Dragon's Heir, Part I
A fantasy novel
Chapter 1: The Shadowed Throne
The great hall of Eldoria’s castle was a cavern hewn from living stone and dancing firelight, its vaulted ceiling soaring upward into an abyss of shadow where leather-winged bats clung to rafters older than memory itself. Centuries of smoke had blackened the ancient timbers until they resembled charred bone, and the air hung thick with the scent of burning pine, tallow, and the metallic tang of the armory beyond. Tapestries lined the walls—faded remnants of glorious victories now reduced to moth-eaten threads—depicting battles against long-dead enemies whose names had been swallowed by time.
King Arin sat rigid upon his throne, a towering seat of black oak carved by craftsmen dead three hundred years. The sigils of his ancestors wound across its surface in intricate relief—wolves with bared fangs, ravens with eyes of polished jet, and serpents that seemed to writhe in the flickering torchlight, their scales catching the amber glow. The throne’s arms were worn smooth by the grip of countless hands, darkened by generations of sweat and blood. Arin’s own fingers, scarred and calloused, pressed white-knuckled against that ancient wood now.
His steel-gray eyes—the color of storm clouds before lightning strikes—scanned the gathered lords arrayed before him in a semicircle of silk and steel. They were peacocks, these men, draped in cloaks of Tyrian purple and midnight blue trimmed with ermine and fox fur. Jeweled swords hung from gilded belts that had never seen true combat, the pommels encrusted with rubies and sapphires that caught the firelight and threw it back in crimson and azure shards. Their hands were soft, their bellies comfortable, their minds devoted more to courtly intrigue than the harsh realities beyond the castle walls.
Arin presented a stark contrast to their finery. His armor was plain iron, darkened with oil and scored with the memories of battle—a deep gouge across the breastplate where an axe had nearly found his heart during the Siege of Blackwood, dents along the pauldrons from arrows that had struck like hail during the Winter Campaign. At forty winters, he was a warrior-king forged in fire and blood, his broad shoulders unbowed despite the crushing weight of responsibility that came with a crown he’d never sought, never wanted, but had taken up when his elder brother fell at the Battle of Raven’s Gap.
His face was all hard angles and weathered planes, a map of sleepless nights and impossible decisions. A scar ran from his left temple to his jaw, a parting gift from a northern raider’s blade. His dark hair, shot through with premature silver, was cropped short in the military fashion, and his beard—trimmed close to his jaw—bore the same mixture of black and gray. There was a heaviness in his eyes tonight, a shadow that went deeper than mere fatigue.
The massive iron-bound doors at the hall’s far end suddenly burst open with a boom that echoed off the stone walls like thunder. A messenger stumbled through, his leather jerkin dark with sweat despite the autumn chill, his face flushed crimson from hard riding. He half-ran, half-staggered down the length of the hall, between the rows of lords who drew back their fine cloaks as if his desperation might contaminate their silk. The man’s boots—caked with mud that left dark prints on the flagstones—slapped against the stone until he reached the base of the dais and collapsed to his knees, chest heaving.
“Sire,” he panted, each word fighting its way past ragged breaths, his voice raw as if he’d been screaming. Sweat dripped from his chin to form dark spots on the ancient stone. “Raiders... struck the border villages again. Thornhaven, Greymoor, the hamlet at the Crossroads...” He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Burned the fields—every acre, sire. The wheat, the barley, all of it. Black as charcoal far as the eye could see. They took every head of livestock—cattle, sheep, even the chickens. The granaries...” His voice cracked. “They left no survivors. Not one.”
The final words fell into the hall like stones into still water. For a heartbeat, there was only the crackle of the torches, the distant howl of wind against the castle walls. Then the murmur began—a ripple of concerned voices that swelled and rolled through the assembled lords like wind through wheat. They turned to one another, eyebrows raised, mouths hidden behind jeweled hands as they whispered calculations of trade routes disrupted, tax revenues lost, the strategic importance of those border regions.
Arin’s jaw clenched so hard his teeth ground together, the muscle jumping beneath his scarred cheek. His knuckles went white against the throne’s arms, the old wood creaking under the pressure of his grip. The raids were growing bolder with each passing moon—first isolated farmsteads, then travelers on the King’s Road, now entire villages razed to ash and bone. And always, there were the whispers.
Whispers that drifted south with refugees and merchants, tales told in taverns and around campfires. Stories of a darkness stirring in the east, beyond the Spine of the World where the old kingdoms had fallen to ruin centuries ago. Of shadows that moved with purpose and hunger. Of a power older and more terrible than any living man had known, awakening from its long slumber like some great beast stretching ancient limbs. These whispers haunted Arin’s dreams, turned his sleep into a gauntlet of nightmare visions—burning cities, rivers of blood, a throne wreathed in black flame, and always, always, the sound of screaming.
He needed answers—answers that the wisdom of his counselors and the strength of his armies could not provide. Answers that only the forbidden magic of the old world might give, the ancient arts that his own great-grandfather had decreed punishable by death after the Great Purge had nearly torn the kingdom apart. The very thought was treason, but what choice remained when conventional means failed and his people burned?
Miles away, in the muddy fields of Thornvale—a village so small it didn’t merit a dot on most maps—Elara trudged through rain-soaked earth that sucked at her boots with each labored step. The autumn storm had turned the usually firm ground into a morass of sticky clay that clung to everything it touched. At seventeen, she was no stranger to hardship; the farm demanded strength from sunrise to sunset, and her calloused hands bore testament to countless seasons of backbreaking toil. They were hands that should have belonged to someone twice her age—rough-palmed, with fingers that ached in the morning cold and nails perpetually rimmed with dirt no amount of scrubbing could fully remove.
Her woolen dress—once perhaps a cheerful blue but now faded to the gray-green of old moss—clung to her slight frame, the fabric heavy with absorbed rainwater that made every movement a struggle. The hem was caked with mud, adding pounds to its weight. Her auburn hair, the one beautiful thing she possessed, was tied back in a messy braid that had come half-undone during her work, wet strands whipping across her face in the wind that carried the smell of rain and turned earth. Freckles dusted her nose and cheeks, and her green eyes—bright and intelligent despite the exhaustion that pulled at her features—squinted against the wind.
“Curse this weather,” she muttered through gritted teeth, wiping a streak of mud from her cheek with the back of her hand, only succeeding in smearing it worse. “Curse this field, curse these roots, curse everything.” Her voice was hoarse from a day of labor without rest. Her father had taken ill with the coughing sickness that had swept through the village, and her two younger brothers were too small yet to handle the heavier work. The responsibility of keeping the farm running had fallen on her shoulders like an iron yoke.
She bent low, ignoring the protest of muscles already pushed beyond their limit, and wrapped both hands around a particularly stubborn root that had somehow wound itself around the plow blade yesterday. The wood was slick and cold, and she had to adjust her grip twice before she could begin to pull. She threw her weight backward, feet sliding in the mud, shoulders screaming. The root resisted, then gave slightly, then held again. She was preparing for another attempt when her left hand, searching for better purchase, brushed against something that didn’t belong.
It was cold—unnaturally cold, so cold it almost burned against her muddy fingers. And hard, smooth metal where there should have been only soil and stone. Frowning, Elara forgot the root entirely and began to dig with both hands, scooping away handfuls of wet earth that oozed between her fingers. The object emerged gradually from its earthen grave—first an edge, then a curve, then the full circle of it.
An amulet. Her breath caught in her throat.
It was perhaps the size of her palm, fashioned from a metal that seemed to shift between silver and gold depending on the angle of the fading light. Its surface was covered in runes—not the simple letters she’d learned from the traveling priest, but complex symbols that seemed to writhe and reshape themselves when she tried to focus on them. And they glowed. Faintly, like embers buried deep in ash, a soft blue-white radiance pulsed from the etched lines. The light grew stronger as her skin made contact, responding to her touch like a living thing.
Elara’s heart began to hammer against her ribs. She’d heard tales of such things around winter fires, whispered stories that made the village elders nervous and sent parents ushering children off to bed. Relics of the old kings, artifacts from before the Great Purge a century ago when King Aldric the Stern had decreed that all magic was an affront to the natural order. The Burning Years, they called that terrible decade—when wizards were hunted like animals, when libraries were put to the torch, when anyone caught with so much as a charm against nightmares could be executed on the spot.
Magic was a death sentence in Eldoria now. The king’s knights—the Order of the Silver Hand—hunted practitioners with religious fervor, believing them to be agents of chaos and corruption. Just last spring, they’d dragged old Marta from the next village over from her home and burned her in the square for the crime of keeping dried herbs that might have been used for healing charms. She’d been seventy winters old and half-blind, but they’d burned her anyway while her grandchildren watched and wept.
Elara’s hands trembled as she stuffed the amulet into the deep pocket of her dress, the metal still unnaturally cold against her thigh even through the fabric. The rain had stopped while she’d been digging, and now the clouds were breaking apart like torn cotton, revealing stars that pierced the darkness like silver daggers driven into black velvet. The moon, nearly full, cast long shadows across the field that seemed to reach for her with grasping fingers.
That night, after a silent supper of thin cabbage soup and hard bread—her father too weak to eat more than a few spoonfuls, her brothers falling asleep at the table—Elara lay in her narrow bed in the loft, listening to the familiar sounds of the house settling around her. The thatch roof whispered in the night breeze. Mice scratched in the walls. Her father coughed wetly in the room below.
The amulet pulsed against her chest where she’d hidden it beneath her shift, the rhythm almost like a heartbeat. She’d meant to simply hide it until she could decide what to do, but the moment she’d laid down, something had changed.
Visions flooded her mind with the force of a dam breaking—not the familiar darkness behind her eyelids but scenes of terrible clarity and beauty. Dragons soared over jagged peaks wreathed in eternal snow, their scales glittering like gemstones, their cries splitting the sky like thunder. They were magnificent and terrible, creatures of pure power and ancient intelligence, their eyes holding wisdom that predated humanity itself. A crown appeared, forged of black metal that seemed to drink in light rather than reflect it, wreathed in shadow that moved with sinuous purpose, whispering promises of power in a language she didn’t know but somehow understood. Armies clashed on blood-soaked fields beneath a sky the color of old bruises. Cities burned. And through it all, a voice—neither male nor female, young nor old—whispered her name over and over like a prayer or a curse.
Elara. Elara. Elara.
She bolted upright with a gasp, her shift soaked through with sweat despite the autumn chill. Her heart threatened to pound its way out of her chest, and her breath came in short, sharp gasps that misted in the cold air. The amulet had cooled against her skin but still thrummed with barely contained energy, like a dog straining at its leash.
The wizard. The thought came unbidden but with absolute certainty. The forbidden tower at the edge of the Thornwood, three miles north where the old road crumbled into the wild. She’d heard the village elders speak of him in hushed tones when they thought children weren’t listening—the last of the old practitioners, too powerful to be taken by the Silver Hand, or perhaps too useful to the crown despite the official prohibition. He alone could decipher the amulet’s secrets, could tell her what she’d found and what it meant and why it had called to her specifically.
She dressed quickly in the darkness, pulling on her least-worn dress and her mother’s old traveling cloak—the one good thing her mother had left behind before she’d run off with the tinker seven years ago. Her hands shook as she fastened the bronze clasp at her throat. She was terrified, but beneath the fear ran a current of something else. Excitement, perhaps. Or destiny recognizing itself.
As she crept down the ladder, careful to avoid the third rung that always creaked, and eased open the door, the cool night air hit her face like a blessing. The farmyard was silver with moonlight, every shadow sharp-edged and deep. The chicken coop was quiet. The old sow snored in her pen. Everything was peaceful, normal, safe.
Then she saw the figure.
A shadow detached itself from the treeline at the field’s edge—a cloaked form, too tall and still to be anything innocent. Moonlight caught the edge of something metallic beneath the cloak. A sword hilt, perhaps, or armor. Whoever it was stood motionless, watching her with the patient attention of a hunter who’d found his prey.
Elara froze, one hand clutching the amulet through her dress, her other hand gripping the doorframe so hard her fingernails dug into the old wood. The king’s spies were everywhere, her father had always warned. The Silver Hand paid good coin for information about magical artifacts, about anyone who might be practicing the forbidden arts. She’d just unearthed a relic that could brand her a traitor, a heretic, a danger to the realm. The punishment wasn’t just death—it was burning, the flames meant to purify the taint of magic from the world.
Her simple life, the familiar patterns of farm and field and family, was unraveling like poorly spun thread. The path ahead led only into darkness and danger, toward a tower where a wizard who’d defied death for a century might hold her answers—or her doom. Behind her lay safety, her father and brothers, the life she knew.
The figure in the treeline took one step forward into the moonlight.
Elara ran.
Chapter 2: Whispers in the Thornwood
The Thornwood swallowed Elara like a living beast, its ancient trees twisting upward in gnarled defiance of the sky, their trunks thick as towers and scarred with centuries of growth. The bark was black with age and slick with moisture, covered in patches of luminescent moss that glowed faintly green in the darkness like the eyes of watching spirits. The branches interlocked overhead in a canopy so dense that only the thinnest slivers of moonlight pierced through, casting jagged silver blades on the forest floor that shifted and danced with every gust of wind, creating the illusion of movement where there should be none.
The ground beneath her feet was a treacherous mire of fallen leaves—layers upon layers of them, years of accumulation creating a thick carpet that was slick with recent rain and rotting from beneath. Each step released a musty scent of decay that filled her nostrils, mingling with the sharp, clean tang of pine resin that oozed from wounded trees like amber blood. Roots snaked across her path in every direction like the veins of some great sleeping creature, thick as her leg in places, breaking through the leaf litter to create a maze of obstacles that seemed designed to trip her. She’d already fallen twice, her knees bruised and her palms scraped raw, mud caking her dress until it was nearly black.
Her breath came in ragged gasps that burned her lungs like fire, each inhalation never quite enough, each exhalation a small sob of exhaustion and terror. The cold autumn air cut through her throat like shards of ice. Sweat ran down her face despite the chill, mixing with the scratches on her cheeks, stinging and wet. Her legs screamed with the effort of running, muscles burning with a pain that radiated up into her hips and lower back. But she couldn’t stop. She wouldn’t stop.
Behind her, the pursuer’s footsteps echoed through the forest with terrible clarity—deliberate, unhurried, the methodical crunch of boots on deadfall betraying a confidence that chilled her more than the autumn night ever could. This was not the desperate chase of two people running at their limits. This was a hunter pacing his prey, knowing that exhaustion would do his work for him, that the frightened rabbit would eventually collapse while he walked steadily onward, conserved and patient.
The cloaked figure had emerged fully into the moonlight back at the farm just as Elara had begun to run, and in that terrible moment of illumination she’d seen the truth of her pursuer. The cloak had fallen back to reveal armor beneath—plate and mail that had been blackened to prevent reflection, but not so dark that it could hide the glint of silver pauldrons etched with the emblem she knew all too well. A gauntleted fist clutching a stylized flame, the metal worked with such skill that the flame seemed to flicker in the moonlight. The symbol of the Order of the Silver Hand, the king’s holy enforcers, the righteous fist that struck down all who dabbled in the forbidden arts.
Knights of the Order were fanatics, true believers in a cause that consumed their entire existence. They were taken as children—orphans mostly, or donated by families too poor to feed another mouth—and trained from youth in isolated fortresses where the outside world became a distant memory. They learned to root out heresy with blade and fire, to see magic not as a tool or talent but as a corruption that festered in the soul like gangrene in flesh. Their vows were absolute, binding them to the crown’s edict with chains stronger than any steel: that all sorcery—be it charm or curse, healing spell or battle magic, no matter how minor or well-intentioned—was an abomination against the natural order of the world, a tear in the fabric of reality itself that let dark things seep through.
They showed no mercy because mercy was weakness, and weakness allowed the taint to spread. They made no exceptions because exceptions were how corruption took root. They were the pure flame that cleansed, and they gloried in their work.
Elara’s heart hammered against her ribs so hard she thought they might crack, each frantic beat syncing with the amulet’s faint pulse in her pocket like two drums beating out of rhythm, trying to find harmony. The relic’s cold had intensified, seeping through the fabric of her dress with an intensity that was almost painful, spreading across her thigh until the skin there felt numb. It was a reminder—constant and undeniable—of the doom she’d unearthed with her own hands. Why had it called to her? Of all the people in all the world, why had it chosen a farm girl with callused hands and mud under her nails? Why now, when her life was already a grinding wheel of hardship and worry, when her father lay dying and her brothers needed her and the farm was failing and there were already too many problems without adding ancient magical artifacts and murderous knights to the list?
She ducked under a low-hanging branch, but not low enough—thorns from some parasitic vine that had wrapped itself around the limb scraped across her cheek like accusing fingers, drawing thin lines of fire across her skin. She felt the warm trickle of blood running down to her jaw, tasted copper and salt when she licked her lips from habit. The pain was sharp and immediate, cutting through the fog of exhaustion for just a moment.
The knight called out behind her, his voice a low rumble that carried through the trees like the echo of distant thunder rolling across a plain. “Halt, girl! In the name of King Arin and the holy Order of the Silver Hand!” The words were ritual, formal, the same words spoken before every arrest and execution. There was no plea in his tone, no negotiation or mercy offered. Only command, laced with the absolute certainty of one who wielded authority like a whip and had never been told no in his entire life. He expected obedience because he always received it. The guilty ran, but they were always caught. The innocent submitted, but they burned anyway if the Order decreed it.
Elara didn’t stop. She knew the stories too well—had heard them whispered around winter fires and in the spaces between market day conversations when people thought children weren’t listening. Stories of neighbors vanishing in the night, dragged from their beds by men in blackened armor who needed no warrant or evidence beyond suspicion. Of pyres lit in village squares for the crime of possessing a trinket that whispered of the old ways—a grandmother’s lucky coin, a carved stone that supposedly helped crops grow, a dried flower pressed in a book that might have been a component for a love charm. It didn’t matter if the magic was real or imagined. The Order made no distinctions. Magic was magic, heresy was heresy, and the punishment was always the same: fire that burned hot enough to reduce bone to ash, flames that were supposed to purify the taint from the world even as they consumed innocent flesh.
Old Marta had died that way. Sweet, half-blind Marta who could barely walk without her stick, who’d dried herbs in her cottage for healing teas because the traveling physician charged silver that poor folk didn’t have. They’d dragged her to the square and chained her to the post and lit the kindling while she’d begged and her grandchildren screamed. Elara had been twelve then, and she could still hear those screams in her nightmares, could still smell the smoke that had drifted across the village for hours afterward.
No. She wouldn’t stop. Not for all the authority in Eldoria.
As she ran, something stirred within her—a warmth that had nothing to do with exertion, uncoiling in her chest like a serpent waking from hibernation. It spread outward in waves, flowing down her arms to pool in her fingertips, making them tingle as if she’d been lying on them for hours and the blood was just now returning. It felt like sunlight breaking through clouds on a cold day, like the first warm wind of spring after a brutal winter, like something that had been sleeping her entire life was finally, finally opening its eyes.
The amulet thrummed stronger now, its pulse quickening to match her heartbeat until she couldn’t tell where her own rhythm ended and the relic’s began. The runes etched into its surface flared in her mind’s eye even though it was hidden in her pocket—she could see them as clearly as if she held the amulet before her face, could trace their patterns with a certainty she didn’t understand. They were writing something, spelling out words in a language that shouldn’t exist, and somehow she knew what they meant even though she’d never seen these symbols before in her life.
Power. Protection. Blood and earth and ancient right.
Instinct took over, bypassing thought entirely. Her hand shot out without conscious decision, pressing her palm flat against the nearest moss-covered trunk as she passed it. The bark was rough beneath her skin, damp and cool, and she felt something flow out of her—not draining her but rather connecting her to something vast and old and patient that had been waiting beneath the surface of the world. She willed herself to blend, to hide, to become part of the wood itself. Not words, not a spell in any traditional sense, just raw intent shaped by desperation.
Please. Please hide me. Please.
The air around her shimmered subtly, like heat rising from sun-baked stone, though the night was cold. The colors of her cloak and skin shifted, bleeding into one another and then bleeding outward into the world around her. The brown of her dress darkened to match the bark. The pale skin of her hands took on a mottled, shadowy quality that mimicked the dappled moonlight filtering through leaves. Her auburn hair seemed to fade, taking on the appearance of hanging moss and shadow. It wasn’t invisibility—not quite. More like camouflage so perfect that the eye simply couldn’t distinguish her from her surroundings. She was tree and shadow and forest all at once.
It wasn’t a spell like the tales of wizards summoning fire from nothing with grand gestures and spoken words of power. It felt natural, instinctive, like breathing deeper or running faster or the way her hand automatically reached out to catch something falling. An extension of herself she hadn’t known existed until this moment, like discovering she had a sixth finger that had been curled against her palm her whole life, waiting to be used.
The knight’s footsteps grew closer, the deliberate crunch-crunch-crunch of boots on leaves marking his steady approach. Elara pressed herself flat against the tree, her cheek against the rough bark, her breath held until her lungs burned with the effort. She could see him now through the undergrowth—a tall figure, broad-shouldered and powerful, moving through the forest with the ease of long practice. His sword was drawn, a length of steel that caught the moonlight in cruel flashes. His head turned methodically from side to side, scanning the underbrush with trained thoroughness.
He passed within arm’s reach of her hiding place—so close she could have touched the edge of his cloak if she’d been foolish enough to try. So close she could smell him: leather and metal polish and the acrid scent of the oil used to weatherproof his armor. His eyes—gray and cold as winter ice—scanned the shadows where she stood, passed over her directly, lingered for half a heartbeat as if sensing something amiss...
Then slid away, seeing only another tree among countless trees, another shadow among infinite shadows. He moved past her, his footsteps receding back into the rhythm of the hunt, and she remained frozen, part of the wood, barely daring to believe it had worked.
She held her breath until his footsteps faded into the distance, until the sound of his passage was swallowed by the normal sounds of the forest—the rustle of leaves, the creak of branches, the distant hoot of an owl. Only then did she allow herself to exhale in a shuddering gasp that left her dizzy. Her legs buckled and she collapsed against the tree, sliding down its trunk until she sat in the leaf litter, trembling violently with a combination of exhaustion, terror, and the strange aftereffect of whatever power she’d just channeled.
Her hands shook as she held them before her face, turning them this way and that in the faint moonlight. They looked normal now—just her hands, calloused and dirty, nothing special about them. But she’d felt it. The power flowing through them like water through a channel, like electricity through copper wire in the machines the traveling merchants sometimes showed at festivals. What was this power that lived inside her, coiled around her bones like a second skeleton she’d never suspected? A gift, like the heroes in the old stories possessed? Or the very curse the Order hunted with such fanatical dedication, the corruption that turned men into monsters and kingdoms into ash?
The visions from the amulet returned in flashes, strobing behind her eyes like lightning—disjointed images that felt more like memories than imagination. Dragons wheeling in storm-torn skies, their scales glittering like gemstones, ruby and sapphire and emerald reflecting lightning as they soared. Their roars shook the earth itself, a sound that was felt in the bones rather than heard with the ears, deep and primal and terrible. Cities burning beneath them, great towers collapsing into rubble and flame, rivers of molten stone flowing through streets where thousands had once walked.
A crown appeared—black metal that seemed forged from shadow given substance, wreathed in darkness that moved with sinuous purpose, tendrils of living night that writhed around it like snakes. The crown whispered promises in that voice that was neither young nor old, neither male nor female, neither kind nor cruel. Promises of power, of dominion, of the strength to break chains and topple thrones and reshape the world according to will rather than fate.
And beneath it all, always, that voice that made her name sound like a prayer and a curse combined. Elara, it whispered with the insistence of a lover’s plea, with the certainty of prophecy, with the weight of absolute truth. You are more than mud and toil. You are more than calloused hands and aching backs and fathers who die slowly while you watch helplessly. You are blood and power and ancient right. Claim what is yours. Claim your birthright. Claim your crown.
The words resonated in her chest like struck bells, and part of her—a part she didn’t want to acknowledge—responded to them with hunger. Yes, she wanted to whisper back. Yes, I am tired of being weak. Yes, I am tired of watching everything I love crumble while I have no power to stop it. Yes.
But terror drowned that hunger almost immediately. This was madness. This was corruption. This was how it started—the stories always said so. The demon whispers sweet promises, offers power to solve your problems, and by the time you realize the price you’ve already paid it with your soul. This was everything the Order existed to prevent, everything the Purge had tried to burn out of the world.
A sound cut through her thoughts—a faint footstep, not ahead where the knight had gone but off to the side. She froze, her hand instinctively moving to the amulet through her dress. But it wasn’t the knight returning. This footstep was lighter, more cautious. Had he brought companions? Was she surrounded?
Then she heard something that made her blood freeze in her veins—a faint hum, barely audible, coming from the direction the knight had gone. A glow emanated from somewhere ahead, filtering through the trees in pulses of sickly red light that painted the tree trunks the color of fresh blood. Not moonlight. Not torchlight. Something else. Something that felt fundamentally wrong in a way she couldn’t articulate but recognized in her bones.
A charm. The knight carried a charm—a forbidden trinket that hummed with unnatural energy, that glowed with borrowed power.
