished in a burst of silver mist and reappeared at the boy’s side. “Sanctuary,” she said, and golden light closed around him just as stray acid sprayed across the slab. A heartbeat later she had him in her arms, purification magic racing over ruined flesh.
Mira and Ilyon took Yssera together.
That was not mercy. That was efficiency.
Yssera fought like poison wearing silk. No wasted movement. No raised voice. Just precise cruelty, one knife at Ilyon’s throat, one line of acid cast low toward Mira’s legs, all while smiling like she was mildly inconvenienced by the need to defend herself.
I went for Caelovar.
He met me laughing.
“Ah,” he said, stepping back as Judgment came into my hand in a flare of light and steel. “So the old tyrant finally came himself.”
I swung for his neck.
He twisted aside, acid spraying from one hand in a long bright arc that hissed across the stone where I had been standing a breath before. “Tell me,” he said, “did Mother know you’d be this easy to provoke?”
I drove him through two worktables.
Glass shattered. Chemicals burst. Fire flashed blue, then green, then went out in choking steam. He shifted forms in the same motion, flesh breaking apart into emerald scale and draconic mass as his body tore out of the room’s mortal proportions. I answered in kind.
Then the lair ceased to be architecture and became a battlefield.
Our true forms wrecked what was left of it. The stone collapsed under claw and tail. Breath weapon lit the dark. Caelovar’s acid came in disciplined streams meant to cripple, blind, and strip scale from bone. He fought like a scholar who had learned cruelty so well it became instinct. Testing me. Observing. Adapting.
I let him think it was working.
Across the chamber Darian had Tazrion pinned near a pillar, both of them bloodied, both huge now, metallic and emerald bodies smashing chunks out of the cavern as they tore at each other. Tazrion kept trying to create space, to control the tempo, to fight with precision.
Darian didn’t allow precision.
He fought like judgment with momentum behind it. Took wounds that should have slowed him. Lost blood enough to kill mortal armies. Still kept coming. When Tazrion misjudged one angle—one—Darian took his arm off at the shoulder, drove him to the ground, and ended him with a downward strike through throat and spine.
On the far side of the chamber, Yssera almost got Mira.
Almost.
She talked while she fought, calm as winter rot.
“You know,” she told Mira while slipping past one blow and carving a line of acid across Ilyon’s side, “most subjects become much more manageable once you stop treating screams as morally significant.”
Mira stared at her for half a second, then said, “Gods, I’m going to enjoy this.”
Ilyon drove Yssera backward with a radiant sweep of his blade, feathers of conjured celestial light bursting around him as his heraldry flared. Mira came in low, brutal, and fast. By the time Yssera realized they had baited her into overcommitting against Ilyon, Mira was behind her.
I heard the crack of her neck even over the rest of the chaos.
Then Caelovar and I were alone.
He was still talking.
They always fucking talk.
“Mother has divine favor,” he said, circling. “You have no idea what is being made here.”
Blessed. The word landed wrong. What I felt in that place was divine, yes, but not corrupted, not steeped in Tiamat’s rot. It was holy. Clean in a way that made my blood run cold. These monsters called themselves dragons and still did not know the difference.
“Then enlighten me.”
That pleased him. Of course it did.
He told me more than he should have. About bloodline selection. Acid resistance. Draconic receptivity. Mortal vessels. Tiamat’s blessing threaded through the work or what he believed was Tiamat’s blessing. A new breed being shaped from all the old failures. He thought I was tiring. Thought my slower guard was real. Thought he was winning because men like him always think intelligence makes them untouchable.
When I had enough, I let the act drop.
I tore through his next spray, took the burn, closed distance, and dropped back into mortal shape faster than he expected. Judgment came down in both hands, bright with everything he had earned.
I split him from collar to hip.
He looked shocked.
Then he was in two pieces on the floor.
The chamber went quiet except for falling stone, children crying in distant tunnels, and all of us breathing too hard in the wreckage.
Seraphine and Ilyon immediately turned to the cages.
Darian leaned on his sword for one ugly second, bleeding badly enough that Mira had to catch his shoulder before he toppled.
“You look terrible,” she told him.
He gave her a feral grin. “Killed mine first.”
“Mine was prettier.”
“Mine screamed better.”
Ilyon, kneeling by a broken cage lock, muttered, “It is genuinely impressive that you are both like this.”
Seraphine laughed once, tired and furious and relieved all at once. “Save your flirting for after we get the children out.”
I should have felt only triumph.
Instead, as I moved through the shattered remains of the lair, something cold and wrong brushed the edge of my awareness.
Divine.
Not mine.
Not anything that belonged in that pit.
I stopped in the middle of the wreckage and felt it again—faint, poisonous in its placement, impossible in its shape. Caelovar had called it Tiamat’s blessing, but he had been too stupid, too arrogant, or too far gone to know what he was touching. This power was not evil. Not chromatic. Not filled with the stench of the Dragon Queen. It was holy and familiar.
That was what made it worse. Holy did not mean safe. Mercy did not become wisdom simply because Tamara had offered it with open hands. A blessing freely given could still become a blade in the grip of someone determined to make kindness serve cruelty
And that frightened me more than if it had been Tiamat.
The truth of that would come later. But even then, standing over Caelovar’s corpse with his blood cooling at my feet, I knew this had never just been about one dragon family in the woods outside Mirefen.
It was bigger.
And far from over.