Hypocrisy burned in Elara’s throat like bile, acidic and bitter. The Order preached purity, demanded absolute adherence to the edict against all magic, burned children for possessing their grandmother’s lucky stones. Yet their own knights carried charms? Wielded the very tools they condemned others for touching? Used magic to hunt those accused of using magic?
The rage that flooded through her was white-hot and cleansing, burning away some of the fear. Old Marta had died screaming while knights wearing magical charms watched her burn. How many others? How many innocents had perished under laws that the enforcers themselves violated?
She pushed herself upright, legs still shaking but holding her weight. The tower’s silhouette was visible now through the thinning trees—a crooked spire of weathered stone that leaned slightly to the left as if the earth beneath it had shifted over the centuries, trying to swallow it down. It rose perhaps fifty feet into the air, though it was difficult to judge in the darkness. The stones were ancient, predating the kingdom by uncounted years, covered in ivy that rustled in the wind like whispers, like warnings, like invitations. Windows glowed faintly at irregular intervals up its height—not with firelight but with something else, something that shifted between blue and green and colors that didn’t quite have names.
She stumbled forward, feet catching on roots and fallen branches, exhaustion making her clumsy. But the tower drew her onward like a lodestone draws iron. Safety was there. Answers were there. The wizard who had survived the Purge through power or cunning or sheer stubborn refusal to die was there.
If he would help her. If he didn’t simply turn her over to the Order. If he wasn’t himself a demon in disguise, as the stories sometimes claimed.
She had no choice but to find out.
Miles away, in the shadowed halls of Eldoria’s castle, King Arin paced the length of his private chambers with the restless energy of a caged wolf, his boots striking the stone floor in a steady rhythm—thump, thump, thump—that echoed off the walls like a heartbeat. The stones were cold despite the roaring fire in the massive hearth that dominated one wall, flames leaping and dancing as they consumed whole logs in their hunger, throwing dancing shadows across the room that made the walls seem to breathe and shift.
The chamber was sparse, almost austere—a warrior’s retreat rather than a monarch’s luxury, reflecting the man who inhabited it rather than the crown he wore. A scarred oaken table dominated the center of the room, its surface littered with maps and reports and dispatches, held down against drafts by daggers driven point-first into the wood. Troop movements. Tax records. Casualty lists. The endless paperwork of kingship that no ballad ever celebrated.
A rack of well-worn weapons lined one wall—swords and axes and maces, each one carried into battle and brought back, each one with its own history written in nicks and scratches. These were tools, not decorations. Arin’s hand sometimes drifted to them during difficult decisions, fingers tracing familiar grips, drawing comfort from their solid reality.
A single narrow window overlooked the darkened countryside, the glass thick and wavy with age, distorting the view of the lands beyond. On clear days Arin could see for miles from this vantage point—fields and forests, villages and roads, all the kingdom he was sworn to protect. Tonight he saw only darkness punctuated by occasional lights—farmhouses, travelers’ fires, the distant glow of the town at the river crossing. Each light represented people, families, lives that depended on him to keep them safe.
The air smelled of beeswax from the candles guttering in iron sconces bolted to the walls, their flames dancing like uneasy spirits, never quite still. The scent mixed with leather and metal and the lingering smell of the evening meal—roasted meat and bread that Arin had barely touched, his appetite consumed by worry.
His scout knelt before the fireplace, grateful for its warmth after the long ride. Garrick was a wiry man, lean as a wolf in winter, with a face pitted from old pox scars that pulled the skin tight across his cheekbones. His eyes were sharp as a hawk’s—the eyes of a man who’d learned to spot danger before it spotted him—and they held a shadow now that spoke of things seen that couldn’t be unseen. His cloak was still damp from the ride, steaming slightly in the fire’s heat, and mud caked his boots to the knees.
“Sire,” Garrick began, his voice roughened by years of shouting orders across battlefields, “the raid sites... they’re worse than we feared. Far worse.” He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his scarred throat. “Thornhaven’s fields aren’t just burned—they’re blighted. The soil has been twisted, corrupted, turned black as pitch and hard as stone in places, cracked like old pottery. Nothing will grow there for years, maybe generations. The earth itself has been poisoned by something unholy.”
Arin’s hands clenched into fists at his sides, the scar across his knuckles—a gift from a northern raider’s axe five years past—whitening with the pressure. He said nothing, waiting for the rest. There was always more. The news was always worse than the initial reports suggested.
“The corpses...” Garrick hesitated, and Arin saw the man’s throat work as he fought down bile. Garrick had been a soldier for twenty years, had seen battlefields where the dead were stacked like cordwood, had walked through plague towns where bodies rotted in the streets. Little shook him anymore. That he hesitated now spoke volumes. “Some of the villagers looked like they’d been drained, sire. Not bled—drained. Their skin was withered like old leather left too long in the sun, pulled tight over bones that showed through like sticks beneath parchment. Their eyes had sunk so deep into their skulls you couldn’t see them anymore, just shadows. Like they’d been alive for a hundred years and died of old age, except we know they were young men and women and children just days ago.”
The king’s jaw clenched, muscle jumping beneath his beard. “Go on.”
“And there were markings, sire. Symbols carved into the granary walls, into door frames, even into the flesh of some of the bodies.” Garrick’s voice dropped to barely above a whisper, as if speaking too loudly might summon whatever had made those marks. “They glowed faintly when we first arrived—a sickly green light that hurt to look at—but they faded after a few minutes, like coals losing their heat. They weren’t our runes, sire. Not the script of any kingdom I know. Something older, something that made my skin crawl just looking at it. The men wouldn’t go near them. We had to order them, and even then they only approached at sword point.”
“Demons,” Arin muttered, the word tasting like ash on his tongue, bitter and dry. He’d tried not to believe it, tried to convince himself there must be another explanation—bandits with a cruel sense of theater, perhaps, or some natural phenomenon that mimicked the supernatural. But he’d known, deep down, what this was. The whispers from the east had been too consistent, too detailed, too specific to be mere tavern tales grown fat with retelling.
The scouts and merchants who dared the passes through the Spine of the World spoke of things beyond—of pacts made in desperation by men who’d had everything taken from them and sought the power to take it back. Of souls bartered away piece by piece for strength and knowledge and abilities that no mortal should possess. Of power that consumed the wielder from within, hollowing them out until only appetite remained, bottomless and insatiable. Of things that had once been human but were human no longer, twisted into shapes that hurt to perceive, driven by hungers that could never be satisfied.
His great-grandfather Aldric the Stern had seen the kingdom nearly fall to such madness during the Burning Years a century ago. Arin had read the accounts in the royal archives—journals and reports that were kept locked in a vault beneath the castle, too dangerous to be widely known. The truth of that terrible decade was far worse than the sanitized histories taught to schoolchildren.
Magic had run rampant then, but it wasn’t the pure art of legends, the wizards of old who’d shaped reality with will and word and created wonders. It was twisted, corrupted, a plague that spread through desperation. When the old kingdom fell and chaos reigned, when warlords carved up the land and refugees starved in the ruins of their burned homes, people grasped at anything that might save them. And there were things in the dark places of the world that were always willing to offer power in exchange for... service. Worship. Pieces of your soul, cut away so gradually you didn’t realize you were being hollowed out until there was nothing left but hunger.
The demons—if demons they were, or dark gods, or entities from beyond the veil of reality, the archives weren’t clear on their precise nature—whispered promises to the desperate. They offered bargains that seemed so reasonable at first. Just a small favor. Just a little ritual. Just this one sacrifice. And then another. And another. Until you’d traveled so far down that dark road there was no turning back, and the thing wearing your face wasn’t you anymore.
Most magic users during that time had gained their power through such pacts, whether they understood the true cost or not. The infernal forces were patient and clever, disguising their bargains as ancient knowledge rediscovered, as latent talents awakened, as anything except what they truly were: hooks sunk deep into the soul, reeling victims in slowly, inexorably.
Aldric’s Purge had been merciless in response—wholesale slaughter on a scale that made the current raids look like minor skirmishes. Wizards were dragged from hiding and put to the question, tortured until they revealed their secrets and named their fellows. Libraries were torched, thousands of years of accumulated knowledge going up in smoke because no one could be certain which books were innocent scholarship and which were gateways to damnation. Artifacts were smashed, their fragments scattered or melted down. Entire bloodlines suspected of magical talent were wiped out, the Order methodically hunting down every last member from grandparents to infants because corruption could lie dormant for generations before manifesting.
It was brutal. It was unjust. Innocent people died by the thousands alongside the guilty. But it had worked. The demons’ influence was severed, the pacts broken, the dark forces pushed back beyond the veil. Magic vanished from Eldoria like a fever breaking, and the kingdom began to heal.
The Order of the Silver Hand had been founded to ensure it never happened again. Their mandate was absolute: all magic was suspect, all users were heretics, no exceptions, no mercy. Because the line between sorcery and corruption was invisible to the human eye. Even those rare few born with natural magical ability—if such people truly existed and weren’t merely myths—couldn’t be trusted not to eventually be tempted into darker bargains. Better to burn a hundred innocents than let one demon-touched sorcerer survive to spread their contagion.
It was a harsh philosophy, but Arin had understood the necessity of it. Had enforced it, even when it sickened him. Order and safety, purchased with blood.
Yet now... now doubts gnawed at him like rats in the walls, small and persistent and impossible to ignore. If the raids were demonic in nature—and all evidence suggested they were—fueled by mass pacts from beyond the Spine of the World where the old kingdoms had fallen and something ancient and hungry had claimed the ruins, how could steel alone prevail? His armies were brave, disciplined, well-trained. They’d never broken in battle, never fled from any mortal enemy. But against shadows that whispered temptations directly into men’s minds? Against enemies who could offer your heart’s desire in exchange for just one small compromise? Against power that could drain the life from entire villages and blight the land itself?
“There’s more, sire.” Garrick’s voice pulled him from his dark thoughts. The scout shifted uncomfortably, clearly reluctant to continue. “We found a survivor. Just one, in Greymoor. A boy, maybe ten years old. He’d hidden in a grain barrel when the raiders came. He was...” Garrick’s scarred face twisted with something between pity and horror. “He was broken, sire. Kept rocking back and forth, wouldn’t look anyone in the eye. But he talked. Gods, how he talked, once he started. Couldn’t get him to stop.”
“What did he say?”
“He said the raiders had eyes like burning coals—glowing red in the darkness like forge fires. They came at dusk and moved through the village with torches that burned green, and their laughter...” Garrick shuddered. “He said their laughter sounded like screaming, like the voices of everyone they’d ever killed were trapped in their throats.”
Arin felt ice water replace the blood in his veins.
“They offered gifts to those who knelt,” Garrick continued, his voice flat now, reciting facts to distance himself from their horror. “The boy saw it happen. They’d grab someone—a farmer, a miller, a blacksmith, didn’t matter who—and they’d speak to them in voices that made your ears bleed to hear. Offer them power, wealth, revenge against old enemies. All they had to do was kneel. Just kneel and swear service.”
“And those who refused?”
Garrick’s silence was answer enough. Then: “The boy said they screamed for a long time. That the raiders took something from them, pulled it out through their mouths like silk thread from a spool. That they withered as whatever it was came out, shriveled up like leaves in autumn, until there was nothing left but husks that blew away in the wind.”
The king turned to stare into the fire, watching the flames devour the logs with mindless hunger. Demons. It was demons, corrupting the desperate and the foolish, spreading like plague from the east. And against such an enemy, what could conventional forces do?
“There’s one more thing, sire.” Garrick’s voice was barely audible now. “Whispers in the Order’s ranks. Nothing concrete, nothing I can prove. But rumors that some knights carry charms—small things to sharpen their senses, to help them detect magic, to make them stronger or faster. They say it’s for the greater good, sire. To hunt the taint more effectively. They say the ends justify the means.”
Arin’s eyes narrowed, storm-gray turning to steel. The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees. “The Order. My enforcers. The ones who burn children for possessing trinkets. They carry charms themselves?”
“As I said, sire—just whispers. Rumors. I can’t prove it.”
“But you believe it.”
Garrick met his king’s eyes. “I’ve seen too many things in the past weeks not to question everything, sire. If the Order dabbles in the very arts they condemn... if hypocrisy runs that deep...”
Arin was silent for a long moment, his scarred hands gripping the mantelpiece so hard his knuckles went white. Finally, he spoke, his voice low and dangerous. “Investigate. Discreetly. Use whoever you trust, but keep it quiet. If the Order has been compromised, if they’re using the very magic they hunt...” He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.
If the guardians had become the corrupted, who would guard the guardians?
“If the darkness rises,” he continued, “if this is truly the demonic resurgence the archives warned of, we may need to question everything—even our most sacred vows. Even the Purge itself.”
It was heresy to speak such thoughts aloud. But Arin had never cared much for orthodoxy when survival was at stake.
Chapter 3: The Wizard of Thornwood
Back in the Thornwood, Elara burst from the final line of trees into a small clearing, her lungs burning and her legs threatening to collapse beneath her. The tower loomed before her like a sentinel from forgotten tales, its ancient stones rising into the night sky with an air of patient endurance, of having outlasted countless generations and intending to outlast countless more.
Up close, it was even more imposing. The door was ancient oak, so old the wood had turned black and hard as iron, its surface carved with symbols that matched those on her amulet—twisting runes that seemed to shift and change when viewed from different angles. Iron bands crossed the door at regular intervals, rusted to the deep red-brown of dried blood, their rivets the size of her fist. There was no handle, no visible lock, just smooth wood and metal that had weathered centuries of sun and rain and snow.
Elara threw herself at the door with the last of her strength, pounding on it with mud-streaked fists that left dark smears on the ancient wood. Her voice came out as a hoarse cry, ragged from running and fear. “Please! Open! I seek the wizard! Please, I need help!” She punctuated each word with another blow against the door, her fists aching, her voice cracking. “Please!”
Behind her, she heard the undergrowth rustle. The knight had found her trail again.
He emerged from the shadows between the trees like nightmare given form, sword drawn and gleaming in the moonlight, the blade held with the easy confidence of a man who’d killed with it many times before. The charm on his gauntlet flared brighter now that he was close to her—a sickly red glow that pulsed in time with her heartbeat, tracking her like a hound following scent. It was a small thing, barely the size of a walnut, set into the back of his armored hand, but its light spoke of power borrowed from places that should not be touched.
“You’ve meddled in forbidden things, girl,” the knight said, his voice carrying the certainty of religious conviction, the absolute faith of a true believer who’d never questioned his cause. “The penalty for possessing artifacts of the old magic is death by fire. The penalty for using that magic is the same. You’ve committed both crimes this night.” He took a step forward, his armored boots crunching on the fallen leaves. “The Silver Hand claims you—and that relic you carry. Submit now and your death will be quick. A clean blade before the flames, a mercy more than you deserve.”
“Mercy?” Elara’s voice cracked, fury and terror mixing in equal measure. “Like the mercy you showed old Marta? Like the mercy shown to every innocent who didn’t even know what they possessed?” She pressed her back against the door, her hand flying to the amulet through her dress. Its pulse surged to meet her touch, recognizing her desperation, responding to her need.
“The guilty always proclaim innocence,” the knight intoned, his voice as flat and remorseless as a judge pronouncing sentence. “Magic corrupts. Magic destroys. Magic is the gateway through which demons enter our world. There are no innocents among those who touch it, only those whose corruption hasn’t yet manifested fully.”
“Then what about you?” She pointed at his gauntlet with a shaking hand. “That charm you wear—that’s magic too! You condemn others for what you yourself use!”
For just an instant, something flickered in the knight’s eyes—doubt, perhaps, or shame quickly buried. “This is sanctified,” he said, but his voice lacked its previous certainty. “Blessed by the Order, used in service of the king, a tool to combat evil rather than embrace it. The difference is intention, girl. We use these tools as weapons against the darkness, not in service to it.”
“Does the fire know the difference?” Elara spat back, surprised by the venom in her own voice. “Did Marta’s flesh burn any less hot because your intentions were pure?”
The knight’s face hardened, the moment of doubt passing like a cloud before the sun. “Enough. Your blasphemy only confirms your guilt.” He raised his sword, advancing with the slow deliberation of a man who knew his prey had nowhere left to run. “Last chance, girl. Surrender the relic and submit to judgment. Make your peace with whatever gods you pray to.”
The warmth within Elara ignited fully now, raw and uncontrolled, like a wildfire catching in dry brush. It wasn’t a conscious decision—she didn’t speak words of power or make arcane gestures. It simply happened, her fear and rage channeling through the amulet into something primal, something that bypassed thought entirely and connected directly to the world around her.
The vines covering the tower’s walls—thick as her wrist, ancient and woody, dormant in the autumn chill—suddenly lashed out like whips given sentience. They moved with impossible speed, uncoiling from stone and wrapping around the knight’s legs with the sound of sliding rope. He stumbled, caught off-guard, his sword swinging wild as he tried to maintain balance.
“What—” he started to say, but then the ground beneath his boots began to shift.
The solid earth that had supported him turned soft and treacherous, the packed dirt of the clearing transforming into something between mud and quicksand. It sucked at his armored boots with audible squelches, each movement driving him deeper instead of freeing him. His ankles disappeared, then his shins, the weight of his armor working against him, dragging him down into earth that moments ago had been firm as stone.
It wasn’t deliberate—Elara had no idea how she was doing any of this, no control over the forces she’d unleashed. It just happened, instinct and terror made manifest, her desperate need for protection translating itself into reality through channels she didn’t understand. The amulet was a conduit, she realized dimly, not the source. The power came from somewhere else—from inside her, or from the earth itself, or from some combination of both. The relic merely gave it shape and direction, like a riverbed gives form to water.
The knight roared in fury and something else—was it fear?—his training reasserting itself as he drove his sword point-first into the ground for leverage. The blade sank deep, and he used it to haul himself forward, his considerable strength fighting against the earth’s pull. The vines tightened around his legs but couldn’t hold him—he was too strong, too well-trained, and the armor protected him from their thorns.
“Demon-touched!” he bellowed, his voice carrying a note of vindication now, as if this proved everything he’d believed. “You’ve made a pact! The darkness has claimed you!” His free hand reached for a pouch at his belt, fingers closing around something within. “May the flame cleanse you!”
Behind Elara, the ancient door suddenly creaked—a sound like bones grinding together, like stone shifting in the deep places of the earth. It was opening. Finally, impossibly, it was opening.
Warm light spilled out from within, golden and welcoming in stark contrast to the cold moonlight. A voice emerged from that light—a voice dry as autumn leaves that have been pressed in books for decades, cracked and brittle yet somehow carrying clearly across the clearing. There was amusement in it, and curiosity, and something else. Recognition, perhaps.
“Enter, child of the old blood,” the voice rasped, each word distinct and precise despite its age. “Before he calls his infernal allies. Yes, yes, I see you there, Knight of the Silver Hand. I see the charm you wear, the pact you’ve made whether you acknowledge it or not. Such delicious hypocrisy. Now then, girl—inside, quickly!”
Elara didn’t need to be told twice. She stumbled backward through the doorway, her legs finally giving out as adrenaline abandoned her all at once. She fell across the threshold, landing hard on smooth stone floor that was surprisingly warm beneath her palms. The ancient door swung shut behind her with a boom that shook dust from the rafters, and she heard the sound of bars falling into place—heavy iron things that hadn’t been there moments before, materialized from nothing or simply hidden until needed.
The knight’s roar of rage and the pounding of his armored fists against the wood were muffled almost to silence. Then came other sounds—crackling, like lightning earthing itself, and the knight’s curses turning to cries of pain and surprise. The tower’s wards had come alive, Elara realized. She could feel them even from inside, a thrumming in the air like the moment before a thunderstorm breaks. Ancient protections woven into the very stones, patient traps waiting for someone foolish enough to assault the wizard’s sanctuary.
“He’ll live,” the dry voice said from somewhere above her, sounding almost disappointed. “The wards won’t kill—I calibrated them carefully after the last incident. Too much paperwork when a knight dies, even one who comes seeking violence. But he’ll have a splitting headache for a week and some entertaining nightmares besides. The Order will think twice before sending another, at least until they gather more information. Or more fools. One never can tell with zealots.”
Elara pushed herself up onto her hands and knees, her arms shaking with exhaustion, her breath still coming in ragged gasps. She was inside. She’d made it. The knight was outside. She was safe, at least for the moment.
Then she looked up and saw her host.
The wizard stood at the base of a spiral staircase that wound upward into darkness, leaning heavily on a staff of gnarled wood that was taller than he was. He was ancient—impossibly ancient, his face a map of wrinkles so deep they looked carved rather than earned through time. His hair was pure white, long and wild, falling past his shoulders in tangles that suggested he’d forgotten what a comb was sometime during the previous century. His beard reached his chest, braided with small bones and stones that clicked softly when he moved. His eyes, though—his eyes were sharp and bright as a crow’s, the brown-black of turned earth, missing nothing despite his obvious age.
He wore robes that might once have been blue but had faded to a color somewhere between gray and lavender, patched in a dozen places with cloth that didn’t quite match. His feet were bare despite the autumn chill, the toes gnarled and knobbly, with yellowed nails that curled slightly. He looked like he might blow away in a strong wind, fragile as dried paper, but Elara could feel the power radiating from him—subtle but undeniable, like standing near a fire that gave off heat without visible flames.
“Well then,” he said, tilting his head to study her with those unsettling eyes. “You’ve made quite the entrance, young lady. Unconscious magic, pursued by the Order, carrying a relic I haven’t seen in... oh, seventy years? Eighty? Time gets slippery at my age.” He made a dismissive gesture with one wrinkled hand. “No matter. The question is—are you here to ask for help, or to beg for sanctuary, or simply to collapse on my floor and die of exhaustion? Because you look like you’re seriously considering that last option.”
Elara opened her mouth to answer, but what came out was something between a sob and a laugh. The absurdity of the moment hit her all at once—she was sitting in a puddle of her own sweat and mud, in a wizard’s tower, having just used magic she didn’t understand to escape a knight who wanted to burn her alive for possessing an amulet she’d found by accident while farming. Yesterday her biggest concern had been getting the root vegetables harvested before the first frost. Now she was a heretic, a criminal, possibly demon-touched if the knight was to be believed.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, her voice small and broken. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t know what’s happening to me. I just—” She pulled the amulet from her pocket, holding it out in a shaking hand. The runes still glowed faintly, pulsing in time with her heartbeat. “I found this. In my field. And then there were visions, and the knight came, and I ran, and I could hide somehow, and then the vines moved, and—”
The words were tumbling out faster and faster, her voice rising with hysteria. “I’m not a witch! I’ve never done magic before! I don’t have pacts with demons! I don’t even know any demons! I’m just a farmer, I just wanted to save the crop, and now there’s a knight outside who wants to burn me and I used magic which means maybe he’s right, maybe I am corrupted, maybe I should just—”
“Breathe, child.” The wizard’s voice cut through her spiral with surprising gentleness. He thumped his staff against the floor once, and the sound seemed to echo not just in the tower but inside her chest, like a drumbeat synchronizing with her racing heart and forcing it to slow. “Breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Yes, like that. Again. Good.”
Against all reason, Elara found herself obeying, drawing in a shuddering breath that filled her lungs with air that tasted of old parchment and dried herbs and something indefinable that might have been magic itself. The panic receded slightly, enough for her to think again, enough for her to notice details about her surroundings.
The tower’s interior was a single large circular room, this ground floor at least, with walls lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves that bowed under the weight of their contents. Books and scrolls, jars filled with things that glowed or moved or sat in preserved stillness, strange instruments of brass and glass that Elara had no names for. A workbench occupied one section of the wall, covered in what looked like the remains of several experiments—beakers and alembics and crystals that refracted the candlelight into rainbow patterns. The floor was smooth stone, worn by centuries of footsteps, inlaid with silver lines that formed geometric patterns she couldn’t quite follow with her eyes.
“Better,” the wizard said, watching her with those sharp eyes. “Now then. Let me see that trinket you’ve found.”
Elara extended her hand, offering the amulet. The wizard didn’t take it—instead he leaned forward, bringing his face close to her palm, studying the relic with intense focus. His breath smelled of mint and something sharper, more medicinal. After a long moment, he straightened with a crack of old joints and a grunt of what might have been satisfaction or concern.
“Hmmm. Yes. I thought I recognized the signature.” He began to pace, his staff clicking against the stone floor with each step, his bare feet making no sound at all. “That’s a focusing talisman from the reign of Aldric the Second—not Aldric the Stern who started the Purge, but his great-great-grandfather, back when magic was still taught openly and the Order didn’t exist. Powerful piece of work, that. The smiths who made such things are long dead, their techniques lost in the Burning Years. Worth a small fortune to the right collector, or a death sentence if the wrong person learns you possess it.”
He stopped pacing and turned to face her fully, his expression grave. “But that’s not what interests me. What interests me is that the talisman activated for you. Such items are keyed to bloodline, you see—they respond only to those who carry the old magic in their veins, the natural affinity that exists independent of any demonic pact. They’re essentially useless to anyone else, just pretty metalwork. But for you...” He gestured at her with his staff. “It woke up. Responded. Amplified what was already inside you waiting to be accessed.”
“But I don’t have magic,” Elara protested weakly. “I’m nobody. My parents were farmers, my grandparents were farmers, we’re just—”
“Nobody?” The wizard’s laugh was sharp as breaking glass. “Child, you just unconsciously reshaped reality to save your skin, commanded earth and vine with no training whatsoever, and survived an encounter with a Silver Hand knight despite having no idea what you were doing. You are many things, but ‘nobody’ is not among them.”
He moved closer, his ancient face serious now, all trace of amusement gone. “The truth the Order doesn’t want anyone to know—the truth buried in archives and hidden behind propaganda—is that natural magic users exist. Always have. They’re rare, yes, perhaps one in ten thousand births at the most, but they exist. Born with the ability to touch the deeper currents of reality, to shape the world through will given proper focus. No pacts needed, no demons required, no soul-selling involved. Just talent, like being born with a gift for music or mathematics.”
“Then why—” Elara’s voice was barely a whisper. “Why does the Order hunt them? If they’re not demon-touched, if they’re not corrupt—”
“Because,” the wizard said heavily, “the Order can’t tell the difference. Or won’t. Magic is magic to them, whether it springs from natural talent or infernal bargain. And in fairness, most magic users they encounter have made such bargains, just as the histories claim. Desperate people making desperate deals, not understanding the price until it’s far too late. But the innocent five percent or so...” He shook his head sadly. “They burn just as hot. Just as bright. Just as dead.”
Elara felt the last of her strength leave her. She slumped against the door, the wood solid and reassuring against her back, and finally let the tears come—silent and hot, tracking through the dirt on her cheeks. “So I’m going to die anyway. Even if I haven’t done anything wrong, even if I was born this way, the Order will hunt me forever. I can’t go home. Can’t see my father again before he...” Her voice broke. “He’s dying. And I can’t even say goodbye because they’ll follow me there and burn my brothers too for harboring me.”
The wizard was quiet for a long moment, studying her with those ancient, knowing eyes. Then he sighed, the sound like wind through a crypt, and lowered himself carefully to sit on the bottom step of his spiral staircase, his joints creaking in protest.
“There are options, child,” he said finally. “Few and dangerous, but they exist. The kingdom is changing, whether the Order sees it or not. The raids from the east, the demonic resurgence—these things will force even King Arin to reconsider the old prohibitions. He’s not stupid, that one. Harsh, yes. Burdened by his crown, certainly. But not stupid. If the evidence becomes overwhelming enough, if the threat grows large enough, he may have no choice but to seek alternative solutions.”
“You mean using magic to fight magic,” Elara said dully. “Becoming exactly what they fear.”
“I mean surviving,” the wizard corrected sharply. “Whatever it takes. The demons won’t stop because we observe the niceties of law. They won’t hold back because we’ve decided magic is forbidden. They’ll tear this kingdom apart and feast on the ruins, and all the Order’s righteousness won’t stop them.”
He struggled back to his feet with another series of cracks and pops that made Elara wince. “But that’s philosophy for another time. Right now, you’re exhausted, hunted, and holding a magical artifact that half the kingdom would kill to possess. First things first: you need food, rest, and training. Can’t do much with any of that power if you don’t know how to control it. Unconscious magic is dangerous—to you as much as to anyone else.”
“Training?” Elara looked up at him, hope kindling faintly in her chest alongside the fear. “You’ll teach me?”
“Someone has to,” the wizard grumbled. “Can’t have you wandering around reshaping reality every time you get startled. You’ll cause an earthquake or summon a thunderstorm or accidentally turn someone into a toad. Probably yourself, knowing beginners’ luck.” He extended a gnarled hand to help her up. “Come on then. Up you get. There’s a room on the second floor you can use, and I think there’s still some stew from yesterday that hasn’t gone bad. Probably. Maybe.”
Elara took his hand—his skin was dry as paper, but his grip was surprisingly strong—and let him pull her to her feet. Her legs wobbled, threatening to give out again, but she forced them to hold.
“I don’t even know your name,” she said.
The wizard paused halfway to the stairs and turned to look at her, something like surprise flickering across his ancient face. “Hmm. No, I suppose you wouldn’t. It’s been so long since anyone asked, I’d nearly forgotten I had one.” He smiled, revealing teeth that were still remarkably white despite his obvious age. “Mordren. Though the Order calls me other things. Heretic. Demon-spawn. A stain upon the kingdom. They’ve been quite creative over the years.”
“Mordren,” Elara repeated, testing the name. It felt solid in her mouth, real, an anchor in the chaos her life had become.
“And you are Elara,” Mordren said, not asking but stating. “The amulet told me your name when it activated. Convenient things, magical artifacts—very chatty when they want to be.” He turned back to the stairs, beginning the slow climb upward. “Now come along. We have much to discuss, and I’m too old to keep repeating myself because you collapsed from hunger in the middle of my lectures. Bad for morale, students dying of starvation. Reflects poorly on my hospitality.”
Elara followed him up the spiral stairs, each step an act of will, her hand trailing along the wall for balance. Outside, she could still hear faint sounds—the knight’s curses, growing more distant as he presumably retreated to report to his superiors or tend his injuries. The wards hummed in the walls, a deep vibration she felt in her bones more than heard with her ears. The tower was protecting her.
For now.
But she knew this was only the beginning. The Order wouldn’t stop. The visions promised horrors yet to come. And somewhere to the east, beyond the Spine of the World, something ancient and terrible was waking up.
The farm girl who’d worried about root vegetables and dying fathers was gone, burned away like morning mist. In her place was something new, uncertain, terrified, but undeniably alive in a way she’d never been before.
Elara of Thornvale was dead.
What would rise from those ashes remained to be seen.
Chapter 4: The Dragon’s Heart
Elara’s sleep was a battlefield, her narrow bed in the tower’s second-floor chamber a fragile raft adrift on a sea of nightmares that crashed over her in relentless waves. The room itself should have been a sanctuary—its simple stone walls softened by faded tapestries depicting starry skies and ancient forests rendered in threads that had once been vibrant blues and silvers but had aged to the color of storm clouds and tarnished metal. A small hearth occupied one corner, where embers glowed like watchful eyes, pulsing with a steady rhythm that should have been comforting but instead seemed ominous in the darkness. The window was a single pane of warped glass, so old and distorted that it transformed the moon outside into something that resembled a leering face, its features stretched and twisted into a grotesque parody of human expression.
The air smelled of dried lavender from a bundle hanging above the door, tied with twine and meant to ward off bad dreams according to folk wisdom older than the kingdom itself. But tonight, against the forces that assailed her sleeping mind, it was as effective as a candle against a hurricane.
She tossed beneath the woolen blanket Mordren had provided—thick and surprisingly soft, smelling faintly of cedar from whatever chest it had been stored in—her body unable to find rest even as exhaustion dragged at her limbs like iron weights. Her auburn hair had come loose from its braid and now lay matted with sweat against her neck and shoulders, damp and uncomfortable. Her freckled face twisted in distress, eyebrows drawn together, lips moving soundlessly as if arguing with phantoms only she could perceive.
The amulet rested on a small table beside the bed, placed there at Mordren’s insistence. “Best not to sleep with it touching your skin,” he’d warned. “Too much resonance, too much feedback. You’ll dream yourself into madness.” But even separated from her flesh by a handspan of air, it wove its influence into her mind like a spider weaving its web, each thread of power connecting to something deep in her consciousness that she hadn’t known existed.
Its runes pulsed faintly in the darkness like a distant heartbeat, blue-white light washing across the stone ceiling in rhythmic waves. And with each pulse, the visions came—not as gentle dreams that one could dismiss upon waking, but as assaults on her consciousness, fragments of history torn from the past and thrust into her awareness with the force of lived memory, as real and immediate as her own experiences.
She saw the Burning Years through eyes that weren’t her own, experiencing events that had occurred a century before her birth as if she stood within them. A young woman—perhaps twenty, with dark hair and eyes the color of amber—fled through smoke-choked streets as buildings burned on either side, their thatch roofs consumed by flames that reached toward the sky like grasping fingers. The smoke was thick and acrid, burning the lungs, tasting of char and terror and the peculiar sweetness of burning flesh. Behind her, the thunder of hoofbeats echoed off cobblestones as the Order’s knights pursued on armored steeds, their silver emblems catching the firelight, their voices raised in righteous fury.
“Heretic! Witch! Demon-spawn!”
The woman’s hands glowed with instinctive power—untrained, uncontrolled, pure desperation made manifest—and she thrust them toward the ground as she ran. Vines erupted from cracks in the cobblestones, thick as ship’s cables, wrapping around the horses’ legs and sending riders tumbling to the street in crashes of metal and screams of men and beasts alike. It was almost exactly what Elara herself had done hours before in the clearing outside this very tower, the same desperate magic channeled through the same terror.
But the knights were relentless, and they were prepared. They rose from their falls, drawing blades that glowed with their own unnatural light—runes etched into the steel that nullified the woman’s defenses, cutting through her conjured vines like scythes through wheat. Hypocritical charms, the vision whispered with bitter knowledge. Tools forged through minor pacts with the very forces they claimed to oppose, bargains made in secret chambers where no one would witness. Fighting fire with fire while publicly condemning the blaze, wielding magic to hunt magic users, all while proclaiming absolute purity.
The woman turned to fight, power gathering in her hands—raw and beautiful and terrible—but there were too many of them. The blades fell, and Elara felt the echo of her death like a punch to the chest, a gasp of finality, a light extinguished forever.
The scene shifted without transition, lurching sideways through time and space. Now she stood—or the memory stood—in a grand square paved with stones that had been worn smooth by centuries of footsteps. It was a place meant for markets and festivals, for celebration and community. But today it had been transformed into something else entirely.
Pyres rose in a line down the center of the square, wooden structures ten feet high, kindling stacked around central posts where figures were bound with chains that cut into their flesh. Flames roared skyward as oil-soaked wood caught and spread, the heat so intense that Elara could feel it even through the barrier of memory and time. The bound figures screamed—gods, how they screamed—their voices rising in a chorus of agony that drowned out everything else.
Not all were pact-makers, the amulet insisted in that voiceless way it had of imparting knowledge directly into her consciousness, bypassing language entirely to deliver pure understanding. The amulet stored memories of things, had witnessed a century of horror and preserved it all with crystalline clarity. It showed her truth, whether she wanted to see it or not.
Most of those who burned had indeed bartered their souls for power—desperate farmers who’d summoned rain during droughts that killed crops and children, only to find that the water they called was tainted, poisoning the very fields they’d tried to save. The crops grew twisted and wrong, producing fruit that rotted from within, and those who ate it fell ill with wasting sickness. Merchants who’d traded honesty for wealth in bargains whispered in dark rooms, finding their deals consuming them from within, their bodies withering even as their coffers overflowed with gold they could no longer enjoy. Soldiers who’d sought strength to protect their families, becoming monsters that slaughtered those same families when the demon’s hunger rose.
For the vast majority, the vision quantified with cold, mathematical precision that somehow made it worse. Statistics of damnation, carefully calculated over decades of observation. Magic users in Eldoria fell into clear categories: of every five hundred people in the kingdom, perhaps one dabbled in magic at all, drawn by temptation or desperate need into making bargains they didn’t fully understand. And of those magic users—those who wielded power of any kind—nineteen in twenty had gained that power through pacts with infernal forces, whether they understood what they’d done or not. Whether they’d meant to sell their souls or had simply been tricked into it by promises that sounded so reasonable at the time.
But the remaining five percent—one in twenty magic users, one in ten thousand souls born into the world at all—carried the gift naturally. Born with it threaded through their bones and blood, as much a part of them as the color of their eyes or the rhythm of their hearts. No bargains needed. No demons required. No corruption inherent to the power itself.
But the Order saw no difference and made no distinctions. Magic was magic, and corruption was considered inevitable. A natural mage might resist the demon’s whispers today, but what about tomorrow? Next year? In a moment of weakness or despair? Better to burn all who showed any hint of power than to risk even one corrupted sorcerer spreading their taint through the kingdom like plague through a city. Better to accept the deaths of innocents—collateral damage in a holy war—than to allow the darkness any foothold whatsoever.
Easier to uproot the entire garden than to weed it carefully, the amulet observed with something that might have been sorrow. Simpler to burn the forest than to identify which trees were diseased.
Elara bolted upright with a gasp that turned into a sob, her green eyes wide and wild in the dim light of dying embers. Her shift clung to her skin, soaked through with sweat that had turned cold in the autumn air, making her shiver violently. Her heart pounded as if she’d run the Thornwood chase anew, as if those knights with their enchanted blades were right behind her, moments from striking her down. Her hands shook as she pressed them to her face, feeling the heat of her own skin, the wetness of tears she hadn’t realized she’d shed.
The odds lingered in her mind like echoes, numbers that refused to fade: one in five hundred souls dabbling in magic overall, scattered through the population like rare seeds scattered by wind, most of them doomed from the moment they accepted their first bargain. But only one in ten thousand born with the innate spark, the natural gift that needed no corruption to function. Like her. Like Mordren. Rare as dragons’ teeth, precious as diamonds, and hunted just as fiercely as the pact-makers they were lumped together with.
How many had burned who shouldn’t have? How many natural mages had died in those pyres, their screams lost among the guilty, their potential snuffed out before they could even understand what they were?
A soft knock echoed from the door, three measured taps that somehow conveyed concern without urgency. “Child? Are you well?” Mordren’s dry voice came through the heavy wood, muffled but clear enough. She could hear the worry beneath the words, carefully controlled but present nonetheless.
Elara swallowed, her throat raw as if she’d been screaming—perhaps she had been, in her sleep. “Just... dreams. Bad ones.” The words felt inadequate, childish. What she’d experienced had been far more than mere dreams.
The door creaked open on hinges that probably predated the kingdom, admitting the wizard in his faded robes. The color was even less definable in the pre-dawn darkness, appearing almost gray. His staff tapped against the floor as he entered, and the bones woven into his beard clicked softly with each movement of his head—small vertebrae from birds or rodents, stones worn smooth by rivers, tiny bells that chimed too softly to truly hear but that registered nonetheless in the ear. His bare feet made no sound at all on the stone floor, as if he weighed nothing, as if he were more spirit than flesh after all his years.
“The amulet’s doing, no doubt,” he said, moving to the table where it rested. He didn’t touch it, but his fingers hovered above its surface, feeling the emanations it gave off like heat from a forge. “It has a way of unearthing buried truths, of showing you what was and what might be. History written in blood and fire, preserved in scale and magic. The dragons remembered everything, you see. Every injustice, every triumph, every moment of beauty and horror. They were creatures of perfect memory, and their artifacts inherited that trait.” He turned to look at her, those sharp crow’s eyes seeing more than she was comfortable with. “Come downstairs when you’re ready. We’ve work to do, and the stew won’t reheat itself forever. Also, you should eat. Power burns through flesh like fire through paper if you don’t fuel it properly.”
He left without waiting for a response, the door closing behind him with a soft click that somehow felt final.
Elara sat in the darkness for another moment, hugging her knees to her chest, feeling the tremors that still ran through her body. Then she forced herself to move. Sitting here dwelling on visions wouldn’t change anything. Action was what mattered now.
She dressed quickly in the simple tunic and breeches Mordren had left folded on a chair—practical garb in browns and grays, far cleaner than her ruined farm dress and actually designed for movement rather than the restrictive modesty that peasant women’s clothing usually demanded. The fabric was soft with age and wear, but sturdy, patched in a few places but serviceable. They fit reasonably well, though they were clearly not made for her—probably clothing from decades past, kept in storage against the possibility of need.
She descended the spiral stairs carefully, one hand on the wall for balance, her bare feet finding the worn centers of each step where countless others had walked before. The tower’s main chamber felt different in the pale morning light that filtered through high windows she hadn’t noticed in last night’s darkness. Less mysterious, more cluttered, like a scholar’s den that had been overrun by decades of accumulated curiosity and experimentation with no thought given to organization or aesthetics.
Books teetered in precarious stacks against every available wall—some bound in leather that had cracked with age, others wrapped in cloth, still others consisting of loose pages tied with string. Scrolls occupied pigeonholes in a massive cabinet that covered one entire section of wall, each one labeled in script too small and faded to read from this distance. Jars bubbled with iridescent liquids on shelves—some glowing faintly blue or green, others swirling with colors that had no names, still others containing things that moved sluggishly in their confinement, pressing against glass with what might have been curiosity or hunger.
Strange instruments occupied a workbench near the stairs—devices of brass and glass and materials she couldn’t identify, with purposes she couldn’t even guess at. Tubes connected to bellows, crystals suspended in wire frames, mirrors positioned at odd angles to reflect and refract light in ways that seemed wrong, as if the angles defied geometry. And everywhere, scattered across every surface, were papers covered in diagrams and calculations and notes in handwriting that ranged from precise and measured to barely legible scrawls.
The silver-inlaid patterns on the floor seemed to shift subtly in the morning light, as if breathing, as if the tower itself were a living thing that had simply chosen the form of stone and mortar. The lines formed geometric shapes—circles and triangles and complex polygons—that Elara’s eyes couldn’t quite follow, that seemed to twist away from direct observation into dimensions that shouldn’t exist.
Mordren stood at his workbench, stirring a pot that sat over a small flame burning without any visible source of fuel—just fire hovering in the air, consuming nothing, sustained by will alone. Another casual display of magic so mundane to him that he probably didn’t even think about it anymore. “Sit,” he commanded without turning around, somehow knowing exactly where she stood despite not looking. He ladled thick vegetable stew into a wooden bowl that had been carved from a single piece of oak, its surface worn smooth by countless meals over countless years. “Eat. Magic takes energy, draws on your body’s reserves. You’ve none to spare after last night’s exertions. Run yourself dry and you’ll burn out—literally, in some cases. I’ve seen it happen. Not pleasant.”
She obeyed, settling onto a three-legged stool that was surprisingly comfortable despite its simple construction, taking the bowl with hands that still trembled slightly. The stew was warm and savory, thick with root vegetables and barley, seasoned with herbs she couldn’t identify but that made her mouth water. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was until the first bite hit her tongue, and then she was shoveling it in with barely contained desperation, burning her mouth slightly in her haste.
Between bites, pausing only to blow on the next spoonful to cool it, she glanced at the amulet. Mordren had brought it down from her room and it now rested on the bench amid scattered tools and crystals that ranged in size from her thumbnail to her fist, glowing in colors from clear as water to deep purple. The Dragon’s Heart looked almost innocent in the daylight—just a pretty piece of metalwork, nothing to indicate the power it contained or the visions it could conjure.
“You said last night it was a focusing talisman,” she said between mouthfuls, her voice still rough from sleep and nightmares. “From before the Purge. From the reign of Aldric the Second.”
Mordren nodded, his sharp eyes glinting with something that might have been approval at her memory. “A quick assessment, yes, based on the craftsmanship and the resonance patterns. Enough to give you basic information and get you safely inside before that knight’s friends arrived. But while you slept and dreamed your troubled dreams, I examined it more thoroughly—probed its enchantments with diagnostic spells, traced its history through divination weaves that followed the thread of its existence backward through time.”
He picked it up gingerly, holding it by its edges as if it were simultaneously precious and dangerous. The metal shifted colors in his grasp, flowing from silver to gold to something that resembled copper but with an inner light, responding to his touch even though he wasn’t its chosen bearer. “It’s more than a mere talisman, child. Far more than I initially suspected, though I had my suspicions from the moment I felt its resonance through the wards.”
He turned to face her fully, his ancient face grave. “This is a Dragon’s Heart—not quite literally, since actual dragon’s hearts are bigger and heavier than any person’s head, but it is literally made from a dragon’s scale. A relic forged in the Age of Wyrms, when dragons ruled the skies and walked the earth as equals to humanity, or perhaps as our betters depending on which histories you believe. When the great wyrms bonded with riders of pure blood through pacts that had nothing to do with demons or corruption, but rather with mutual respect and shared purpose.”
Elara’s spoon paused halfway to her mouth, stew dripping back into the bowl, forgotten. “The Age of Wyrms? But that was... the stories say that was thousands of years ago. Before the first kingdoms, before...” She trailed off, unable to even comprehend that kind of antiquity.
“Three thousand years, give or take a century,” Mordren confirmed casually, as if discussing last week’s weather. “Before humans built their first cities of stone, when we still lived in tribes and the dragons were the undisputed masters of creation. They were magnificent beings—intelligent beyond human comprehension, powerful beyond measure, ancient beyond counting. They lived for millennia, accumulated knowledge and wisdom that would take a human library centuries to record. And they were not the monsters of current legend, the beasts that kidnap maidens and hoard gold. Those are lies, propaganda spread after the Fall to justify what was done to them.”
He set the amulet down gently, as if laying a baby in its cradle. “The visions of dragons you described in your sleep—I heard you crying out, speaking of fire and wings and ancient voices—those weren’t random images conjured by nightmare. This artifact was made from a dragon’s scale, freely given, infused with their essence through rituals of bonding that required no force, no coercion, only willing sacrifice. The dragon who gave this scale did so to create a tool for their chosen rider, to amplify and focus that rider’s natural magic into something greater than either could achieve alone.”
“Natural magic,” Elara repeated, latching onto the key phrase. “You keep saying that. As if there’s a difference.”
“There is,” Mordren said firmly. “The fundamental difference the Order refuses to acknowledge. Natural magic flows from harmony—with yourself, with the world around you, with the deeper currents of reality itself. It’s an extension of will through channels that exist naturally in the fabric of existence. No bargains needed, no prices paid, no external forces granted leverage over your soul. You’re simply... capable. The way some people can sing beautifully without training, or calculate complex mathematics in their heads, or see colors others cannot. It’s a gift, an ability, a talent.”
He began to pace, his staff clicking against the floor, falling into what was clearly a lecture he’d given before, probably to students long dead. “Demonic magic—pact magic—is fundamentally different. It’s a shortcut, a cheat, power borrowed from entities whose very existence is antithetical to life as we understand it. They don’t give that power freely. They loan it at interest rates that compound exponentially. Every spell cast through a pact drains something from the caster—vitality, sanity, humanity itself—and feeds it to the demon. Eventually, there’s nothing left but an empty shell animated by hunger. That’s what most of the Burning Years victims had become. Not evil people who’d chosen darkness, but desperate people who’d made terrible bargains and been consumed by them.”
He stopped pacing and fixed her with those penetrating eyes. “But you, child—you’re one of the rare ones. One in ten thousand births carry the innate gift at all, scattered among the populace like seeds in the wind, most never knowing what they possess because they never encounter anything to awaken it. The Dragon’s Heart chose you because you’re not just naturally gifted, but because you carry something even rarer: draconic affinity. Latent bloodlines from the ancient pacts, not the demonic sort that corrupt and consume, but the harmonious bonds that elevated both parties. Long forgotten by most, but the dragons remembered. They always remembered. And their artifacts remember still.”
Elara set down her bowl, her appetite forgotten, fingers reaching unconsciously to trace the amulet’s runes. It warmed to her touch immediately, a faint hum vibrating through her bones that resonated with something deep in her chest. “Draconic affinity. Dragon blood. In me?” The words sounded absurd even as she spoke them. “That’s impossible. I’m just—I was just—”
“A farm girl?” Mordren’s chuckle was dry as rustling leaves in autumn. “Yes, you’ve mentioned that several times now. Poor child, clinging to an identity that no longer serves you, if it ever truly did. Bloodlines hide themselves, child. They surface unexpectedly after generations of dormancy. Your mother, perhaps? You mentioned she left with a tinker when you were young. Wanderers often carry secrets—literal secrets, hidden bloodlines from ancient times when geography was more fluid and the distinction between nobility and peasantry didn’t exist as it does now. Or it could go further back. Great-grandparents, ancestors ten generations removed. Dragon blood is patient. It waits for the right combination of circumstances to manifest.”
He leaned forward, his voice dropping to something almost reverent. “The point is this: the Dragon’s Heart chose you because you’re one of the rare ones—not just a natural mage, which is rare enough, but one attuned to elder forces that predate human civilization.”
She pulled the amulet toward her across the bench, holding it in both hands now, feeling the pulse of it synchronize with her own heartbeat until she couldn’t tell which was which. “What does it mean? For me? What am I supposed to do with this... gift? This curse? I don’t even know what to call it.”
“It means potential,” Mordren said quietly. “And peril in equal measure. Dragons are gone—driven to extinction or into slumber so deep it might as well be death during the old wars, when humanity turned on its former allies in an orgy of betrayal and violence that still stains our history. But their echoes linger in artifacts like this, in bloodlines like yours, in places of power scattered across the world. This Heart could awaken more in you given time and proper training: visions of the future as well as the past, command over flame or storm, bonds with beasts that others could never forge, flight itself perhaps if the gift runs deep enough.”
His expression darkened. “But it also attracts attention. Demons hunger for such purity, you see. Natural magic is rare and precious to them, uncorrupted power they can twist to their purposes if they can just get their hooks in deep enough. They’ll tempt you constantly now that you’ve awakened. Whisper in your dreams, in your moments of weakness. Offer solutions to your problems that seem so reasonable, so harmless. And the Dragon’s Heart makes you even more visible to them, a beacon in their darkness. They’ll try to corrupt what you carry, turn it from a tool of harmony into a channel for their hunger.”
Elara shivered, pulling the amulet against her chest, remembering the whispers in her visions. That voice that had promised power, dominion, strength to solve all her problems if she would just kneel, just submit, just accept what was being offered. The memory of how tempting it had been made her stomach churn with self-disgust.
“Teach me, then,” she said, and was surprised by the strength in her own voice. The decision crystallized in her mind even as she spoke it. There was no going back to the farm, to her old life. That girl was gone, burned away by visions and pursued by knights and marked by dragons. What came next was unknown, but she wouldn’t face it ignorant and unprepared. “Teach me how to control it. How to use this gift without being consumed by it. How to be... whatever I’m supposed to be.”
Mordren’s smile was approving, the wrinkles around his eyes deepening. “Eager. Good. Eagerness can be shaped into discipline, and discipline is what separates the living from the burned.” He moved toward the center of the room, his staff tapping out a rhythm, and began clearing space amid the clutter with casual waves of his hand that sent books and jars floating to new positions on shelves. “We’ll start simple. Natural magic flows from harmony—with yourself, with the world around you. No incantations needed, no complex gestures, no memorized formulas. Just intent given form through channels that already exist within you. The Dragon’s Heart will help focus that intent, prevent it from scattering or misfiring. Now, come stand here.”
He indicated a spot where several of the silver lines inlaid in the floor converged, forming a complex pattern that resembled a flower or perhaps a snowflake, or perhaps something that human geometry couldn’t quite capture. Elara set down the amulet reluctantly—she’d grown used to its presence already, uncomfortable when separated from it—and moved to where he indicated.
“Good. Now, close your eyes. Feel the earth beneath your feet. Not just intellectually, but really feel it. The stone of this floor is connected to the bedrock beneath the tower, which connects to the bones of the world itself, deep stone that has stood since the world was young. Draw from it. Not forcefully, not taking, but asking. Requesting the loan of its strength, its stability, its patient endurance.”
Elara closed her eyes, bare feet—when had she removed her boots? She couldn’t remember, but they sat neatly by the stairs—pressed against cold stone that was somehow warming beneath her. The floor hummed with something that wasn’t quite sound, more a vibration felt in her bones than heard with her ears. The silver lines glowed faintly even through her closed eyelids, pulsing with light that seemed to seep up from somewhere deep below.
Energy rose like sap in spring, a slow welling from the earth through stone and into her body. It entered through her feet, traveled up her legs, coiled in her chest where her heart beat faster in response. It was exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure—so much power, so much potential, and only her will standing between control and chaos.
“Now shape it,” Mordren instructed, his voice coming from somewhere to her left. “Nothing complex. A light, just a simple light. Imagine it forming in your palms. Don’t force it, don’t strain. Just... intend it. Will it gently into being.”
Her palms tingled, a pins-and-needles sensation that intensified rapidly. Heat bloomed in her hands without burning, energy seeking release, looking for form. She imagined light—just light, simple and pure—and opened her eyes.
A soft orb of blue glow materialized between her cupped palms, hovering like a captive firefly, casting dancing shadows across the cluttered room. It was effortless, as natural as breathing, as easy as opening her hand. The light pulsed with her heartbeat, growing slightly brighter with each pulse, responding to her wonder and delight.
“Excellent!” Mordren’s approval was genuine, no false praise to coddle her. “First attempt and you’ve achieved stable manifestation. Most students take days to reach that point, but the Dragon’s Heart amplifies your natural affinity. Good. Now dismiss it. Will it gone.”
She thought stop, and the light winked out instantly, the energy dissipating back into the ambient flow around her.
They progressed through the morning and into the afternoon, Elara learning the basic vocabulary of natural magic through practical application. She bent water from a basin into shapes—first simple spheres, then spirals, then complex geometries that collapsed when her concentration wavered. She coaxed vines from cracks in the stone walls where a few hardy plants had taken root over the decades, making them grow and twist according to her will, though they moved slowly, reluctantly, constrained by the limits of living matter. She summoned gusts of wind that sent papers flying across the room, learned to heat and cool the air in her immediate vicinity, made small flames dance on her fingertips without burning herself.
Mishaps occurred—they were inevitable with raw, untrained power. A burst of wind sent an entire shelf’s worth of books crashing to the floor in an avalanche of leather and parchment that made Mordren wince. A flame intended for a candle wick flared out of control and singed Mordren’s beard, filling the tower with the acrid smell of burning hair and smoke. Water she’d been levitating fell in a sudden splash that soaked them both when her concentration broke at a sudden noise outside.
But Mordren laughed them off, showing infinite patience that belied his crusty exterior. “Raw power, child. Like a foal learning to run—all gangly legs and no coordination, but the strength is there. The grace will come with practice. The pact-takers skip this entire process, you see. Their demons provide shortcuts, the knowledge and control gifted wholesale in exchange for that first small piece of soul. But at what cost? They never truly understand what they’re doing, never develop the instinctive feel for the flow of energy. And when the demon decides to withdraw its support—or worse, to twist it against them—they’re helpless. You’re building real skill, real understanding. It takes longer, but you’ll own it in a way they never could.”
By midday, exhaustion was setting in again—the deep, bone-level weariness that came from pushing her body and mind beyond their accustomed limits. Her hands trembled, her legs felt weak, and a headache was building behind her eyes. But Elara felt alive in a way she never had before, every nerve singing with potential, every sense sharp and clear. The Dragon’s Heart pulsed approval against her chest where she’d reclaimed it after that first exercise, a warm and solid weight that felt like coming home.
She was just attempting to lift a small crystal—telekinesis being significantly harder than working with natural elements—when the tower’s bells began to ring.
Chapter 5: Spreading Rot
Miles away, in Eldoria’s castle, King Arin stood in a dimly lit chamber beneath the keep that few knew existed—a holding cell cut from living rock, accessible only through passages that weren’t marked on any official map. It reeked of damp stone and fear, smells that had soaked into the walls over centuries of use. Iron bars cast long shadows in the torchlight that flickered in wall sconces, and the air hung heavy with the metallic tang of chains and the sour smell of unwashed bodies and human waste.
The boy from Greymoor—young Lirren, barely ten years old by his own account—huddled in the corner on a thin pallet of straw that provided almost no protection from the cold stone floor. A ragged blanket was clutched around his thin shoulders, and his eyes were wide and haunted, reflecting traumas no child should bear, horrors that had broken something fundamental inside him. He rocked slightly, an unconscious self-soothing motion that spoke of deep psychological damage.
“Tell me again,” Arin said gently, crouching to bring himself to the boy’s level despite the protest of old battle wounds—his left knee especially, which had never quite healed right after a spear thrust during the Winter Campaign. His voice was low and coaxing, as soft as he could make it, a far cry from the commanding tone he used in the great hall when projecting authority to his lords. This was a terrified child, not an enemy soldier. Kindness was called for, even though every instinct screamed at him to demand answers quickly, to shake the information free and move on to action.
Garrick stood guard at the cell’s entrance, his pitted face impassive, but Arin caught the flicker of discomfort in his scout’s eyes. Garrick had children of his own—three daughters and a son, all grown now but still living. He didn’t like seeing a child broken this way.
Lirren—his name whispered so softly Arin had almost missed it during their first conversation—rocked slightly, his voice settling into a monotone recital, as if he’d told this story so many times it had lost all meaning. As if reducing it to mere words could somehow lessen its power over him. “They came at dusk. When the sun was red and low. Eyes like coals, burning red. Not reflecting light, sire, but making it. Glowing from inside. Torches that burned green, flames that were cold instead of hot. Cold enough to hurt when you got close. They laughed...” His voice cracked. “They laughed like screams. Like all the people they’d ever killed were trapped in their throats, trying to get out.”
He pulled the blanket tighter, small hands white-knuckled on the fabric. “They offered gifts. Said kneel and take what’s owed. Power to never be weak again. Revenge against anyone who’d ever hurt you. Wealth beyond counting. Said all you had to do was swear service, pledge yourself. Mama...” His voice dropped to barely a whisper. “Mama knelt. Her eyes changed. Turned red like theirs. She turned on Papa. Put her hands on his face and just... drained him. Like pouring water from a pitcher. He screamed and withered and turned to dust, and she laughed. She laughed while she killed him.”
Arin’s jaw clenched so hard his teeth ground together, the muscle jumping beneath his beard. Demonic pacts offered en masse, not to individuals in desperate secret but openly, publicly, with all the trappings of religious conversion. The raiders weren’t mere bandits seeking wealth. They were evangelists of corruption, spreading infernal bargains like plague through the countryside, deliberately targeting the desperate and the vulnerable with promises they couldn’t resist. Converting entire villages into... what? Servants? Soldiers? Food for whatever darkness orchestrated this nightmare?
“And the symbols?” Arin forced himself to ask, though he dreaded the answer. “The ones carved into the walls, into the bodies. Tell me about those.”
Lirren’s gaze went unfocused, staring at something only he could see, some memory playing out behind his eyes. “Carved everywhere. In the wood, in the stone, in flesh.” His voice had gone flat, emotionless, the only way he could speak of it without breaking down entirely. “They glowed—sickly green, like infected wounds, like poison made into light. Hurt to look at them. Made your eyes water, made your head ache. They whispered things when you got close. Not words exactly, but... meanings. Ideas that pushed into your head without asking permission.”
“What did they say?” Arin kept his voice gentle despite the urgency clawing at his chest. “What meanings did they push?”
“That we were weak. That weakness deserved punishment. That strength was the only truth, the only virtue. That the strong had the right to take whatever they wanted from the weak.” The boy’s rocking intensified. “That I could be strong too. Strong enough that no one could ever hurt me again. All I had to do was say yes. Just one word, and I’d never be afraid again.”
“But you didn’t,” Arin said quietly. “You resisted. You hid instead.”
“I was too scared to say anything,” Lirren admitted, shame creeping into his voice. “I wasn’t brave. I just... froze. Couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. They thought I was dead already. Left me in the grain barrel and moved on.”
“That’s not cowardice,” Arin said firmly, reaching out slowly to rest a hand on the boy’s shoulder—gentle, no sudden movements that might spook him. “That’s survival. You lived when everyone else died. That takes a different kind of courage.”
A knock interrupted them—three sharp raps against the cell’s outer door that made Lirren flinch violently, the blanket falling from his shoulders as he scrambled backward into the corner. Arin rose with a curse, his knee protesting sharply, and stepped outside where a messenger waited in the corridor beyond. The man’s livery identified him as one of Lord Vorril’s household servants.
Lord Vorril himself stood in the wider corridor beyond, his silks immaculate as always—deep purple today, trimmed with cloth-of-gold that caught the torchlight. His hands were clasped in an attitude of piety that Arin had long since learned to distrust. Vorril was wealthy, influential, and perpetually angling for more of both. His soft hands had never held a weapon beyond ceremonial daggers, never known real work, and his concerns rarely extended beyond his own comfort and status.
“Sire,” Vorril began, his voice dripping with false concern, “these raids unsettle the entire realm. The common folk are terrified, trade has slowed to a trickle, and I fear we’re losing control of the narrative. People are beginning to question whether the crown can protect them.” He paused delicately. “Perhaps... unconventional solutions are required? In times of crisis, surely some flexibility in our absolute adherence to—”
“Speak plainly, Vorril,” Arin cut him off, his patience worn thin by the day’s revelations. “I’m in no mood for courtly circumlocution.”
Vorril’s smile was oily, ingratiating. “Of course, sire. I merely suggest that aid from... alternative sources might be prudent. I myself have acquired a charm—sanctified by members of the Order itself, I assure you—that enhances sight, reveals hidden foes, provides warning of magical influences in one’s vicinity. A minor thing, barely worth mentioning, but in these times...” He drew a small object from his robes—a pendant of dark metal etched with runes that made Arin’s eyes water slightly just looking at them. “I could arrange for similar protections for Your Majesty and your inner circle. Purely defensive, of course. Merely tools to help us combat the demonic threat more effectively.”
Arin’s eyes narrowed, storm-gray turning to steel, cold and hard as winter iron. The temperature in the corridor seemed to drop ten degrees, and Vorril’s smile faltered. “Sanctified? Or bargained? I’ve heard whispers, Vorril. Rumors that have grown too persistent to ignore. The Order preaches absolute purity while some of its members—and certain lords of my court—carry charms forged through the very pacts they condemn others for making.”
Vorril paled, the healthy pink draining from his soft cheeks to leave him the color of old parchment. “Sire, I assure you, it’s for the greater good! A small pact, carefully controlled, bounded by strict terms—”
“There is no such thing as a controlled pact,” Arin said, his voice dropping to a dangerous quiet that made hardened soldiers nervous. “You’ve read the archives—I know you have, you requested access last year. You know what happens. It starts small. A minor bargain for a useful tool. Then another, slightly larger, because the first worked so well. Then another. Each time surrendering a bit more of yourself, each time the demon’s hooks sink a little deeper. Until one day you look in the mirror and the thing looking back isn’t you anymore. It’s wearing your face, speaking with your voice, but the person you were is gone, consumed from within.”
He stepped closer, and Vorril retreated until his back hit the stone wall. “How many bargains have you made, Lord Vorril? How many pieces of your soul have you traded away for comfort and convenience? How much of you is still... you?”
“I... I’m loyal to the crown, sire! Everything I’ve done has been in service to—”
“Get out,” Arin commanded, his voice like the crack of a whip. “Take your charm and your compromised loyalty and get out of my sight. You’re confined to your quarters pending investigation. Garrick—”
The scout stepped forward immediately. “Sire?”
“Assign two men to Lord Vorril. Ensure he reaches his chambers safely and remains there for his own protection.” The words were polite, but everyone present understood the truth: house arrest, albeit gilded.
Vorril opened his mouth to protest, then thought better of it when he saw Arin’s expression. He bowed stiffly and hurried away, his silks rustling, two guards falling into step behind him.
When they were gone, Arin turned to Garrick, speaking quietly so the words wouldn’t carry. “Dig deeper into the Order. I need proof, not rumors. If they’ve been compromised—if they’re using pact-magic to hunt magic users—then everything we believe about the Purge, about the last century of policy, is built on hypocrisy and lies.”
“And if I find proof?” Garrick asked. “What then?”
Arin was silent for a long moment, staring at nothing, his scarred hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. “Then we may need to question everything. Every sacred vow, every absolute prohibition. If steel and conventional forces can’t stop what’s coming—and I don’t believe they can—then we need alternatives. Real alternatives, not corrupted shortcuts.”
“Natural mages,” Garrick said quietly. “Like in the old stories. The ones who were burned alongside the pact-makers.”
“If they exist. If they’re not just myths the desperate cling to.” Arin rubbed his face tiredly. “The archives suggest they’re real, but rare. One in ten thousand born with the gift. How many did we burn in the Purge? How many potential allies did we destroy out of fear and ignorance?”
“What are you planning, sire?”
Arin met his scout’s eyes directly. “If the darkness rises—and all evidence suggests it already has—if this is truly the demonic resurgence the archives warned about, then I need to find those rare few who can fight it without being consumed. Natural mages, if such things truly exist. And I need to do it before the Order burns them all.”
Back in the tower, the afternoon calm shattered with the sound of bells—not the gentle chiming of time markers, but a deep, resonant gong that reverberated through the stones themselves, felt in the bones and teeth more than heard with the ears. The wards were sounding an alarm, magical defenses responding to a threat approaching or already arrived.
Mordren’s face, which had been relaxed and almost grandfatherly during the teaching session, hardened instantly into something ancient and dangerous. The affable teacher vanished, replaced by the wizard who’d survived a century of persecution through power and cunning. “They’re back,” he said curtly, moving to a window with speed that belied his apparent age. “The knight, and he’s brought friends. Predictable. The Order never sends one when five will do.”
Elara joined him at the window, peering down at the clearing below. Her stomach dropped.
The space around the tower swarmed with Silver Hand knights—five of them, all in blackened armor that seemed to drink in the afternoon light rather than reflect it. Their movements were coordinated, professional, the spacing between them calculated to provide mutual support while preventing a single attack from taking them all. These weren’t random enforcers. This was a trained unit, possibly one of the Order’s elite squads that normally handled the most dangerous heretics.
Charms glowed on their gauntlets and shields and breastplates—multiple charms per knight, a constellation of sickly red light that pulsed in uneven rhythms. The hypocrisy was staggering. Each of those lights represented a pact, a bargain with the very forces the Order claimed to fight. How did they justify it? How did they sleep at night, burning others for doing exactly what they themselves had done?
The lead knight was the same one from last night—Elara recognized the way he held himself, the slight favor of his left leg where the tower’s wards had struck him. He was bandaged now, white cloth visible at his neck where it extended above his gorget, and his movements were stiff with pain. But his voice was strong as he bellowed up at the tower, magically amplified to carry clearly through stone and glass.
“Mordren the Heretic! Surrend the girl and the artifact! By order of the Silver Hand and the crown of Eldoria, this tower is condemned! Your protections will not hold against our combined might! Surrender now and face judgment, or we will extract you both by force and add resisting arrest to your list of crimes!”
Mordren snorted. “Add it to the list? Child, I’ve been on their list for eighty years. One more charge hardly matters.” But his expression was grim as he turned away from the window, his staff held ready, knuckles white around the aged wood. “They’re serious this time. Five knights, all warded and armed with counter-magic. They must have reported back about the Dragon’s Heart. That artifact is too valuable—and too dangerous—for them to let slip away.”
“Can the wards hold them?” Elara asked, trying to keep her voice steady and mostly succeeding.
“For a time. But they’re already beginning their assault—feel that?” He tapped his staff against the floor, and Elara did feel it—a tremor running through the stones, faint but growing stronger. “They’re using enchanted hammers to strike at the foundations of the wards, finding resonance points where the defensive spells are anchored. Clever. Brutal, but clever. Given enough time, they’ll crack them open like an egg.”
“How much time?”
“Hours, if we’re lucky. Less if they’re better than I think.” He turned to face her fully, his ancient eyes serious. “This is your chance to run, child. There’s a passage, hidden behind the bookshelf in the eastern corner. It leads down through the bedrock and emerges half a mile into the Thornwood. You could be gone before they breach the wards. Take the Dragon’s Heart and flee. Find somewhere to hide, somewhere to train in secret. I’ll hold them here, give you time—”
“No,” Elara said, surprising herself with the firmness of her refusal. “I’m not running anymore. I ran last night and it solved nothing—they just came back with more men and more determination. And I won’t let you sacrifice yourself for me. You’re the only teacher I have, the only person who can help me understand what I am.”
“Noble,” Mordren said dryly. “Also foolish. You’ve had one morning of training. You’re not ready to face five veteran knights in combat.”
“Then you’ll protect me while I learn on the job,” Elara shot back. The fear was there—gods, the terror was enormous, threatening to drown her—but beneath it ran something else. Anger. Righteous fury at the hypocrisy, at the injustice, at a century of innocents burned by those who committed the very crimes they prosecuted. “Teach me to fight, Mordren. Right now. Quick and dirty, no finesse. What do I need to know to survive the next few hours?”
The wizard studied her for a long moment, then a slow smile spread across his wrinkled face. “You have your grandmother’s fire. Or perhaps your great-great-grandmother’s—the bloodlines get confused at my age. Very well. Combat magic, accelerated course. First lesson: forget everything I taught you this morning about harmony and balance.”
“What?”
“In combat, there’s no time for meditation and careful channeling. You need fast, instinctive responses. The Dragon’s Heart will help with that—it’s designed for battle as much as contemplation. Let it guide your instincts. When you see a threat, don’t think. React. Will the world to protect you, and the amulet will translate that will into effect.”
Another tremor ran through the tower, stronger this time. Mordren’s smile faded. “No more time for theory. They’re accelerating their assault. Come. We defend.”
He led her down the spiral stairs to the main floor, then through a door she hadn’t noticed before—hidden behind a tapestry, naturally—that opened onto a narrow staircase spiraling upward. They climbed past the second floor where she’d slept, past a third floor that appeared to be entirely devoted to alchemical experiments judging by the smells seeping under its door, emerging finally onto the tower’s roof.
The view was breathtaking and terrifying in equal measure. The Thornwood stretched in every direction, a sea of autumn colors—red and gold and brown extending to the horizon. She could see for miles from this height, could make out the smoke rising from Thornvale in the distance, could trace the thread of the old road winding through the trees.
But her attention was drawn inexorably downward, to the clearing below where the knights had formed a circle around the tower’s base. They’d produced hammers from somewhere—heavy mauls etched with runes that glowed the same sickly red as their other charms. In perfect synchronization, they struck at the ground, targeting specific points that Elara somehow knew corresponded to ward anchors buried in the earth.
Sparks flew with each impact—not physical sparks but magical ones, bursts of light that hurt to look at directly. The wards flared in response, becoming briefly visible as a dome of translucent energy surrounding the tower. Cracks appeared in that dome with each strike, thin lines of darkness spreading like fractures in glass.
“Now then,” Mordren said, raising his staff. “Lesson two: defense is active, not passive. Don’t just sit behind wards and hope they hold. Make the attackers regret their choices. Observe.”
He spoke no words of power, made no elaborate gestures. He simply thrust his staff toward the nearest knight and willed something into being. The earth beneath that knight’s feet suddenly erupted upward in a geyser of dirt and stone, sending the man flying backward to crash into a tree trunk with a resounding clang of armor against wood.
“Your turn,” Mordren said calmly, as if he’d just demonstrated a simple cooking technique. “The one on the left. He’s overextended, off-balance from his last swing. Vines, like you did last night. But more of them, thicker, faster. Don’t ask the earth nicely. Command it.”
Elara gripped the Dragon’s Heart through her tunic, feeling its pulse accelerate to match her racing heart. She focused on the knight Mordren had indicated—saw him indeed off-balance, weight on his front foot, vulnerable. She reached out with her will, not gentle and coaxing as she’d been taught this morning but demanding, urgent, fueled by the adrenaline flooding her system.
Bind him!
Vines erupted from the ground like striking serpents, thicker than her arm, moving with impossible speed. They wrapped around the knight’s legs, his waist, his sword arm. He shouted in surprise and alarm, trying to cut himself free, but more vines kept coming, faster than he could sever them. Within seconds he was cocooned, immobilized, his struggles only binding him tighter.
“Excellent!” Mordren’s approval was genuine and fierce. “You’re a natural at this—pun intended. Again! The one trying to flank around to the eastern side!”
Another knight, moving too quickly. Elara thrust out her hand instinctively, and a blast of wind—far more powerful than anything she’d managed that morning—slammed into him like a battering ram. He flew backward, tumbling end over end, his hammer spinning away to land somewhere in the underbrush.
The remaining three knights regrouped, recognizing the threat. They began working in concert, two continuing the assault on the wards while the third raised his shield high. The runes on that shield blazed brighter, and a barrier shimmered into existence—magical protection against magical attack, powered by whatever pact that knight had made.
“Problematic,” Mordren muttered. “Counter-magic barriers are difficult to penetrate directly. But observe—they have a weakness.”
He gestured, and one of the massive stones that formed the tower’s crenellations suddenly lifted free, hovering in the air. With a casual flick of his wrist, Mordren sent it plummeting downward—not aimed at the knights themselves but at the ground just in front of them.
The stone impacted with tremendous force, cratering the earth, sending a shockwave of dirt and rock fragments in all directions. The physical projectile bypassed the magical barrier entirely, and the debris peppered the knights, forcing them to cover their faces, disrupting their coordination.
“Magic against magic is inefficient,” Mordren explained even as he levitated another stone. “But magic to manipulate physical objects that do the actual damage? Much more effective. Remember that—it’s a lesson most combat mages learn too late or not at all.”
They fell into a rhythm, teacher and student working together against the assault. Elara found herself acting on instinct more than conscious thought, the Dragon’s Heart translating her intentions into effects with minimal delay. When a knight tried to scale the tower wall, she summoned ice to coat the stones, sending him sliding back down. When another attempted to undermine the tower’s foundation with his hammer, she caused the earth to soften beneath him, creating quicksand that swallowed him to the waist.
But the knights were persistent and skilled. They adapted quickly, using their pact-enhanced strength to overcome obstacles that would have stopped normal men. The barrier knight maintained his protective dome, limiting Elara and Mordren’s options. And all the while, the assault on the wards continued, the cracks in that protective dome spreading wider with each coordinated strike.
Then, in the heat of battle, as Elara reached deep for more power to repel another assault, she felt it—a whisper sliding into her mind like oil through water, so smooth she almost didn’t recognize it as an intrusion.
Such effort. Such struggle. There is an easier way, child.
The voice from her visions, neither male nor female, promising and seductive. It was different from the Dragon’s Heart’s silent communication—that felt like her own thoughts, natural and organic. This felt foreign, invasive, wrong in a way that made her skin crawl even as part of her leaned toward it.
Power, instant and absolute. No more fumbling through first lessons like a child with a new toy. I can give you mastery in an instant. Real strength, not this pale shadow you’re playing with. All you need do is accept. Open yourself to me. Let me in.
Visions flooded her consciousness without her permission—her father standing healthy and strong, the coughing sickness burned away by power she’d wielded. Her brothers safe and prosperous, the farm thriving beyond imagination. The knights below broken and scattered, no longer a threat to anyone. The Order itself dismantled, its hypocrisy revealed, its victims avenged. Herself standing before King Arin not as a supplicant but as an equal, respected and feared and necessary.
All of it could be hers. All she had to do was kneel in her mind, submit to the will offering these gifts, accept the bargain being offered.
Her hands trembled, power faltering. One of the knights broke through her defensive vines, rushing toward the tower’s entrance. She needed more strength. Needed it now. The offer was so reasonable, so logical. Why struggle when the solution was right there, offered freely?
The Dragon’s Heart burned cold against her chest—warning, rejection, alarm.
“No!” Elara screamed, both aloud and in her mind, rejecting the voice with every fiber of her being. She’d seen where that path led—had experienced the memories of those who’d accepted similar bargains, had felt their slow consumption from within. She’d watched Lirren’s mother turn on his father, had seen the withered corpses in burned villages. “I don’t need your power! I don’t want your gifts! Get out of my head!”
The voice retreated with something that felt like laughter—patient, eternal, not offended or discouraged. For now. But I will return, child of dragons. You will have need of me eventually. They always do.
Then it was gone, leaving her gasping and shaken but clear-headed.
The Heart surged in response to her rejection, flooding her with something different—not borrowed power but her own potential unleashed. A vision burst forth with crystalline clarity, forcing itself into her awareness:
The eastern darkness, beyond the Spine of the World. Ruined halls that had once been magnificent—a palace of some fallen kingdom, reduced to rubble and shadow over centuries of abandonment. But not empty. Never empty. A figure sat on a throne of bones and blackened stone, neither fully solid nor fully incorporeal, shifting between states of matter as if unable to decide whether physical form was worth maintaining.
A demon lord. Ancient beyond reckoning, powerful beyond comprehension. It had been sleeping—or imprisoned, the distinction was unclear—for centuries. But it was waking now, stretching ancient limbs, testing ancient powers. And it was brokering pacts to legions, offering bargains to anyone desperate enough to listen, building an army not of soldiers but of corrupted souls bound to its will.
The raiders were its evangelists, spreading the word of easy power to those who lacked the will or knowledge to resist. But they were merely the beginning, the first drops of rain before the deluge.
The vision expanded, showing the future that would unfold if this darkness went unchecked. Cities falling one by one, populations either converted or consumed. Skies filling with twisted winged beasts—not dragons, never dragons, but mockeries of them. Abominations created by corrupting those with draconic blood, turning their gift into something monstrous. The natural mages—those rare few born with the untainted gift—hunted down specifically, systematically eliminated because they represented the only real threat to the demon’s dominion.
Elara saw herself in that vision—or rather, saw her own absence. A void where she should have been, because she’d been found and destroyed before she could reach her potential, before she could become what she was meant to be.
The vision shattered as Mordren’s hand gripped her shoulder, yanking her back to immediate reality. “Stay with me, child! Whatever you just saw, file it away for later. We have immediate problems!”
She blinked, reorienting, and saw that one of the wards had finally cracked—a section of the protective dome falling away like shattered glass, leaving an opening large enough for a man to pass through. The lead knight, the one from last night, was already moving toward it with grim determination.
“Seal it!” Mordren commanded, pouring his own power into shoring up the breach. But he was tiring—she could see it in the slight tremor in his hands, hear it in the labored breathing. A century was a long time to maintain this level of combat effectiveness, and even wizard’s endurance had limits.
Elara joined her strength to his, the Dragon’s Heart burning bright against her chest, channeling energy through her into the wards. The breach slowed its spread, stopped expanding, but didn’t close. They were holding the line but not winning, buying time but not solving the problem.
The lead knight reached the breach and began forcing his way through, his pact-enhanced strength allowing him to push through magical resistance that should have repelled him. His eyes met Elara’s across the distance, and she saw not just determination but zealotry—absolute conviction that what he was doing was righteous, necessary, ordained by higher authority.
He would never stop. None of them would. Even if she escaped today, tomorrow, next week, they would keep coming until they burned her or she killed them all.
The futility of it threatened to overwhelm her. How could she fight an entire kingdom? An Order dedicated to her destruction, a demon lord raising armies in the east, a king who’d inherited centuries of policy based on fear and hypocrisy?
You don’t, a new voice whispered—not the demon’s oily seduction but something else. The Dragon’s Heart itself, she realized, speaking to her clearly for the first time. You change their minds. You prove them wrong. You become what they think doesn’t exist—a natural mage who doesn’t fall, doesn’t corrupt, doesn’t burn out in a blaze of madness and destruction. You show them there’s another path.
But how? she thought desperately. How do I prove anything when they’ll burn me before listening?
You find the one who will listen. The one who must listen, because his kingdom depends on it.
The king. The vision was showing her the king. Arin, burdened by his crown, haunted by raids he couldn’t stop, questioning the absolutes he’d inherited. If she could reach him, if she could prove what she was, demonstrate that natural magic existed and wasn’t inherently corrupt...
It was insane. It was impossible. It was suicide.
It was also the only path forward that didn’t end in her death or corruption.
“Mordren,” she said, her voice surprisingly steady despite the chaos. “We need to warn the king. We need to tell him what’s coming, what I saw. The raids are just the beginning—there’s something worse rising in the east. He needs to know. The kingdom needs to prepare.”
The wizard barked a laugh that was more shock than humor. “Warn the king? Child, he’ll have us burned before we finish our first sentence!”
“Maybe,” Elara admitted. “Probably. But what choice do we have? Keep hiding until the demon’s army sweeps across Eldoria? Fight a losing battle against the Order until exhaustion or mistake gets us killed? Let the darkness win because we’re too afraid to try?”
Mordren stared at her, and in his ancient eyes she saw something shift—a decision being made, a gamble being considered. “You truly mean this. You’d walk into the wolf’s den, declare yourself to the man whose great-grandfather slaughtered thousands like you, and hope he doesn’t simply add you to the pyre.”
“I’d try to save the kingdom,” Elara corrected. “Same as his ancestors did, in their own terrible way. They were wrong about how, but not about the threat. Demonic corruption is real. It does destroy everything it touches. But the solution isn’t burning everyone with power—it’s finding those who can fight corruption without being consumed by it. Natural mages. People like us.”
Another tremor rocked the tower as the wards weakened further. The lead knight was halfway through the breach now, his companions redoubling their assault.
Mordren sighed, a sound like wind through ancient tombs. “Very well. I’ve lived too long anyway—another decade or two is just showing off. But we do this intelligently, not as some suicidal grand gesture.” He slammed his staff against the stone, and the tower’s defenses flared one final time—not to stop the assault but to channel it, to redirect it. The wards collapsed inward and then exploded outward in a controlled detonation of pure force that sent all five knights tumbling backward, stunned but alive.
“That bought us minutes at most,” Mordren said, already moving toward the stairs. “There’s the escape passage I mentioned. We use it, lose them in the Thornwood, and then...” He shook his head, muttering. “Then we commit treason and heresy by approaching the crown directly. This is what I get for taking students. They make you do insane things in the name of hope.”
But he was smiling despite his words, and Elara felt something unclench in her chest. She wasn’t alone. She had a teacher, an ally, someone who’d survived a century of persecution and might just be crazy enough to help her pull off the impossible.
They descended the stairs at a run, Elara’s hand clutching the Dragon’s Heart, its pulse steady and strong against her palm. Behind them, she heard the knights breaching the tower’s entrance, their shouts of triumph echoing through the stone.
But ahead—ahead lay the king’s city, and perhaps the slim chance of convincing one burdened ruler that everything he’d been taught was wrong.
It was a fool’s errand.
It was their only hope.
And Elara discovered, as they plunged into the hidden passage behind the eastern bookshelf, that some part of her was eager for it—eager to stop hiding, stop running, and finally stand before power and speak truth, regardless of consequences.
The farm girl was truly dead now.
What rose in her place remained to be seen.
But it would not kneel.
Not to demons.
Not to the Order.
Not to anyone.
Chapter 6: The Fall
The hidden passage swallowed Elara and Mordren like the maw of some ancient beast, its stone walls slick with moisture that dripped in irregular rhythms—plink, plink, plink—echoing faintly in the confined space with a sound that seemed unnaturally loud in the oppressive silence. The air was cool and musty, heavy with the scent of earth and minerals that had been untouched by sunlight for centuries, maybe longer. It tasted stale on the tongue, thick and cloying, as if they were breathing in the compressed weight of time itself.
Roots pierced through cracks in the roughly hewn tunnel ceiling and walls—thick, gnarled things that had forced their way through solid stone over decades or centuries of patient growth. They hung down like skeletal fingers, grasping at their cloaks as they passed, catching on fabric and hair with a persistence that felt almost malicious. The ground sloped downward unevenly, sometimes in gradual descents and sometimes in sudden drops that forced them to brace themselves against the walls, navigating by touch and the faint glow of Mordren’s staff.
The staff itself emitted a soft blue luminescence, barely brighter than moonlight, that cast elongated shadows behind them—shadows that seemed to writhe and twist with each flicker of the light, creating the illusion of movement in the corners of vision that made Elara’s heart jump every time she glanced back. The light revealed just enough to show the path ahead but not enough to make her feel safe, leaving vast pockets of darkness where anything might be lurking.
Elara’s breath came in controlled gasps that she fought to keep quiet, her lungs burning with the effort of maintaining the pace. Her legs ached from the rapid descent down the tower’s spiral stairs—she’d taken them two and three at a time, reckless with urgency—and now this hurried flight through cramped passages that seemed designed to punish human passage. The Dragon’s Heart thrummed against her chest with a steady, insistent pulse that was a counterpoint to her racing heart, as if the artifact itself were urging her onward, lending her strength when her own threatened to fail.
Behind them, muffled by stone and distance but still audible, came the sounds of the knights breaching the tower proper. Shouts of triumph rang out, masculine voices raised in the zealous certainty of righteous conquest. The crash of furniture being overturned echoed down through the passages—tables smashed, shelves toppled, decades of careful accumulation destroyed in moments of sanctioned vandalism. And beneath it all, a sound like breaking glass or shattering crystal: the hiss of wards discharging their final energies as they were systematically dismantled by men who carried the very magic they claimed to despise.
“They’ll find the passage soon,” Mordren muttered, his voice a rasping whisper that somehow carried clearly in the enclosed space despite its lack of volume. Sound behaved strangely down here, she was learning—some noises amplified while others were dampened into nothing. “The entrance is warded, layered protections that should slow them considerably, but these fools have enough pact-trinkets between them to brute-force their way through anything given enough time. We need distance. Keep moving, and watch your step—there are places where the floor has crumbled away. Fall through and you’ll break something we don’t have time to set.”
Elara nodded, though he couldn’t see it in the dim light, all his attention focused on the path ahead. Her mind raced even as her body moved on autopilot, replaying the battle on the roof in fragmented images that wouldn’t quite cohere into a coherent narrative. The rejection of the demon’s whisper—that oily, seductive voice that had promised everything she wanted. The vision of the eastern lord sitting on his throne of bones, ancient and patient and terrible. The decision to seek King Arin, to walk into almost certain death in the desperate hope that truth might matter more than dogma.
It felt surreal, a fever dream born of desperation and exhaustion, the kind of plan that would seem obviously suicidal once she’d had time to rest and think clearly. But the weight of the Dragon’s Heart against her skin grounded her, its solid reality a reminder that this wasn’t nightmare or delusion. This was real. This was happening. This was her path now, chosen or not.
The tunnel leveled out after what felt like an eternity but was likely only ten or fifteen minutes by objective measure—time distorted underground, stretched and compressed by darkness and fear. It widened gradually into a natural cavern, the worked stone of the passage giving way to rough rock formations that had been shaped by water over countless millennia. Bioluminescent fungi clung to the walls in patches of ethereal green light, growing in clusters that resembled stars or perhaps diseased flowers. They cast just enough illumination to make Mordren’s staff-light redundant, bathing everything in an otherworldly glow that made the cavern feel less like a place on Earth and more like something from the stories about the lands beneath the world where strange things dwelt.
Mordren paused, leaning heavily on his staff, his ancient frame showing the strain of their exertion in ways he’d never shown during the battle above. His breathing was labored, wheezing slightly with each inhalation, and when he moved his hand along the staff Elara saw it tremble. A century was a long time to maintain peak physical condition, even with magic to sustain the body beyond its natural limits. “Rest here,” he commanded, his voice rough with exhaustion. “Five minutes. No more than that. Catch your breath, drink if you have water. We’ll need our strength for what comes next.”
Elara slumped against the damp wall gratefully, her legs giving out as soon as permission was granted. She slid down to sit on the uneven floor, ignoring the cold moisture that immediately began soaking through her breeches, too tired to care about discomfort. The fungi’s glow illuminated Mordren’s face as he lowered himself beside her with a series of alarming pops from his joints—knees and hips and spine all protesting the abuse they’d endured. The green light deepened the wrinkles into canyons of shadow, made his eyes appear to glow faintly in their sockets like some creature of the deep caves. He looked ancient in that moment, older than the century she knew he’d lived, as if the weight of all those years had suddenly descended on him at once.
“How far to the exit?” she asked between gasps, her throat raw and dry.
“Half a mile, as the worm burrows.” He arranged himself as comfortably as the rough stone floor would allow, grimacing as old wounds made themselves known. “Straight line through the earth, that is. The actual path is closer to a full mile, winding back and forth to follow stable rock and avoid cave-ins. It emerges in a dense section of the Thornwood, well away from any trails or landmarks the knights might know.” He paused, tilting his head as if listening for pursuit. The distant sounds from the tower had faded to nothing, swallowed by stone and distance. “But they’ll pursue. Make no mistake about that. The Order never abandons a hunt, never forgets a target. We need to evade, not just outrun. Brute speed won’t save us—they’re younger, stronger, and they have those damned pact-charms enhancing their stamina. We need to be cleverer.”
He turned to face her more fully, his sharp eyes catching the fungi-light. “Time for a quick lesson in illusions. And in fact there’s a crucial difference between natural and demonic magic in this regard. Demonic illusions impose false reality on the world, force it to believe something that isn’t true. Natural illusions work with what’s already there, manipulating perception without changing underlying truth. Subtler, but also harder to detect and dispel.”
Despite her exhaustion, Elara forced herself to focus. This was survival knowledge, and Mordren wouldn’t waste precious rest time on theory without good reason. “Show me.”
He guided her through it swiftly, his teaching style compressed by urgency but no less effective for it. “Feel the air’s moisture—it’s heavy down here, saturated. That moisture can bend light, refract it like a prism if you know how to manipulate its density. The fungi’s glow provides ambient illumination you can work with. Weave shadows from one into the other, create pockets of darkness that look like solid stone, or make solid stone appear to be shadow and empty space. It’s about suggestion, making the eye see what it expects rather than what’s actually there.”
Elara concentrated, one hand on the Dragon’s Heart, feeling its pulse synchronize with her own heartbeat. She reached out with her will, not forcefully but with a delicate touch, feeling the moisture in the air like invisible threads she could pluck. She imagined pulling those threads together, thickening them, making them dense enough to catch and hold light rather than letting it pass through. The Heart warmed in encouragement, its power flowing through channels she was only beginning to understand, amplifying her intent into reality.
A shimmering veil began to form behind them, across the passage they’d just traversed. It started as a barely visible distortion in the air, like heat haze, then gradually solidified into what appeared to be a solid wall of stone—rough-textured, slightly damp, absolutely indistinguishable from the genuine cavern wall except that it occupied space that had been empty moments before. Even knowing it was illusion, Elara had trouble convincing her eyes that they could walk through it.
“Good,” Mordren approved, genuine satisfaction in his voice despite the circumstances. “Very good, actually. Most students take hours to achieve even basic visual coherence. That’ll slow them considerably—they’ll have to test every surface, tap every wall, never certain whether they’re seeing truth or deception. Buys us time and sows doubt. Nothing more dangerous to blind zealots than doubt. Now, we move. Can you maintain it while we go?”
Elara tested, holding the image in her mind while standing. It wavered slightly but held. “I think so. For a while, at least.”
“It’ll fade naturally within the hour as your attention moves to other things. That’s fine—by then we’ll be far enough ahead.” He pushed himself upright with his staff, joints protesting audibly. “Forward, then. And as we walk, I’m going to tell you things you need to know. The full truth about the Purge, about what happened in the Age of Wyrms. The Heart will help—it remembers, you see. Dragons remembered everything, and their artifacts inherited that trait. You’ll need this knowledge for what comes next. Understanding the past is the only way to avoid repeating it.”
They pressed on, the passage twisting like a serpent’s spine, sometimes narrowing until they had to turn sideways to squeeze through gaps between rock faces, sometimes opening into larger chambers where their footsteps echoed in the vastness. Water dripped constantly from unseen sources, and once they heard the rushing of an underground stream somewhere off to their left, though they never saw it. The air grew colder as they descended, then warmer as they presumably passed near some geothermal source, then cold again.
As they moved, Mordren began to speak, his voice settling into the rhythm of a storyteller, low and measured, filling the space around them. “You need to know the full truth, child. The Purge wasn’t just about pacts—though those were the spark that ignited the pyre. It ties back to the dragons, to what happened in the Age of Wyrms three thousand years ago. The official histories the Order teaches are sanitized lies, designed to justify current policy rather than illuminate truth. But the Heart knows better. The Heart was there, in a sense. It remembers.”
Elara’s fingers brushed the amulet instinctively, feeling it pulse with sudden excitement beneath her touch, as if it recognized that its story was about to be told. The metal vibrated against her chest with an intensity she hadn’t felt before, warming until it was almost uncomfortable, spreading heat through her veins like liquid fire seeking every extremity.
“Show me,” she said, echoing the words she’d spoken in the tower when accepting her first visions. This time she was ready, braced for the assault on her consciousness.
Mordren’s gnarled hand covered hers on the Heart, his weathered skin rough and cool against her own. His power joined with hers, and the visions came—but different this time. Not the overwhelming assault of unfiltered memory like her nightmares, but guided revelations, filtered through his knowledge and experience, shaped into narrative form that her mind could process without breaking.
She saw the dragons in their prime, and the sight stole her breath even in vision-form.
They were colossal beings beyond anything the current age could imagine—creatures that made the great whales of the northern seas seem like minnows by comparison. The smallest of them dwarfed houses, their bodies massive and muscular, scaled in hides that gleamed like precious gems. Their scales came in every conceivable color and many that had no names in human languages—emerald green that seemed to contain entire forests, crimson red that burned like captured sunfire, sapphire blue deeper than any ocean, obsidian black that drank light and gave back nothing, silver that reflected the moon’s glow even in daylight, gold that put the sun itself to shame.
They soared over primordial landscapes that predated human civilization, over forests that covered continents, over mountains that made the current ranges seem like foothills. Their wings were vast membranes supported by bone strong as steel yet light as hollow bird bones, catching air currents and riding them with grace that belied their tremendous size. When they flew in formation, their wings darkened the sky like storm clouds passing overhead, and the sound of their passage was like sustained thunder rolling across the land.
But they were not the cold-blooded reptiles of current legend, the sluggish beasts that supposedly slept on hoards of gold. The vision corrected that misconception immediately and emphatically. Dragons were warm-blooded titans, their vast bodies generating enormous amounts of heat, their metabolisms burning like furnaces. Such massive warm-blooded creatures demanded energy far beyond what mere food could reasonably provide—unlike the great whales that could feast on virtually unlimited plankton in endless seas, dragons needed something more concentrated, more powerful. Many had chloroplasts in their scales and upper skin like plants did, but it was not enough.
So they sought geothermal havens, nesting in volcanic caverns where the earth’s fire rose close to the surface. The vision showed her their lairs—magnificent caves in the hearts of active volcanoes, where rivers of molten stone flowed like water and the air shimmered with heat intense enough to melt steel. Here the dragons rested, basking in warmth that would instantly kill any human foolish enough to approach, absorbing energy directly from the planet’s molten core and extremophile archaea to fuel their immense bodies. They slept on beds of cooled lava, their scales reflecting the red glow of magma, looking like living jewels set in stone.
They were wise beyond human comprehension, these ancient beings. They lived for millennia—the youngest of them had seen centuries pass, the eldest had witnessed the rise and fall of entire geological epochs. They accumulated knowledge and wisdom that would take entire human libraries generations to record. They understood arts and sciences that humanity had barely begun to grasp, saw patterns in reality that human minds couldn’t perceive, thought in timescales that made mortal concerns seem like the buzzing of mayflies.
And they were not the monsters of current legend, the kidnappers of maidens and hoarders of gold who needed to be slain by brave knights. That was propaganda, lies spread after the Fall to justify what had been done to them. The truth was far different, and infinitely more tragic.
Dragons bonded with humans of pure intent, the vision showed her. Not all humans—they were selective, choosy about who they deemed worthy. But those they chose were elevated beyond mortal limits through partnerships built on mutual respect and shared purpose. These were not relationships of master and servant, or even of rider and mount in any conventional sense. They were true partnerships, bonds of mind and spirit that made both parties greater than they could ever be alone.
The bonded humans—the Dragon Riders of legend—could share their dragon’s senses, see through eyes that could spot a rabbit from a mile above, feel the world through awareness that extended in all directions simultaneously. They could channel their dragon’s power through the focusing talismans like the Heart, amplifying their own natural magic to levels that seemed godlike to others. And in return, the dragons gained something equally valuable: connection to humanity’s quick-burning passion, to the intensity of emotion that came from lives measured in decades rather than millennia, to the creative fire that made humans so unpredictable and innovative.
Together, they shaped the world. They raised mountains and carved valleys, diverted rivers and planted forests, built wonders that would endure for ages. The greatest cities of the ancient world—structures whose ruins still dotted the landscape, so massive and well-built that nothing in the current age could match them—had been raised through partnerships of human vision and draconic power. They had been the guardians of civilization, the shepherds of humanity’s infancy, the wise protectors who kept the darker forces at bay.
But then came the betrayal, and the vision’s tone darkened, the colors bleeding toward shadow and ash.
The most powerful among them—Agnirbelek the Eternal, a behemoth of obsidian scales and infernal flame—turned rogue. He was ancient even by dragon standards, had lived for over five thousand years, had accumulated power and knowledge that made other dragons seem like hatchlings by comparison. His scales were black as the void between stars, his eyes burned like the heart of a volcano, and his flames could melt stone to vapor in seconds. He was magnificent and terrible, respected and feared in equal measure.
But respect was not enough for Agnirbelek. Fear was not enough. He wanted more—needed more with an appetite that had grown over millennia until it consumed all other considerations. He looked at the bonds between dragons and humans and saw not partnership but limitation. He observed the younger races—the demons that dwelt in the spaces between realities, beings of pure hunger and chaos—and saw opportunity where others saw only threat.
Consumed by ambition that had festered for centuries, driven by a need for dominion that had grown beyond all reason, Agnirbelek did the unthinkable. He forged a forbidden pact with a demon lord from the veiled realms, one of the ancient entities that existed outside normal reality, that fed on suffering and corruption like dragons fed on geothermal heat. The bargain was specific and terrible: in exchange for power beyond even draconic limits, in exchange for the ability to ascend beyond mortality into something approaching godhood, Agnirbelek would trade his kin’s very essence. He would deliver his fellow dragons to the demon, their souls and power to be consumed and converted into fuel for both their ascensions.
The slaughter began on a scale that dwarfed any human conflict before or since.
Agnirbelek collected a few followers and rampaged through the volcanic lairs where his kin nested, his demonic-enhanced fire scorching brethren in their sleep before they could respond to the threat. His flames burned hotter than any natural dragon could produce, hot enough to melt dragon scales themselves, to reduce ancient bones to ash in seconds. He moved with speed impossible for something his size, striking without warning, giving no quarter and accepting no surrender.
The vision showed the carnage in terrible detail—dragons dying in their roosts, their death-roars echoing across continents as continents shook with their agony. Some fought back, rising to meet the betrayer and his minions with their own fire and fury, but Agnirbelek had grown too powerful too quickly. He absorbed their essence as they fell, drinking in their life force, their accumulated power, their very souls, converting everything they were into fuel for his continued ascent. Each death made him stronger, made the next death easier, created a cascade effect that accelerated with each passing day.
Mountains quaked under the impacts of their battles, volcanic eruptions triggered by the violence shaking the world’s foundation. Skies darkened with ash thrown up by the fighting, blocking out the sun for months at a time, plunging the world into a volcanic winter that killed countless other creatures through starvation and cold. Rivers of molten stone flowed through inhabited lands as Agnirbelek’s fury broke open the planet’s crust, and the screaming never stopped—the roars of dying dragons carrying for hundreds of miles, echoing off mountain ranges, a sound that haunted the dreams of everyone who heard it for the rest of their lives.
Dragons fell by the thousands. An entire species, ancient and wise and beautiful, reduced to fleeing prey hunted by one of their own who’d transformed himself into something monstrous. Rookeries were obliterated, clutches of eggs destroyed, knowledge accumulated over millennia lost forever as its keepers perished. The Dragon Riders tried to intervene, but what could humans do against such power? They died alongside their bonded partners, brave and futile, and their names were remembered only in the most obscure histories.
Few survived the slaughter—perhaps a hundred from populations that had numbered in the tens of thousands. They fled to the most remote places they could find, seeking refuge where Agnirbelek might not follow immediately, buying time to regroup and plan some kind of response. They scattered across the world, but many sought the same type of haven: mountain ranges where volcanoes still simmered, places where the earth’s fire could sustain them in hiding, where they could nest deep in the stone and hope their heat-signatures would be lost among the geothermal chaos.
In Eldoria’s region, whispers among natural mages like Mordren—those few who’d managed to preserve scraps of the old knowledge through the century of persecution—spoke of the Spine of the World with a mixture of hope and reverence. Those jagged peaks that formed the eastern border of the kingdom, where active vents still breathed smoke into the sky and the ground rumbled with regular earth tremors, were rumored to shelter the last remnants of dragonkind in this part of the world. Sleeping in geothermal wombs deep beneath the stone, their metabolisms slowed to near-death to conserve energy, waiting in hibernation so deep it mimicked death itself, waiting for a call to awaken from those who still remembered the old bonds.
The vision began to fade, the intensity of the images bleeding away like watercolors in rain, leaving Elara gasping and shaken. But the Dragon’s Heart thrummed with an excitement that bordered on frenzy, pulsing so rapidly against her chest that it felt like a second heart trying to match the pace of her own racing pulse. It was recognizing its own history in the tale, she realized—not just understanding the story intellectually but remembering it with the perfect recall that dragons had possessed. This artifact had been part of those events, had witnessed the betrayal and survived the slaughter, had carried its message forward through three thousand years waiting for someone like her to hear it.
And the Heart was urging her toward something, she could feel it. Pushing at her awareness, trying to direct her attention eastward, toward those mountains where the survivors supposedly still slept. There was eagerness in that push, almost desperation. The artifact wanted to go home, wanted to wake its makers from their long slumber, wanted to complete some purpose it had been created for millennia ago.
“Agnirbelek...” Elara managed to force the words past her constricted throat, her voice hoarse as if she’d been screaming. “He’s the demon lord in my visions? The one rising in the east now? The one brokering all these pacts?”
Mordren shook his head grimly, his ancient face drawn with sorrow and something that might have been guilt—the weight of knowledge kept too long in isolation. “No, child. Agnirbelek and his gang were slain eventually, though it took decades and cost even more dragon lives. The last alliance—every surviving dragon united under desperate necessity—brought them down at terrible cost. The battle cratered an entire region, created what’s now the Shattered Wastes south of the Spine, a place where reality itself is still wounded and nothing grows. They killed him, but he’d already accomplished much of what he’d set out to do. Dragonkind was broken, reduced from tens of thousands to barely more than dozens. They never recovered. Couldn’t recover—there were too few left to maintain viable populations, and the trauma ran too deep. So they withdrew, hid themselves away, and let the world believe they were extinct.”
He paused, and his voice dropped to something barely above a whisper, as if speaking the next words too loudly might give them more power. “But his pact corrupted the veil between realities, child. Tore holes in the fabric that separates our world from the realms where demons dwell. The demon lord Agnirbelek bargained with—that entity endures, feeding on the fallout of that ancient betrayal. For three thousand years it’s been using those tears, widening them gradually, building its strength, influencing events from beyond the veil. The Purge echoed Agnirbelek’s corruption, you see—pacts spreading through desperate humanity like Agnirbelek’s madness spread among dragons. Different species, same pattern, same corruption.”
His expression hardened, anger flickering in those ancient eyes. “And naturals like us were persecuted as ‘enablers,’ potential Agnirbelek-likes who might betray their kind just as he did. Better to burn us all than risk another betrayal of that magnitude, or so Aldric the Stern reasoned. Meanwhile the Order dabbled in the minor bargains they claimed to despise, blind to the irony or simply not caring. Using small pacts to hunt larger ones, never understanding—or refusing to acknowledge—that they were following the same path, just at a different pace. The only difference between a knight’s ‘sanctified charm’ and a desperate farmer’s bargain is time and scale. Both involve trading pieces of yourself for power you don’t naturally possess. Both end the same way eventually.”
Elara felt the truth of it settling into her bones alongside the Heart’s eager pulse. She tested her affinity carefully, drawing on that pulse, channeling it through the pathways she’d only begun to understand that morning. A minor flame flickered to life in her palm—draconic fire, she knew somehow, warm but controlled, burning without consuming her flesh. It danced on her skin like a living thing, responding to her thoughts, and there was no taint to it, no corruption seeping in at the edges. This was clean power, drawn from harmony rather than bargain, from heritage rather than theft.
A flutter of wings made her start, and she looked up to see a bat descending from the cavern ceiling—not fleeing from the light as bats should, but drawn to it. Or not to the light itself, she realized, but to her. The creature landed on her shoulder with delicate claws that barely pricked through her tunic, and it settled there with unnatural trust, pressing its furry body against her neck as if seeking warmth, reminding Elara of a little dog with wings. Animals shouldn’t behave this way toward humans, especially not wild animals with no history of domestication. But the Heart pulsed approval, and she understood: this was part of draconic affinity, this connection to living things, this ability to communicate without words across the species barrier.
“My mother...” The words came without her conscious decision to speak them, pulled from her by the weight of revelation and the need to understand her own origins. “She had this too? The bloodline? The gift?”
“Likely.” Mordren’s voice was gentle now, understanding the turmoil she felt. “The timing fits—she would have begun manifesting around the age you are now, subtle things at first that could be dismissed as coincidence or luck. Animals behaving oddly in her presence, plants growing better where she walked, an instinctive understanding of weather patterns and natural rhythms. But someone noticed, or she noticed herself and became frightened of what it meant. So she fled to protect you, perhaps. Ran before the Order could connect her manifestations to her family, before they could start investigating her children. Left you behind where you’d be safer, just another farm girl with no distinguishing characteristics, nothing to draw dangerous attention.”
He reached out and placed a weathered hand on her shoulder, the gesture surprisingly comforting despite his usual prickly demeanor. “Draconic heirs are rare—perhaps a few dozen in any given generation scattered across the entire world, often never knowing what they are because the gift lies dormant without proper catalyst. But they’re valuable beyond measure to those who know what to look for. Targets for demons seeking to twist them as Agnirbelek was twisted, to corrupt that pure bloodline and turn it into a weapon against the very thing it was meant to protect. Your mother may have understood that instinctively, may have known that staying near you would only paint a target on your back brighter than any you’d carry alone.”
The pain of that particular revelation cut deeper than Elara expected—the idea that her mother’s abandonment, which she’d spent years resenting, building walls of anger and hurt around, might have been an act of love rather than cowardice or selfishness. That those seven years of believing herself unwanted, of watching her father slowly break under the weight of managing alone, of taking on responsibilities no child should bear, might have been the price of survival. That she’d hated her mother for the very thing that had kept her alive.
She pushed the feelings down, locked them away to process later when there was time for such luxuries. Right now, survival took precedence over emotional reconciliation with ghosts.
Chapter 7: Wings of Fury
Their brief rest ended abruptly, shattered by the sound of distant shouts echoing down the tunnel behind them. The words were indistinct, distorted by distance and stone, but the tone was unmistakable—triumph and renewed purpose. The knights had found the passage entrance and breached Mordren’s wards faster than anticipated. And if the timing was right, they’d just discovered the false wall Elara had created, would be testing every surface now with methodical thoroughness, slowed but not stopped.
“Time to move,” Mordren said unnecessarily, already pushing himself upright with visible effort. “And time to move fast. They’re closer than I’d hoped.”
They ran through the remaining passage at a pace that burned Elara’s already exhausted legs, the wizard keeping up through sheer stubborn determination and probably liberal application of magic to sustain his century-old body beyond its natural limits. The tunnel twisted and turned, sometimes forcing them to climb over rock falls or squeeze through gaps barely wide enough for their bodies. Once they had to wade through waist-deep water so cold it stole the breath from Elara’s lungs, the bottom slick with algae that made every step treacherous.
Finally, mercifully, she saw natural light ahead—not the green glow of fungi or blue luminescence of Mordren’s staff, but actual daylight filtering through an opening. They burst from the passage’s exit into afternoon sunshine that felt like a physical blow after so long in darkness, temporarily blinding her until her eyes could adjust.
The exit was concealed cleverly—a cleft in a rocky outcrop, overgrown with thorns and blackberry vines so thick they formed an almost solid barrier. But the thorns parted at Mordren’s gestured command, the plants responding to his will, pulling back just enough to create a passage that closed behind them immediately, leaving no trace of their passage.
The Thornwood enveloped them immediately, and Elara felt simultaneously safer and more exposed. Safer because the forest was vast, filled with places to hide and paths to take. More exposed because the canopy overhead would make it impossible to see pursuers coming until they were practically on top of them.
“Which way?” she asked, turning to Mordren.
The wizard pointed northeast, toward where the forest eventually gave way to the foothills that led up to the Spine of the World. “Toward the mountains first, away from settled lands where the knights can raise alarm. Then we circle south toward the capital along routes they won’t expect. But—”
He was cut off by the sound of multiple bodies crashing through underbrush, the jingle of armor, the labored breathing of men who’d been running hard. The knights emerged from different directions simultaneously—not from the passage behind but from the forest itself. They’d split up, sent forces around through the woods to cut off escape routes. Clever. These weren’t mindless zealots but trained soldiers executing tactical doctrine.
Three knights materialized from the trees in a coordinated ambush pattern that spoke of long practice working together. Their armor was dented and scratched from passage through the tunnel and woods, and their faces beneath their helms were grim with determination. The pact-charms on their gauntlets and shields glowed with that sickly red light, but there was something else now—their eyes held hints of that same redness, faint enough that it might have been reflection of their charms but concentrated enough that Elara suspected otherwise. How deep did their bargains go? How much of themselves had they traded away in their righteous hunt for corruption?
“Surrender!” the lead knight commanded, the same one from last night and this morning’s tower assault. His voice was hoarse, probably from shouting orders during the battle and subsequent pursuit. His left arm hung slightly stiff where the wards had struck him. “There’s nowhere left to run. The forest is surrounded. More of our brothers converge from every direction. You’re done, heretic. You and your demon-touched student both.”
Mordren raised his staff, power gathering around him in visible waves of distortion. “I’ve been ‘done’ for eighty years, boy. You’ll have to try harder than that.” Stone erupted from the ground at his command, forming a barrier between them and the knights, buying seconds.
Elara summoned vines as she’d been taught, feeling them respond more quickly now, the Dragon’s Heart amplifying her intent. They burst from the forest floor to entangle legs and weapons, buying more time. But they were outnumbered and exhausted, and the knights were fresh with the energy that came from charms powered by demonic bargains. The math wasn’t favorable.
A knight’s hammer swung toward her head, the air whistling with the speed of its passage. She tried to dodge but her legs were too slow, too tired, and she knew with crystalline certainty that she couldn’t evade in time, that the hammer would connect and that would be the end of—
The Heart blazed.
Not warming gradually as it had before, but igniting like a star contained within her chest, erupting with power that felt like lightning channeling through her bones. Something awakened inside her, or perhaps was awakened by the Heart—some potential that had been sleeping her entire life, waiting for the right catalyst, the right moment of desperate need to manifest.
Spectral wings unfurled from her back.
They weren’t physical—she could tell that immediately. They cast no shadow, had no weight, existed in some space between reality and potential. But they were there, visible and semi-solid, scaled like a dragon’s wings in patterns that shifted between emerald and sapphire depending on the angle of light. They spanned fifteen feet from tip to tip, the membranes translucent like stained glass, supported by spectral bone that gleamed like polished obsidian.
They moved, responding to her instinctive need for protection, sweeping forward to shield her body. The hammer’s head struck spectral membrane instead of human flesh, and the impact generated a gust of wind powerful enough to hurl the attacker backward through the air. He crashed into a tree trunk twenty feet away with a sound of metal striking wood hard enough to embed, and lay still.
The other knights froze, staring at the wings with expressions Elara could read even through their helms—awe and terror mixed in equal measure. They’d been taught their entire lives that dragons were extinct, that such manifestations were impossible, that anything appearing draconic was demonic in nature. But the spectral wings radiating from this exhausted farm girl contradicted everything they thought they knew.
“Demon spawn!” one cried, his voice cracking with the strain of fear and zealotry fighting for dominance. “She’s manifested! Abomination! Kill her before the transformation completes!”
The knights recovered from their shock with trained discipline, raising weapons that glowed with borrowed power. But their coordination had fractured—she could see it in the way they glanced at each other, in the slight hesitation before committing to the attack, in the widening of eyes visible through helm slits. Fear had entered the equation, and fear made even the best-trained soldiers unpredictable.
Mordren seized the moment with the ruthless efficiency of someone who’d survived a century through recognizing opportunities and exploiting them without mercy. He thrust his staff into the earth and spoke a single word in a language that predated Eldoria, predated human kingdoms entirely—something from the Age of Wyrms, perhaps, preserved in the memories of those who studied the old ways. The silver lines that had been barely visible on his staff suddenly blazed with light, and the earth itself answered his call.
The ground beneath the knights’ feet turned treacherous, solid earth becoming a morass of mud and quicksand in an instant. Two of them sank immediately to their knees, the weight of their armor working against them, dragging them down faster. The third managed to leap clear, landing on more stable ground, but his attention was divided between maintaining his footing and tracking his targets.
“Illusions!” Mordren barked at Elara. “Multiple false images! Scatter their focus! Don’t think, just do!”
Elara acted on pure instinct, the spectral wings still spread wide from her back, their presence both exhilarating and terrifying. She reached for the moisture in the forest air—abundant here in the shade and damp of old growth—and bent light through it as Mordren had taught her in the cavern. But where she’d created one false wall before, now she created five false Elaras, each one splitting off from her position to run in different directions through the trees.
The illusions weren’t perfect—close inspection would reveal them as tricks of light and shadow—but they didn’t need to be perfect. They just needed to be convincing enough for a few seconds of confusion. And in combat, seconds were everything.
The knight who’d kept his footing chose the wrong target, charging after an illusion that led him deeper into the forest and away from the real Elara. The two who were sinking in quicksand earth were too busy trying to free themselves to pose immediate threat, their movements growing more panicked as they realized their struggles only accelerated their descent.
“Now!” Mordren grabbed Elara’s arm with surprising strength, his grip iron-hard despite his apparent frailty. “While they’re scattered! This way!”
They ran northeast, Elara’s spectral wings folding against her back as naturally as if she’d been born with them, though she could still feel their weight—or perhaps their weightlessness—pressing against her awareness. The Heart pulsed with approval so intense it was almost overwhelming, sending waves of encouragement and eagerness through her chest. The artifact was excited, she realized, thrilled by this manifestation of her draconic heritage, eager to see what else might awaken.
Behind them, shouts of confusion and anger echoed through the forest. The illusions were fading as her concentration shifted to running, but they’d served their purpose. The knights would regroup, would pick up their trail again, but they’d lost minutes of pursuit time and had their certainty shaken. For soldiers whose greatest strength was absolute conviction in their righteous cause, doubt was poison.
They ran until Elara’s lungs burned and her legs threatened to give out entirely, until even Mordren’s magically sustained endurance began to flag. Finally, the wizard called a halt in a dense thicket where ancient oaks grew so close together their roots formed a natural barricade. They collapsed against rough bark, chests heaving, hearts hammering.
“Those wings,” Mordren gasped between breaths, his ancient face flushed with exertion. “I’ve never seen a manifestation that powerful without years of training and bonding. The Heart recognized you at a deeper level than I’d suspected. You’re not just carrying draconic bloodline—you’re a true heir, the kind that appears once in a generation at most. The kind that could have bonded with a dragon as a full partner, not just a rider but an equal.”
Elara stared at her hands, which still trembled with residual energy. She could feel the wings even though they’d vanished when she’d stopped consciously maintaining them—feel them as phantom limbs, present but not, waiting to be called forth again. “I didn’t mean to. It just... happened. The Heart did something.”
“The Heart catalyzed what was already there, waiting,” Mordren corrected. “You did that, child. Your bloodline, your power, your desperate need to survive. The artifact merely showed you the path and amplified the result. But that display...” He shook his head, something between wonder and concern crossing his weathered features. “That was a beacon visible for miles to anyone with the sensitivity to perceive it. Every natural mage within a day’s travel felt that surge. And worse, far worse—every demon with interest in this region felt it too.”
As if summoning it by speaking of it, Elara felt the presence before she heard the voice. A pressure building in her mind like the air before a thunderstorm, heavy and oppressive and wrong in ways that made her skin crawl and her stomach turn. The demon’s voice slithered into her consciousness like oil through cracks, different from before—not the seductive whisper offering power but something colder, more analytical, infinitely more ancient.
Interesting. Very interesting indeed. A true heir awakening. We had thought your kind extinct, child of the wyrms. Hunted to nothing by the very cattle you once protected. But here you are, blazing like a bonfire in the darkness, announcing your presence to all who have eyes to see. How... convenient.
Elara tried to shut it out, to raise mental walls as Mordren had briefly instructed during their earlier lessons, but the voice pushed through with the irresistible pressure of water finding every crack in a dam.
You cannot silence me so easily. I am not some minor tempter offering parlor tricks to desperate fools. I am ancient, patient, and I have waited three thousand years for this moment. For Agnirbelek’s betrayal to bear its final fruit. For the last heirs of the dragons to reveal themselves so that the cycle can finally complete.
“Get out of my head!” Elara screamed aloud, pressing her hands to her temples as if physical pressure could force out the mental intrusion. The Dragon’s Heart pulsed against her chest, but where before it had offered only warmth and encouragement, now it radiated something else—warning, urgent and insistent, like a fire alarm shrieking danger.
Oh, I shall leave. For now. But know this, little heir—every time you use that power, every time you manifest those beautiful wings, every time you channel the Heart’s amplification, you send ripples through the veil between worlds. And I am always listening. I am always watching. And I am coming.
The Spine calls to you, does it not? The sleepers in their geothermal tombs, waiting for one such as you to wake them. By all means, go. Wake them. Gather them. Bring them forth into a world that has forgotten them, that will fear them, that will seek to destroy them as Agnirbelek destroyed his own kind. History repeats, child. Betrayal echoes through generations. And when the time comes, when you face the choice that Agnirbelek faced—power to save those you love, or principles that mean nothing to the dying—you will kneel. They always kneel eventually.
The presence withdrew like a receding tide, leaving Elara gasping and shaking, her vision blurred with tears she didn’t remember shedding. Mordren’s hands gripped her shoulders, steadying her, his voice cutting through the ringing in her ears.
“Breathe, child. It’s gone. For now, it’s gone. What did it say? Tell me everything.”
She recounted the words as best she could remember them, her voice shaking but growing stronger as she spoke. Mordren’s expression grew grimmer with each sentence, the wrinkles around his eyes deepening into canyons of concern.
“The demon lord itself,” he muttered. “Not a lesser servant but the primary entity, the one Agnirbelek bargained with. It’s taking personal interest in you, which is both validation of your importance and an absolutely terrifying complication. It knows you’re an heir. It knows about the Spine. And it’s actively trying to manipulate you toward waking the dragons, which means...” He paused, thinking rapidly, his sharp mind working through implications. “Which means it believes it can corrupt them if they wake. Or corrupt you and use you to corrupt them. It’s planning something, has been planning something for three thousand years, and your manifestation has accelerated whatever timetable it was following.”
“Then we can’t go to the Spine,” Elara said, though the words hurt to speak. The Dragon’s Heart pulsed against her chest with what felt like disagreement, pulling her attention eastward with almost physical force. “If waking them is what the demon wants—”
“We have no choice but to go,” Mordren interrupted. “Because the demon is right about one thing—the sleepers are the only force that can potentially stop what’s coming. The demon’s armies are already gathering beyond the Spine. The raids are spreading, converting whole villages into corrupted servants. King Arin’s conventional forces cannot stop what’s coming, no matter how brave or well-trained. Without the dragons, without their ancient power to counter the demon’s influence, Eldoria falls. Then the next kingdom. Then the next. Until the demon lord has consumed the world as Agnirbelek tried to consume dragonkind.”
He stood slowly, using his staff for support, and looked toward the northeast where the Spine of the World rose in jagged peaks visible even at this distance. “But you’re also right that we can’t simply charge blindly toward the mountains while a demon lord watches our every move and knights hunt us from behind. We need allies. We need resources. We need...” He sighed heavily. “We need the king to listen. To truly listen, to see past a century of propaganda and recognize the threat for what it is. And to do that, we need proof. Undeniable, incontrovertible proof that natural magic exists, that it’s not inherently corrupt, and that it’s Eldoria’s only real defense against what’s coming.”
“How do we prove that?” Elara asked, though she suspected she knew the answer.
“We walk into the lion’s den,” Mordren confirmed. “Present ourselves to King Arin, demonstrate your abilities without threatening anyone, and hope that he’s wise enough to see the difference between you and the pact-makers his Order has been hunting. Hope that he’s desperate enough to question his inherited assumptions. Hope that we can convince him before his knights convince him to have us burned.”
It was insane. It was the plan of desperate people with no good options. It was also, Elara realized with sinking certainty, exactly what the Dragon’s Heart wanted her to do. The artifact pulsed with approval, with encouragement, with something that felt almost like pride. It had been created for a Dragon Rider, for someone meant to be a bridge between species, a diplomat and warrior combined. And now it was pushing her toward the diplomatic path, toward convincing rather than conquering, toward building alliances rather than hiding in shadows.
This is what you were made for, the Heart seemed to whisper in its wordless way. Not to hide or flee or cower before those who don’t understand. But to stand and speak truth and make them see. Your mother hid to protect you. But you are not your mother, and this is not her time. This is yours.
“Then we go to the capital,” Elara said, her voice steadier than she felt. “We find the king. And we make him listen.”
“Or die trying,” Mordren added with dark humor. “But yes. That’s the plan. Such as it is.”
Miles away, in the shadowed archive vault beneath Eldoria’s castle, King Arin pored over forbidden tomes by candlelight, the wax dripping slowly to form stalactites on the ancient desk he’d commandeered. The air was thick with dust and the scent of aged parchment—that distinctive smell of old paper and leather bindings and time itself, compressed into physical form. Shelves loomed around him like silent guardians, laden with scrolls that had been sealed since the Purge, documents deemed too dangerous for common knowledge but too valuable to destroy entirely.
His steel-gray eyes, red-rimmed from hours of reading by insufficient light, scanned faded ink that documented atrocities committed in his great-great-grandfather’s name. Confessions extracted under torture. Lists of the burned, both guilty and innocent lumped together with no distinction. Theoretical treatises on the nature of magic that contradicted everything the official histories claimed. Evidence that Aldric the Stern had known—known—that not all magic users were pact-makers, but had ordered them burned anyway out of pragmatic calculation that it was easier to destroy a hundred innocents than risk one corrupted sorcerer surviving.
The math was there in Aldric’s own hand, written in cipher that had taken Arin hours to decode: “Of those tested, perhaps one in twenty show signs of power without demonic taint. But we lack means to reliably distinguish them from the corrupted, and the stakes of error are civilizational collapse. Therefore, all must be purged. Future generations may forgive this necessary evil, or they may curse our names. Either way, they will be alive to do so.”
Cold calculation. Genocide justified by probability and the inability to distinguish innocent from guilty with perfect accuracy. Arin felt bile rise in his throat, and not for the first time that day. How many like that farm girl the Order was currently hunting had died over the past century? How many potential allies, potential defenders, had been destroyed because the kingdom lacked the tools or will to see the difference?
A soft knock at the vault’s iron door pulled him from his dark thoughts. “Enter,” he called, his voice rough from hours without speaking.
Garrick slipped inside, his pitted face grim under the hood of his travel cloak. He carried a leather satchel that he set on the desk with the careful handling of someone transporting dangerous materials. “Sire, the proof you wanted.” He unrolled a parchment from the satchel—intercepted correspondence between Order chapter houses, written in the assumption of privacy. “Missives between commanders, confessions from initiates who thought they were speaking confidentially to their spiritual advisors. All admitting to minor pacts for ‘enhanced vigilance’ in their duty.”
Arin took the parchment, scanning contents that made his jaw clench tighter with each line. Charms for enhanced sight, “blessed” by Order sorcerers in secret ceremonies. Amulets of strength, allowing knights to fight longer without exhaustion. Detection wards powered by bargains made with “lesser spirits”—which was apparently how they justified using demons while claiming moral superiority. The euphemisms were creative, but the underlying truth was undeniable.
“How widespread?” he asked, though he dreaded the answer.
“Perhaps a third of active knights carry something,” Garrick reported. “More in the higher ranks. And the leadership knows, sire. They have to know. There are procedures for requesting these ‘sanctified tools,’ approval chains, oversight committees. It’s systematic, institutional. They’re not rogue actors making individual mistakes—this is policy, enacted in shadow while they preach purity in sunlight.”
Arin’s fist clenched, crumpling the parchment’s edge. “Hypocrisy rots from the core outward. Aldric’s legacy, twisted into something even uglier than his original sin.” He turned to another dusty volume lying open on the desk—pre-Purge lore recovered from a sealed section of the archives that hadn’t been opened in decades. Sketches of dragons adorned its pages, magnificent creatures rendered in loving detail by artists who’d seen them with their own eyes. Notes on natural mages bonding with them, achieving wonders through partnership rather than domination.
“If naturals exist—truly exist, uncorrupted as these archives suggest—then we need them,” he said, more to himself than to Garrick. “The raids spread corruption like plague. Entire villages consumed, converted into servants of whatever darkness rises beyond the Spine. Pacts offered en masse, accepted by the desperate. The pattern is identical to what these texts describe from the Age of Wyrms—Agnirbelek the Betrayer consuming his own kind, except now it’s demons consuming humanity. And conventional forces cannot stop it. Steel breaks against magic. Courage means nothing when your enemy can drain your life with a touch or turn your neighbors into weapons against you.”
He looked up at Garrick, decision crystallizing. “If there are natural mages—people with power who haven’t bargained it away—then they’re the only real defense we have. But first, we need to survive the corruption within our own walls. You said Vorril escaped confinement?”
A sudden commotion from the corridor beyond answered before Garrick could respond—shouts of alarm, the clash of steel, the peculiar sound of magic discharging in confined spaces. Arin’s hand went to his sword, old battle instincts flaring to life, the warrior-king reasserting himself over the scholar he’d been playing at for the past hours.
The vault door burst open, iron hinges shrieking in protest. Three figures stumbled through—castle guards, but their eyes glowed faintly red in the candlelight, that telltale sign of demonic influence. Vorril’s men, or possibly Vorril himself had gotten to them, offered them bargains for strength to overcome loyalty. Their weapons were raised, their faces twisted with something between zealotry and hunger.
“Treachery within,” Arin muttered, drawing his sword in a smooth motion honed by decades of practice. The blade sang as it cleared the scabbard, plain steel without magical enhancement but lovingly maintained, sharp as a razor, perfectly balanced. “Of course. The corruption’s already here, spreading through my own household.”
He fought alongside Garrick in the cramped confines of the vault, and it was grimly satisfying to remember that he was still good at this despite years behind a crown and council tables. The corrupted guards were stronger than normal men, enhanced by whatever pacts they’d accepted, but they lacked discipline. Demonic power made them overconfident, reckless, predictable. Arin parried a wild swing and riposted with precision, his blade finding the gap in armor at the armpit where no demonic enhancement could thicken flesh. The guard dropped, his red eyes fading to normal brown in death, and there was a human expression of confusion and regret on his face at the last, as if he’d just woken from a nightmare and couldn’t understand how he’d arrived here.
The second guard fell to Garrick’s efficient brutality—a feint high, strike low, hamstring the legs and finish with a thrust to the throat. No honor in it, no glory, just the practical violence of a man who’d survived twenty years of warfare by doing whatever worked.
The third guard hesitated, seeing his companions fall, and that hesitation was fatal. Arin’s blade took him in the chest, punching through mail that had been weakened by demonic corruption—metal rotting from within, just like the men who wore it.
“Check them,” Arin commanded, breathing harder than he’d like, feeling his forty years and the old wounds that never quite healed right. “See if they carry any identifiers. Find out how many others might be compromised.”
Garrick was already moving, efficiently searching bodies with the practice of someone who’d done this too many times. “Vorril’s household sigils on their undershirts, sire. They were his personal guards. Which means...”
“Which means Vorril himself is fully corrupted, and anyone he’s had contact with over the past weeks is suspect.” Arin wiped his blade clean on a dead man’s cloak, the gesture automatic. “Lockdown protocols. Seal the castle, no one in or out without verification. And Garrick—we need to accelerate our timeline. If the corruption has spread this far this fast, then waiting for perfect information is a luxury we don’t have. We need allies who can fight magic with something other than more magic borrowed from demons.”
As if summoned by the thought, a page burst into the vault, young and terrified, skidding to a halt when he saw the bodies. “S-sire! Report from the Thornwood! The Order engaged two heretics, but there was... there was a manifestation. One of them—a girl—sprouted wings. Dragon wings, the knights said, spectral but real. They felt the power surge from miles away. And she survived, sire. She and an old man, they survived and escaped, and the knights are pursuing but...”
The boy trailed off, clearly uncertain whether this report would be welcomed or whether he’d be punished for repeating what sounded like madness.
Arin and Garrick exchanged a long look. Dragon wings. A girl with natural magic powerful enough to manifest draconic traits. In the Thornwood, which was less than two days’ travel from the capital. And she was fleeing toward... where? Toward safety if she had any sense. But if she were truly what she seemed to be, truly a natural mage with draconic bloodline, then she was also exactly what the prophecies in these ancient texts described.
“The knights are pursuing?” Arin asked carefully, his mind racing through implications.
“Yes, sire. Orders to capture or kill, standard heretic protocol.”
“Send riders,” Arin decided, the words coming before he’d fully thought through all the consequences. But instinct screamed that this was important, that this girl might be exactly what he needed, what the kingdom needed. “Intercept the Order’s pursuit. My authority supersedes theirs, and I’m invoking royal prerogative. I want that girl brought to me alive and unharmed. Her and her companion both. Tell the knights that if they harm her, they’ll answer to the crown for destroying a potential strategic asset. Frame it in those terms—not mercy, not doubt about the Order’s mission, but practical military necessity. They’ll object, but they can’t directly refuse a royal command.”
“Sire, if she’s truly corrupted...” Garrick ventured carefully.
“Then we’ll discover it quickly enough, and she’ll burn like any other,” Arin said flatly. “But if she’s not—if she’s what those texts describe, what Aldric knew existed but killed anyway—then she might be the difference between salvation and annihilation. I need to see for myself. I need to talk to her, assess her, determine if natural magic is truly different from the demonic variety.”
He looked down at the bodies of men who’d been his guards, loyal subjects corrupted by promises they hadn’t understood. “The demon lord is already moving, already spreading its influence through my kingdom. I can feel it, like rot spreading through timber. We’re running out of time to be cautious. Sometimes you have to gamble everything on incomplete information because waiting for certainty means death.”
He sheathed his sword and turned to the page. “Go. Send the riders now. And bring me every scrap of intelligence we have on reported sightings in the Thornwood. I want to know where she’s heading, what her next move might be. If she’s coming here to the capital...” He paused. “If she’s brave enough or foolish enough to seek audience with the king who ordered her kind exterminated, then she deserves at least a hearing before we make any final judgments.”
The page fled, and Garrick moved to Arin’s side. “You’re betting the kingdom on a girl with wings who might be demon-touched, sire. I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“So do I,” Arin admitted. “But the alternative is fighting darkness with darkness, using demon magic to hunt demon magic until we can’t tell the difference anymore. That path leads nowhere good. So we try something different. We try the truth that Aldric buried—that not all power is corruption, not all magic is evil. And we hope we’re not committing civilization’s final mistake.”
He looked at the ancient texts spread across his desk, at the sketches of dragons and their riders working in harmony, at the mathematical proof of Aldric’s cold genocide. “Get me everything we have on draconic lore. Everything on the Age of Wyrms, on the dragon riders, on Agnirbelek’s betrayal. If this girl is what I think she is, I need to understand what she represents. Because if she’s a true heir to that legacy...” He didn’t finish the sentence, but both men understood the implication.
If she was a true heir, she might be either their salvation or the instrument of their destruction. And they were about to invite her directly into the heart of the kingdom with open eyes and desperate hope that they could tell the difference before it was too late.
In the Thornwood, Elara felt a strange tingling along her spine, as if someone had walked over her grave. The Dragon’s Heart pulsed once, sharp and urgent, and she knew without being told that something had shifted. The game board had changed. New players were entering the field.
“Something’s different,” she told Mordren, unable to articulate the sensation more clearly.
The wizard nodded grimly. “The king moves. The pieces are in motion. Now we discover whether we’re making a brilliant gambit or walking willingly to our deaths. Come, child. We have a long road ahead, and apparently we’re expected.”
They set off toward the capital, toward King Arin and his corrupted court, toward answers and accusations and a reckoning that had been building for a century. Behind them, the knights regrouped and renewed their pursuit. Above them, something ancient stirred in the Spine, sensing the awakening of its inheritor. And ahead, in the spaces between reality, a demon lord smiled with anticipation of the chaos to come.
The pieces were moving toward collision.
And when they met, the world would discover whether dragons’ heirs brought salvation or merely repeated ancient betrayals in new forms.
Chapter 8: Veiled Alliances
The Thornwood’s depths offered scant mercy to the fleeing pair, its ancient trees closing ranks like silent sentinels that had witnessed centuries of human struggle and remained unmoved by any of it. The trunks were massive—some wide enough that three men linking hands couldn’t encircle them—their bark scarred and blackened with age, deeply furrowed like the faces of very old men. The gnarled branches intertwined overhead to form a living labyrinth of shadow and thorn, creating a canopy so dense that even at midday the forest floor remained in perpetual twilight broken only by occasional shafts of light.
Sunlight pierced the canopy in erratic shafts where gaps allowed, dappling the forest floor with fleeting pools of gold that shifted and moved as branches swayed in the wind high above. But the light did little to warm the chill autumn air that had settled into the woods like an unwelcome guest, carrying with it the damp smell of approaching winter and the promise of harder days ahead. The temperature was dropping steadily—Elara could feel it in her bones, that ache that came when cold worked its way past clothing and into flesh.
Her breath fogged before her as she and Mordren pressed onward, small clouds of vapor that dissipated almost immediately in the still air. Their footsteps were muffled by layers of fallen leaves that carpeted the forest floor—crimson and amber and brown remnants of a dying season, beautiful in their decay but treacherous underfoot. The leaves were slick with moisture from yesterday’s rain and the morning’s heavy dew, concealing roots and hollows that could easily turn an ankle, hiding the smaller detritus of the forest—stones and branches and the occasional burrow that could collapse beneath an unwary step.
The spectral wings had faded shortly after the ambush, dissolving like mist at dawn when the sun’s warmth finally burns away the last traces of night. One moment they’d been there—semi-solid, gleaming with that strange inner light that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once—and the next they’d simply ceased to exist, pulled back into whatever space between reality and potential they occupied when not manifested. But their echo lingered in Elara’s muscles, a phantom ache that ran along her shoulder blades and down her spine, a sensation like having used muscles she hadn’t known existed. It was uncomfortable but not unpleasant, a reminder of power that spoke of untapped potential waiting to be explored.
The Dragon’s Heart pulsed steadily against her chest, a reassuring rhythm amid the chaos of flight and fear and uncertainty. Its beat had synchronized with her own heartbeat so perfectly that she couldn’t tell them apart anymore—her heart or the artifact’s pulse, one and the same, unified. The warmth it radiated had become a constant comfort, a small sun pressed against her sternum that kept the worst of the autumn chill at bay even when her breath misted in the air.
But the demon lord’s parting words echoed in her mind with the persistence of a song you couldn’t quite forget, a venomous undercurrent to every step, every breath, every moment of relative safety. History repeats. Betrayal echoes through generations. You will kneel. They always kneel eventually. The certainty in that ancient voice haunted her more than the threats themselves. It wasn’t boasting or bluster—it was the patient observation of an entity that had watched the same patterns play out across millennia and saw no reason to expect different results this time.
Mordren moved with surprising agility for someone who claimed more than a century of life, his staff probing the ground ahead like a third limb, testing stability before committing his weight, finding safe paths through terrain that would have slowed someone half his age. His bare feet—he still hadn’t bothered with boots, even in the cold—made almost no sound on the leaves, stepping with the precision of someone who knew exactly where to place each footfall to minimize noise. It was a skill born of decades, maybe centuries, of practice.
“Keep your senses sharp,” he warned, his voice a low rasp that barely carried the few feet between them. Speaking louder than necessary was an invitation to detection, and the Order’s knights had proven themselves far too skilled at tracking for comfort. “The knights are persistent as plague and twice as hard to shake, but the wood favors the cunning over the strong. We’ll use that to our advantage. These trees have stood for centuries—they remember when the Order was first founded, when Aldric’s pyres burned. If we listen carefully, the forest itself can warn us of approach.”
As they navigated a narrow ravine choked with brambles—thorny vines as thick as Elara’s thumb that caught at clothing and exposed skin with barbed persistence—Mordren began to speak again, falling into what was clearly a teaching mode even in the midst of flight. Perhaps especially in the midst of flight, when distraction from fear was welcome and every piece of knowledge might mean the difference between survival and capture.
“Your gift follows the old blood laws,” he said, his voice taking on the cadence of a lecture delivered countless times before, though probably never while scrambling through a thorn-choked ravine fleeing religious zealots. “The inheritance of draconic affinity isn’t random chance or divine whim, whatever the old stories might suggest. It’s bloodline, pure and simple, following patterns that can be observed and predicted if you watch families closely enough over generations. It’s like... breeding horses for speed or hounds for scent. The traits pass through blood, but not always in ways immediately visible.”
He paused to navigate around a particularly dense cluster of thorns, using his staff to push them aside, creating a gap that Elara could slip through. “The gift must be carried in double measure to manifest fully—inherited from both parents, you see. Like when two brown-eyed parents produce a blue-eyed child only if both secretly carry the trait. Your mother manifested it fully—a natural witch, though she probably never called herself that, never had proper training to understand what she was. She would have carried the blood-gift in full measure, which means every child she bore would receive at least a partial inheritance from her. Your father...” He glanced back at her, sharp eyes assessing. “Your father must have carried it hidden in his blood, passed down from some distant ancestor, granting him no power himself but capable of passing it forward. A carrier of the gift but not a wielder of it, if you understand the distinction.”
The implications settled over Elara like a heavy cloak. “Which means I received the gift from both sides. Full blood inheritance from mother and father both.” The logic was simple enough even for someone with limited education. “But my brothers...”
“Could manifest too, if they inherited the gift from both parents as you did,” Mordren confirmed, helping her over a fallen log that blocked the ravine’s narrowest point. “Or they might have inherited it from only one parent—carriers like your father, capable of passing the gift to their own children someday but never wielding it themselves. Or they might have received it from neither, possessing no draconic affinity at all in their blood, though that’s less likely given your mother’s strong inheritance. It’s chance, child. Like throwing dice, but with life-altering stakes. Each child is a separate throw of fate’s bones.”
The revelation stirred her worries anew, adding layers to fears she’d been trying not to think about. “So they might be in danger? If they manifest, if the gift awakens in them—the Order would hunt them too?” Her younger brothers, still at the farm, still believing their sister had simply run away or been taken by bandits or met some other fate that didn’t involve magic and dragons and demons. They’d be working the fields now, trying to manage without her, trying to care for their dying father with no understanding that their bloodline marked them as targets.
“Only if it awakens,” Mordren said, and there was sympathy in his voice despite its usual dry rasp. “A dormant gift shields them for now, probably for their entire lives if fortune favors them. The power typically shows itself in youth—the years between childhood and full adulthood, when the body changes and hidden things rise to the surface. You’re seventeen—prime years for manifestation. Your brothers are younger, yes? Ten and twelve, if I recall your earlier mention?”
Elara nodded, not trusting her voice.
“Then they have years yet before the danger becomes acute. And many who carry the gift in their blood never show it at all, never encounter the circumstances that wake it, live and die as ordinary folk with no idea they carried seeds of greatness or tragedy in their veins. The Order hunts those who display power openly, not those who might theoretically possess it hidden in their blood. Your brothers are safer than you, at least for now.”
It was meant to be comforting, she knew. But “safer than you” was a low bar when you were fleeing for your life through the woods while knights with demonic charms hunted you and an ancient demon lord took personal interest in your existence.
Elara tested her affinity as they walked, partly to distract herself from worry and partly because Mordren had drilled into her during their brief training that power required practice, that skill atrophied without use. She focused on the air ahead, on the brambles that blocked their path, and willed them aside with a minor gust of wind. Nothing dramatic—just enough force to push the thorny vines away from their trajectory, clearing a path that would close again behind them, leaving little trace of their passage.
A nearby fox paused in its foraging, ears perking up, head swiveling toward Elara with an attention that went beyond normal animal curiosity. Its amber eyes met hers for a long moment, and she felt something pass between them—recognition, perhaps, or acknowledgment. The fox wasn’t afraid despite their proximity, despite having every reason to flee from predators as large as humans. Instead it sat, watching with what seemed like interest as they passed, drawn to her presence in ways she was only beginning to understand. Then, as if satisfied with its observation, the creature scampered off into the underbrush, red fur flashing between the trees before disappearing entirely.
“Draconic affinity,” Mordren observed, having noticed the exchange. “Animals sense it, respond to it. Dragons were part of the natural order once, apex predators certainly, but not separate from the ecosystem. Creatures recognized them, understood their place in the hierarchy. That recognition transfers to those who carry dragon blood. Useful trait when you need scouts or allies. Less useful when you’re trying to remain inconspicuous—animals gathering around you like some kind of woodland princess tends to draw attention.”
But even as power flowed through her, controlled and directed toward useful purpose, she felt it—the demon’s whisper returning like an infection that had never truly left, just retreated to gather strength. The voice slithered into her consciousness without permission, without warning, simply appearing in her mind as if it had always been there.
Why struggle, child? Why fight upstream when the current could carry you so easily? You worry about your brothers—admirable, truly. Such devotion to family. I can shield them eternally, you know. Wrap them in protections so complete that no knight, no zealot, no force in this world or any other could touch them. Your father too, heal his wasting sickness, restore his youth, grant him decades more of life. All of this within my power, freely given. Just accept. Just open yourself to me. Just kneel.
Elara clenched the Heart with both hands, pressing it hard against her chest until the metal edges dug into her palms with points of sharp discomfort that helped ground her against the seductive whispers. She shoved at the voice mentally, imagining walls of stone rising around her consciousness, barriers that couldn’t be breached. “Get out,” she hissed aloud, earning a concerned glance from Mordren. “I don’t want your gifts. I don’t need your power. Leave me alone!”
The demon retreated with what felt like a mocking laugh—not sound exactly, but the impression of amusement that conveyed more clearly than any actual laughter could. For now. But I’ll return, little heir. I always return. And eventually—perhaps not today, perhaps not this year, but eventually—you’ll see reason. They always do.
Then it was gone, leaving behind only the echo of its presence and a sick, oily feeling in her mind that she couldn’t quite scrub away. Elara stumbled, caught herself against a tree trunk, breathing hard. These intrusions were coming more frequently, she realized. Each time she used significant power, each time she called on the Dragon’s Heart’s amplification, she apparently sent out a signal that the demon could track, could use as an opening to push its whispers into her consciousness. It was like leaving a door unlocked—every manifestation of power an invitation for corruption to enter.
“It spoke to you again,” Mordren said. Not a question, a statement based on observation. “You’re becoming a target of increasing interest. Every display of power, every awakening of your draconic heritage, draws its attention more strongly. We need to find a way to shield your mind, create proper mental wards. I can teach you the basics, but what you truly need is—” He stopped himself, shaking his head. “What you truly need is what we don’t have: time, safety, a proper sanctum for training. Instead we have pursuit, exhaustion, and a desperate gambit that may get us both killed.”
They evaded two more patrols that day, both times saved by Mordren’s illusions cloaking them in false foliage—their forms seeming to merge with the surrounding brush and trees, appearing as nothing more than particularly dense thickets to eyes that swept past them without recognition. While hidden, pressed against the cold earth and barely daring to breathe as knights passed within arm’s reach, Elara honed her skills as Mordren had instructed.
She summoned flame wisps for practice—tiny balls of fire no larger than her thumbnail, barely bright enough to read by, but perfect for learning control. Making them appear was easy now, instinctive. Making them maintain a steady size and brightness without fluctuation, making them move in precise patterns, making them extinguish the instant she willed it—that took concentration and practice. But she was getting better, she could feel it. Each attempt was smoother than the last, the power flowing more naturally through channels that were becoming worn and familiar with use.
She practiced animal calls to mislead trackers, learning to mimic the sounds of the forest—the territorial cry of a hawk that might make knights look skyward and lose precious seconds, the warning bark of a deer that could make them hesitate before entering a clearing, the scrabble and chitter of squirrels that masked the sounds of her own movement. Mordren taught her to layer the illusions, to create entire false narratives of forest activity that drew attention away from their actual position.
Between these moments of practice and evasion, Heart-visions flickered through her consciousness—gentler than the overwhelming assaults she’d experienced before, more like glimpses through a partially open door than having the entire history of dragonkind thrown at her consciousness all at once. She saw her mother’s face, younger than Elara remembered her, eyes wide with fear and determination mixed together. Saw her fleeing through these same woods perhaps, or woods very like them, running from shadows that pursued with relentless purpose. Saw her making the hardest choice a mother could make—abandoning her children to safeguard them, trusting that absence would protect them better than presence ever could when the Order came sniffing around looking for witches to burn.
Understanding didn’t erase the hurt of abandonment, but it added context, painted the choice in different colors. Her mother hadn’t been a coward. She’d been terrified, desperate, and ultimately willing to sacrifice her own happiness for her children’s survival. Whether that made it right or wrong, Elara couldn’t decide. But it made it... comprehensible.
Miles away, in Eldoria’s castle, King Arin paced his private solar with the restless energy of a caged predator, his boots striking the stone floor in a steady rhythm that had worn a path in the carpet over the years. The room was his sanctuary—smaller than the great hall, warmer than the council chambers, private in ways that a king rarely enjoyed. Tapestries hung on the walls, faded scenes of ancient hunts depicting stags and boars brought down by noble riders, but they did little to muffle the echoes of his booted steps or the grinding of his thoughts.
Candles guttered in iron sconces mounted at intervals around the room, their flames dancing in drafts that snuck through gaps in the stone despite the castle’s impressive construction. The wavering light cast shadows that moved across a large table dominating the solar’s center, a table currently strewn with reports that represented everything wrong with his kingdom. Raid maps with red marks indicating villages attacked, casualty lists that grew longer every day, whispered intelligence about corruption spreading through his court like rot through timber.
He’d been reading for hours, cross-referencing reports, trying to find patterns in the chaos. The raids were growing bolder and more frequent. The corruption was spreading faster than he could track it. And his own Order—the institution his great-great-grandfather had created to prevent exactly this kind of demonic infiltration—was itself compromised, its knights carrying pact-forged charms while burning others for the same crime.
A soft knock at the door interrupted his pacing—three measured taps that followed the protocol he’d established for his most trusted advisors. “Enter,” he called, grateful for the interruption even though he suspected it brought more bad news. Everything brought bad news lately.
Father Eamon stepped through, moving with the careful deliberation of age and arthritic joints. He was an elderly priest in simple gray robes that spoke of humility rather than rank, though his position as the king’s personal confessor granted him access few others enjoyed. His face was a map of wrinkles, kind eyes set in features weathered by decades of spiritual service. He’d been Arin’s confessor for fifteen years now, since shortly after Arin had taken the throne, and had become more than just a religious advisor—he was one of the few people Arin could speak to honestly without filtering every word through layers of political calculation.
“You summoned me, sire?” Eamon’s voice was soft, inflected with the accent of the southern provinces where he’d grown up as a farmer’s son before finding his calling in the church.
Arin gestured to a chair by the hearth, where a fire burned low but steady, providing more psychological comfort than actual warmth. “Sit, Father. Please. These raids... this corruption spreading through my kingdom like plague. I need guidance beyond what steel and strategy can provide. I need spiritual counsel, or moral counsel, or—” He rubbed his face tiredly. “—honestly, I need someone to tell me I’m not going mad for questioning everything I was taught to believe.”
Eamon settled into the chair with a soft grunt of relief, his arthritic hands folding in his lap in an unconscious gesture of prayer position that he’d probably adopted so many times over the decades it had become automatic. “The soul’s burdens weigh heavy on any man, sire. But on a king, on one who bears responsibility for thousands of souls beyond his own...” He shook his head sympathetically. “That weight can be crushing. What troubles you most?”
“The Order’s charms,” Arin said bluntly, abandoning the diplomatic circumlocution he’d use with almost anyone else. “Garrick brought me proof—incontrovertible evidence that knights are carrying pact-derived enhancements despite their vows. Written records of requisitions, approval chains, systematic distribution of ‘sanctified tools’ that are nothing more than demonic bargains dressed in holy language. The hypocrisy is staggering, Father. They burn people for possessing trinkets while wearing far more powerful items forged through the same damned pacts they claim to oppose.”
He moved to the table, picked up one of Garrick’s intercepted documents, and handed it to Eamon. “Read this. It’s a requisition form for ‘enhanced vigilance charms,’ complete with the ritual required to ‘bind the blessing.’ The ritual involves blood sacrifice and invocations in languages that aren’t human. It’s a demon pact, Father. Dressed up in religious terminology, approved by Order leadership, but still fundamentally a bargain with forces that should not be trafficked with.”
Eamon read slowly, his eyes scanning the document with increasing concern, his weathered face growing more troubled with each line. Finally, he set it down and looked up at Arin with an expression of deep sadness. “This is... troubling. Very troubling. The language is certainly concerning, and if what you say about the ritual is accurate...” He trailed off, then asked quietly, “But you didn’t summon me merely to confirm what you already know to be true, did you sire? You have another question. A harder one.”
Arin appreciated that about Eamon—the old priest could read him like a book, could sense the deeper concerns beneath surface issues. “The archives,” he said, moving to stand by the fire, staring into its depths as if answers might be written in the flames. “I’ve been reading the sealed documents from before the Purge, from Aldric’s own time. They speak of natural magic, Father. Power born not from demonic pacts but from... from some innate quality, some gift or talent that exists independent of bargains with dark forces. Magic that flows from harmony with the natural world rather than dominion over it.”
He turned to face Eamon directly. “The archives make it clear that Aldric knew such people existed. Knew that not all who wielded power had made pacts. But he ordered them burned anyway, declared that the risk of missing even one corrupted sorcerer was too great to allow any magic user to survive. It was genocide justified by probability, Father. Cold calculation dressed up as holy necessity.”
Eamon was silent for a long moment, his aged hands tightening in his lap. “What are you asking me, sire? Whether Aldric’s choice was moral? Whether the Purge was justified?”
“I’m asking whether natural magic—if it truly exists, if those archives are accurate—whether such power is inherently sinful,” Arin said, and heard the desperate need for answers in his own voice. “By current doctrine, all magic invites corruption, all power from non-divine sources is tainted. But if there are people born with abilities, with gifts that require no bargain, no pact, no corruption... is that sin, Father? Or is it simply human diversity, no different than being born with unusual strength or exceptional intelligence?”
Eamon stood slowly, moving to join Arin by the fire. When he spoke, his voice was measured and careful. “By strict interpretation of Order doctrine, all magic is suspect, all wielders are potential threats, all power not granted by the divine is doorway to corruption. This has been church teaching for a century, enshrined in catechisms and enforced by the Archbishop-Primate himself.” He paused, then continued more softly. “But from older texts I’ve studied—works that predate the Purge, theological writings from the Age of Wyrms—natural magic, born of harmony with creation rather than dominion over it, was not considered sinful. It was seen as a gift, like a healer’s touch or a prophet’s insight. Something that could be misused certainly, but not inherently corrupt.”
He met Arin’s gaze directly. “The question is not whether such gifts exist, sire. The older texts make clear they do. The question is whether we have the wisdom to distinguish between gift and curse, between natural talent and demonic bargain. Aldric decided we did not, that the cost of error was too high. Whether he was right...” Eamon shook his head. “That is between him and the divine. But I will tell you this: if natural mages exist, if they are being burned alongside the truly corrupted, then we are not purifying the kingdom. We are murdering innocents and calling it holy work.”
The words hit Arin like a physical blow, validation and condemnation mixed together. “Then we’ve condemned gifts alongside curses. For a century, we’ve burned people whose only crime was being born different. And we’ve done it in the name of righteousness, convinced of our moral superiority even as we committed atrocities.”
“Perhaps,” Eamon said carefully. “But understanding past wrongs and correcting future course are different challenges. What will you do with this knowledge, sire? How will you proceed?”
Arin moved back to the table, his mind racing through political calculations and moral imperatives that didn’t always align. “The Archbishop-Primate needs to be informed. Archbishop Loric is pragmatic, not a zealot. If I present him with evidence of the Order’s hypocrisy, of knights wielding the very pacts they claim to hunt, he’ll have to act. Public condemnation, internal reforms, stricter oversight. But caution is required, Father. Loric wields immense influence, commands loyalty from large segments of the population. If I handle this wrong, if I push too hard or too fast, I could trigger schism, possibly even civil conflict.”
“Tread carefully then,” Eamon advised. “Reform the visible rot first—the Order’s hypocrisy, the proven pacts, the systematic violations of their own code. Establish that corruption has infiltrated even the institution meant to prevent it. Build credibility, demonstrate that you’re acting to preserve the Purge’s intent rather than dismantle it. Only then, once you have moral high ground firmly established, raise questions about natural magic. Frame it as discovering new information rather than rejecting old wisdom.”
It was sound political advice, the kind of maneuvering Arin had become depressingly good at over his years wearing the crown. He nodded slowly, already composing the message in his mind. “I’ll send a sealed missive to Loric tonight. Evidence of Order charms, documentation of pact-rituals, demand for immediate consultation and public condemnation as heresy within their own ranks. No rulings on natural magic yet—politics demand we tread lightly there. But establish the principle that using demonic power to hunt demonic power is still corruption, regardless of stated intentions.”
“And if Loric refuses? If he chooses to protect the Order despite evidence?”
“Then I learn that corruption runs deeper than I feared, and I’ll need to consider more drastic measures,” Arin said grimly. “But I don’t think it will come to that. Loric is many things, but he’s not stupid. He’ll see the pragmatic necessity of cleaning his own house before external forces do it for him.”
Eamon nodded approval, then rose to leave. At the door, he paused. “One more thing, sire. The girl. The one who manifested dragon wings in the Thornwood. You’ve sent riders to intercept her rather than allowing the Order to kill her. That’s a significant departure from protocol.”
“I need to see for myself,” Arin said. “Need to talk to her, assess her, determine if the old texts speak truth. If she’s truly what the archives describe—a natural mage with draconic heritage—then she might be exactly what this kingdom needs to survive what’s coming. And if she’s not, if she’s corrupted...” He left the sentence unfinished, but both men understood.
“Pray she’s genuine then,” Eamon said quietly. “Because if she’s not, if she’s another demon-touched sorceress playing on your doubts and desperation, then you’ll have invited corruption directly into the heart of the kingdom. And that mistake could doom us all.”
“I’m aware of the stakes, Father,” Arin said, his voice hardening slightly. “But doing nothing while the darkness spreads is also a choice, and one that leads to certain doom rather than merely possible doom. Sometimes you have to gamble on incomplete information because waiting for certainty means death.”
After Eamon departed, Arin summoned a messenger—a young man named Petric who’d served in his household guard for three years and had proven himself discreet and reliable. The kind of servant who understood that some messages were never to be spoken of, even under interrogation.
“I need this delivered directly into Archbishop-Primate Loric’s hands,” Arin said, handing over a sealed missive he’d spent the last hour composing. The wax seal bore his personal signet, not the royal seal—this was between him and the head of the church, not an official state communication. “No intermediaries, no assistants, no one else sees this but Loric himself. Wait for his initial response if he chooses to give one immediately, but don’t press if he needs time to consider. Understood?”
“Yes, sire.” Petric took the letter with appropriate reverence, tucking it into an inner pocket of his jerkin where it couldn’t be easily stolen or observed. “When should I depart?”
“Now. Tonight. The matter is urgent, and delay serves no one.” Arin watched the messenger bow and retreat, then returned his attention to the scattered reports and documents that still demanded his review.
But even as he tried to focus on administrative matters, his mind kept drifting to larger concerns. Unrest was brewing in the capital and beyond—Vorril’s escape had emboldened other pact-influenced nobles who saw opportunity in the chaos, who whispered of coups and regime changes in the shadowed corners where loyalty went to die. Some sought personal power, advancing their own interests under cover of crisis. Others were likely already corrupted, influenced by demonic whispers that promised them kingdoms if they could just eliminate the current obstacle wearing the crown.
Arin needed allies he could trust absolutely, people whose loyalty was beyond question and whose judgment he respected. He’d begun quietly recruiting what he was calling a “reform council” in his own mind—Garrick certainly, the scout had proven himself time and again. A few other trusted advisors, carefully vetted, whose integrity was established through years of service. Father Eamon as spiritual counsel. Perhaps a few knights from the Order who he could confirm were not carrying pact-charms, if such paragons still existed in that compromised institution.
Together, they’d been poring over dragon relics recovered from storage—ancient scales kept in preservation oils, their iridescent surfaces still gleaming with colors that seemed to shift and change depending on viewing angle. Texts on draconic biology and behavior, detailing their geothermal lairs and the massive energy requirements of their warm-blooded metabolisms. Genealogical studies on recessive bloodlines, explaining how draconic gifts could skip generations, lie dormant in carriers, then suddenly manifest when the right genetic combination occurred.
“If heirs exist,” Arin had mused to Garrick during one of their late-night research sessions, holding a preserved dragon scale up to the candlelight and marveling at the craftsmanship of nature that had created something so beautiful and so deadly, “if there are still people carrying this bloodline after three thousand years of breeding it into the general population through dispersed carriers, then they’re our shield against this rot. Natural magic to counter demonic corruption, power that doesn’t require selling one’s soul to wield it. But finding them...” He’d trailed off, shaking his head at the impossibility of the task.
“You may have found one, sire,” Garrick had replied quietly. “If the reports from the Thornwood are accurate. If this girl is genuine.”
“If,” Arin had agreed. “That word bears a great deal of weight. But we’ll know soon enough. Either she’s our hope, or she’s another threat to be eliminated. There’s no middle ground here.”
In the Thornwood, as dusk settled over the forest like a heavy cloak and the temperature dropped further with the departure of what little sun had penetrated the canopy, evasion turned abruptly to confrontation.
They’d been moving through a relatively open section of forest—old growth with wide spacing between trees, little undergrowth to conceal movement, the kind of terrain that made Mordren nervous and made Elara constantly glance over her shoulder expecting to see pursuers materializing from nothing. The wizard had wanted to skirt around this area entirely, take a longer route through denser cover, but that would have added hours to their journey and they were already exhausted, already running on fumes of determination and desperation.
So they’d gambled. And they’d lost.
The ambush came from three directions simultaneously, coordinated with the precision of professional soldiers executing a practiced maneuver. Order spies—not the armored knights they’d been evading all day but lighter-dressed trackers, men who’d traded heavy plate for leather armor that allowed faster movement and quieter approach. Their eyes held that telltale red tinge that spoke of pact-enhancement, and they moved with speed and coordination that went beyond human norm.
“Heretics!” the lead tracker shouted, his voice carrying the zealot’s certainty. “By order of the Silver Hand, you are detained! Surrender or face purification!”
Mordren reacted instantly, his staff striking the ground with a sound like thunder compressed into a single syllable. Stone barriers erupted from the earth, thick walls of rock that rose between them and the closest attackers, buying precious seconds. “Elara! Vines, now! Don’t think, just react!”
She did, her hand shooting out toward the second group of trackers, will translating to effect with barely a conscious thought between. Vines burst from the forest floor—thicker than before, faster, responding to the urgency of mortal threat with power she hadn’t known she possessed. They wrapped around legs and torsos, thorns digging through leather armor to find flesh beneath, and she heard screams of pain and surprise that should have horrified her but instead filled her with savage satisfaction.
Good, she thought fiercely. Let them feel what it’s like to be hunted. Let them know terror.
But there were too many of them, and they were too well-prepared. The third group hadn’t been caught by Mordren’s barriers or Elara’s vines—they’d held back deliberately, waiting to see what defenses would be deployed, and now they moved in with the calculated precision of soldiers who’d trained for exactly this scenario. They produced nets—not ordinary rope but something that gleamed with metallic threads woven through organic fiber, enchanted to resist magic, to dampen power, to contain sorcerers who might otherwise simply blast their way free.
One net sailed toward Mordren, and the wizard barely managed to dodge, his century-old body moving with desperation that sacrificed grace for speed. The net hit the ground where he’d been standing and sparked, electricity arcing through its mesh, making it clear that contact would be extremely unpleasant.
The second net flew toward Elara with unerring accuracy. She tried to dodge but her exhausted legs couldn’t match the speed of thrown weights, couldn’t evade the spread of enchanted mesh that seemed to expand in mid-air, growing wider than physically possible. The net struck her shoulder, began to fall across her body—
And then a blade grazed her arm.
Not from the net but from a tracker who’d gotten closer than she’d realized, who’d circled around while she was distracted by the larger threat. The blade was small, probably intended for capture rather than kill—a quick slash to disable rather than a killing blow—but it still cut through her tunic and into flesh with a line of fire that made her gasp.
Blood welled from the cut, bright red in the fading light, and dripped to the forest floor in fat droplets that seemed unnaturally loud as they struck fallen leaves. The pain was sharp and immediate, cutting through exhaustion and fear to focus her attention with crystalline clarity.
Then everything stopped.
“Hold! By royal command!” The voice cut through the chaos like a trumpet blast, authoritative and commanding, carrying the weight of legitimate power that even zealots had to acknowledge. “Stand down immediately or face charges of disobeying direct orders from the crown!”
The trackers froze, confusion evident in their body language even if their faces were hidden by shadows and distance. Who would dare interfere in an Order operation? Who had the authority to countermand their sacred mission?
A figure emerged from the trees—not alone but accompanied by a small force of armed men, perhaps ten in total. But their armor wasn’t the blackened plate of the Silver Hand. These wore the royal colors, bore the king’s sigil on their surcoats, and at their head was a face Elara recognized from her brief glimpse in the tower’s scrying pool during one of Mordren’s demonstrations.
Garrick. King Arin’s personal scout, his most trusted agent, a man whose word carried the weight of royal authority.
“The king demands the girl be brought to him alive and unharmed,” Garrick declared, his scarred face set in an expression that brooked no argument. His hand rested on his sword hilt—not drawn, not threatening, but ready. “She is a person of interest in matters of kingdom security. Your pursuit is terminated by royal prerogative. Stand. Down.”
Tension crackled through the clearing like static electricity before a lightning strike. The Order trackers exchanged glances, clearly torn between their sworn duty to hunt heretics and their equally binding oaths to obey the crown. For a long moment, Elara thought they might actually refuse, might decide that their holy mission superseded secular authority.
Then one of them—a tracker whose eyes glowed brighter red than the others, whose face was twisted with something beyond normal zealotry—defied the command with a snarl of pure rage. “The Order answers to higher authority! No king commands us when heresy walks!” He lunged toward Elara with his blade raised, moving with pact-enhanced speed that blurred his form.
Instinct took over before conscious thought could interfere.
The spectral wings unfurled from Elara’s back in an explosion of light and power, manifesting faster than they had before, more solid, more real. They swept forward to shield her body, the translucent membranes catching light and refracting it into rainbow patterns that danced across the clearing. The attacking tracker’s blade struck spectral scale and stopped as if it had hit a wall of solid steel, the impact generating a shockwave of wind that hurled him backward through the air to crash into a tree trunk with bone-breaking force.
Garrick stared, his weathered face frozen in an expression somewhere between awe and terror. His sword was half-drawn now, instinct bringing it out when violence erupted, but he made no move to attack. Just stared at the wings, at the power radiating from this exhausted farm girl, at something he’d been told his entire life shouldn’t exist—or if it did exist, should reek of corruption and wrongness.
But his instincts, honed by twenty years of warfare and tracking corrupted sorcerers, were screaming confusion. Every pact-wielder he’d ever encountered had carried a wrongness about them—a smell like rot barely masked by perfume, a feeling in the gut like spoiled meat, eyes that reflected light wrong. This girl... there was none of that. Just exhaustion and fear and desperation, and power that felt more like standing near a bonfire than standing near a plague pit.
“I don’t...” he started, then stopped, unable to articulate what he was sensing. Or rather, what he wasn’t sensing.
The other trackers had backed away, uncertainty replacing zealotry in their postures. One of them was kneeling, hands raised in a gesture of submission or perhaps prayer. Another had dropped his weapons entirely, staring at Elara as if seeing a vision made flesh. The last few held their ground but made no move to attack, clearly reassessing everything they thought they knew about heresy and damnation.
“She’s bleeding,” Mordren said quietly, moving to Elara’s side now that immediate threat had passed. “The blade found flesh before the wings manifested.”
Garrick’s attention snapped to the cut on her arm, to the blood still seeping through torn fabric. “Does she need a healer? We have supplies—”
“Watch,” Mordren interrupted, and there was something like pride in his voice.
Elara focused on the wound, feeling it throb with each heartbeat, feeling the torn flesh and damaged tissue. She’d never tried healing before—it hadn’t come up during their brief training session, and she’d had no reason to attempt it. But the Dragon’s Heart pulsed encouragingly against her chest, and something inside her knew what to do, understood instinctively how to direct power inward rather than outward, how to channel energy into restoration rather than destruction.
She laid her hand over the cut and willed it closed. Willed the flesh to knit, the blood to clot, the pain to cease. The Heart amplified her intent, and warmth spread through her arm like sunlight breaking through clouds. When she pulled her hand away seconds later, the wound was gone. Not scarred, not even a mark to show where the blade had cut—just smooth, whole skin as if the injury had never occurred.
“Natural,” Mordren explained to Garrick and the assembled men, his voice taking on that lecturing quality again. “Born gift, not bargained power. She heals as easily as she damages, creates as readily as she destroys. Balance, harmony, the old ways that predate the Purge and the corruption that necessitated it. This is what the archives speak of, what Aldric knew existed but burned anyway. This is what your king seeks to understand.”
Garrick lowered his sword completely, sheathing it with a decisive click that spoke of decisions made. His eyes met Elara’s, and she saw calculation there—not threat but assessment, weighing evidence and drawing conclusions. “You’re coming with us,” he said, and it wasn’t a question or a command but a statement of fact. “The king seeks audience. He’s sent riders to intercept the Order’s pursuit specifically to bring you safely to the capital. Whether you trust that or not is your decision, but I’ll tell you this: you have no better options. The Order will never stop hunting you. The demon lord clearly has interest in you. Running will only delay the inevitable. But if you come willingly, if you speak to King Arin, you might—might—find an ally instead of another enemy.”
“Or we might find a pyre,” Elara said bluntly, her wings still spread wide, still ready to defend despite her exhaustion.
“Possible,” Garrick admitted with refreshing honesty. “Not likely—Arin’s not a fool, and he needs allies more than he needs to maintain outdated policies—but possible. That’s the gamble. Stay in the woods and die tired, or come to the capital and maybe, just maybe, change everything.”
Elara looked at Mordren, seeking guidance, seeking permission to make this insane choice. The wizard studied Garrick for a long moment, then nodded slowly. “I know this one. Garrick the Hawk, they called him during the Winter Campaign. Loyal to a fault, honest to the point of stupidity sometimes. If he says Arin wants alliance rather than execution, he believes it. Whether he’s right...” Mordren shrugged. “But as the man says, we have no better options. And I’m too old to spend weeks hiding in caves eating raw rabbit.”
“Then we go,” Elara decided, feeling the weight of the choice settling on her shoulders like a physical burden. “But I keep the Heart. And if this is a trap, if we’re walking to our deaths, then I swear I’m taking as many of you with me as I can manage before I fall.”
“Fair enough,” Garrick said, and there might have been approval in his voice. “Now, can you... dismiss those wings? They’re magnificent, but they’re also visible for miles and attract attention we don’t need. We’re traveling under disguise, trying to avoid notice. Hard to do that when you’re manifesting draconic traits that glow in the dark.”
Elara focused, willing the wings to fade, and they dissolved back into potential as smoothly as they’d appeared. The absence left her feeling oddly vulnerable, exposed, but also less of a target. “How do we travel? And what about them?” She gestured to the Order trackers who’d stood witness to everything.
“They’re detained pending investigation of using pact-charms in direct violation of Order vows,” Garrick said, his voice hardening. “My men will escort them back to the capital separately for questioning. As for us—we move fast, we move quiet, and we don’t stop until we’re behind walls thick enough to keep out armies. The Order won’t be happy about losing their prize, and there are forces in motion that would prefer you never reach the king alive.”
As they prepared to depart, binding the trackers with ropes—mundane ones, not enchanted nets—and confiscating their weapons and charms, one more threat materialized from the deepening shadows.
Pact-horrors. Not human anymore, not entirely. These had been men once, probably trackers or knights who’d accepted too many bargains, traded too much of themselves away until there wasn’t enough humanity left to maintain human form. Now they were twisted things that moved wrong, whose limbs bent at angles that shouldn’t exist, whose faces held features that hurt to look at directly because they violated fundamental assumptions about how reality should work.
They attacked without warning, without mercy, with the single-minded hunger of things that existed only to consume. Shadowy forms that seemed to blur between solid and incorporeal, physical strikes phasing through armor one moment and tearing flesh the next with no consistency or predictability.
“Defensive formation!” Garrick shouted, his men responding with trained precision, forming a circle around Elara and Mordren. “Don’t let them touch you! Their corruption spreads through contact!”
But conventional tactics meant little against enemies that weren’t entirely physical. Blades passed through shadow without effect, only connecting when the horrors chose to be solid, and by then it was often too late. One of Garrick’s men screamed as clawed fingers that materialized from nothing tore through his shoulder, leaving wounds that smoked and festered immediately, corruption spreading from the point of contact like poison through water.
Elara’s wings unfurled without conscious decision, pure reflex to mortal threat, spreading wide to shield not just herself but the men around her. The spectral membrane glowed brighter than before, intensifying until it hurt to look at directly, and where that light touched the pact-horrors they recoiled, smoking, writhing, burning in ways that had nothing to do with physical fire.
She understood then—understood what the Dragon’s Heart had been trying to tell her through visions and pulses and wordless communication. Draconic power was anathema to demonic corruption, not because dragons were inherently holy or divine but because they represented a different path entirely. Natural power versus stolen power, harmony versus dominion, balance versus consumption. The two could not coexist in the same space without one destroying the other.
She channeled that understanding into action, her wings sweeping outward in great arcs that generated gusts of wind strong enough to bend trees, but more than that—generating waves of cleansing power that struck the horrors like physical blows. Where her wings touched them, the corruption burned away, the demonic influence shredded, and what was left...
What was left were men again. Or at least the broken remnants of men, their bodies twisted and damaged by what had been done to them but no longer hosting the demonic presence that had animated them. They fell, lifeless, and Elara felt a pang of guilt for killing them even though she knew there had been no other choice, no way to save what they’d been.
“Cleansing flame,” Mordren muttered, staring at the fallen horrors with something like awe. “True purification, not the Order’s crude burning but actual separation of corruption from host. Child, do you understand what you just did? Do you comprehend the implications?”
Elara didn’t answer, couldn’t answer, because the effort had drained her completely. The wings faded as her strength gave out, and she collapsed to her knees, breathing in ragged gasps, vision tunneling to darkness at the edges. The Dragon’s Heart had gone from warm encouragement to almost painful heat against her chest, as if it had drawn too much power too quickly and was now radiating the excess like an overheated forge.
Garrick caught her before she could fall completely, his strong hands steadying her shoulders. “Easy. You’re safe now. We’ve got you.” His voice was gentle, the hardened soldier replaced momentarily by something almost paternal. “That was... I’ve never seen anything like that. You didn’t just kill them—you freed them. Gave them death with dignity instead of lingering as corrupted husks.”
“The king needs to see this,” one of Garrick’s men breathed, his eyes wide with shock and something that might have been religious fervor. “Needs to witness what natural magic can do. This changes everything, sir. Everything.”
“I know,” Garrick said quietly. Then louder, with command returning to his voice: “Secure the perimeter. Tend the wounded. We move in ten minutes—these things rarely travel alone, and their deaths will draw attention. The girl rides with me, the wizard with Tam. Fast pace, defensive formation, and if anything else attacks we don’t engage unless absolutely necessary. Our mission is delivery, not extermination. Understood?”
A chorus of acknowledgments answered him.
As Garrick helped Elara to her feet and toward a horse—she’d never ridden before, this would be interesting—Mordren appeared at her side, his ancient face creased with concern and approval mixed together. “You did well, child. Better than well. But that display will have consequences. Every demon within fifty miles felt that surge of purifying power, recognized it for what it represents. And the lord himself...” He trailed off, shaking his head. “The lord himself now knows beyond doubt that you’re a true heir, not merely a carrier or weak manifestation. You’re everything it feared dragon riders could be. Which means it will stop at nothing to corrupt you or destroy you.”
“Comforting,” Elara managed weakly, accepting Garrick’s help to mount the horse, settling into the saddle with all the grace of a sack of potatoes.
“The truth rarely is,” Mordren replied, mounting his own horse with considerably more skill despite his age. “But you deserve truth, not comforting lies. The path ahead grows more perilous with each manifestation of your power. But it’s also the only path forward that doesn’t end in darkness triumphant. So we ride, we hope, and we trust that a king burdened by his crown might see reason where his predecessors saw only threat.”
They rode through the night, the forest flying past in shadows and moonlight, Garrick setting a brutal pace that the horses maintained through some combination of training and the urgency their riders communicated. Elara clung to the saddle with white knuckles, every jolt and bounce sending fresh waves of exhaustion through her body, but she didn’t complain. Couldn’t complain, when these men were risking their lives to protect her rather than hunt her.
Behind them, in the space they’d left, corruption stirred. The demon lord’s awareness focused with terrible intensity on the spot where its pact-horrors had been cleansed rather than merely destroyed, studying the method of their unmaking, learning from defeat as ancient things learned over millennia of existence.
Interesting, it mused. Very interesting indeed. She burns away the taint rather than simply overpowering it. That suggests understanding, not merely strength. Dangerous. So very dangerous. But also so very useful, if she can be turned. And she will turn. They always turn eventually. Agnirbelek turned. The others of his cabal turned. Why should she be different?
We shall see, little heir. We shall see.
The capital loomed in the distance, a beacon of civilization against the wild darkness of the woods, lights from thousands of windows painting the sky with a glow that could be seen for miles. Within those walls lay King Arin, burdened by crown and conscience, seeking answers to questions that terrified him. Within those walls lay the Order’s stronghold, zealots who would gladly burn her without trial if they learned of her presence. Within those walls lay courtiers corrupted by demonic influence, nobles playing their power games while darkness spread through the foundations of society.
And within those walls, somehow, she had to find a way to speak truth to power and make it heard above the screaming of a century of propaganda and fear.
The Dragon’s Heart pulsed against her chest—steady, certain, approving.
Soon, it seemed to whisper. Soon the reckoning comes. Soon you stand before kings and demons alike and prove what dragons’ heirs were always meant to be. Not conquerors. Not destroyers. But bridges. Diplomats. The voice that speaks reason when madness reigns.
Soon.