"Set him free," I said simply. “I did a long time ago. The collar was simply for show. The collars control them, Jalend, the free Talfen dragons don't need riders because they can think for themselves. With freedom of thought and control over their own bodies, they don't need someone else making decisions for them. They can communicate, plan, execute strategies just as well as any human commander.”
He stared at me, his face impassive in the glow of dragon fire. He didn't understand. I guided Sirrax closer so he could hear me better.
"The Talfen dragons aren't mounts, Jalend. They're people. Shapeshifters who can take human form when they choose, who live and love and have families just like anyone else. And the reason the Emperor keeps raiding their territory, the reason he captures so many prisoners..." I took a shaky breath. "He's looking for the dragon shifters. He's trying to enslave an entire people."
I waited for the shock, the disbelief, the angry denials that such a thing was impossible. Instead, Jalend just closed his eyes and let out a long, weary sigh.
"I know," he said quietly.
Those two words hit me like a physical blow. Not surprise, not confusion, not even the grudging acceptance I might have hoped for. Just calm, resigned knowledge that told me everything I needed to know about how completely I had misjudged him.
"You know?" I whispered, my voice barely audible over the sounds of battle below.The world tilted around me, the roar of the battle fading to a dull hum in my ears as the full scope of my misjudgement became clear.
He hadn’t been a willing participant. He hadn’t been a blind follower. He had been a man acting with the full, horrifyingknowledge of what this war truly was. Every order he gave, every attack he led, he had done it knowing he was leading a campaign of enslavement and genocide. The cold statue of an Imperial officer shattered in my mind, replaced by the image of a man in an agony I couldn't begin to comprehend.
“How?” The word was a breath, a ghost of sound. “How long have you known?”
His eyes, when they met mine, were ancient wells of despair. “Long enough.”
The pain in his voice was a blade in my gut. All my anger, my self-righteous fury, evaporated, leaving behind a raw, aching pity. “But why?” I asked, my voice breaking. “Why lead them? Why do this if you knew?”
He glanced down at the carnage, at the war he was supposed to be winning. “Because I have no choice, Livia,” he said, and the simple finality of it chilled me to the bone. “There are things… levers he can pull. Stakes you don’t know about.”
He. The Emperor.
“Livia, listen to me,” Jalend pleaded, turning his haunted eyes on me. “I had no choice.”
“There is always a choice!” I screamed, my voice breaking. “And you chose this! You accepted this promotion! Every person who dies down there, Talfen or Imperial, their blood is on your hands!”
He flinched as if I’d struck him. “You think I don’t know that?” he asked, his voice raw with despair.
"I've been such a fool," I breathed, turning Sirrax away from him in shame and self-recrimination.
But before I could flee into the smoke and darkness, Jalend's hand shot out and caught my hand with desperate strength.
"Livia, wait—"
His words were cut off by the sudden appearance of Valeria's dragon, emerging from the battle below. The youngnoblewoman's face was twisted with hatred as she aimed her dragon straight at Sirrax’s unprotected underbelly. There was no warning, no chance to evade or defend. Valeria's mount came in fast and low, claws extended and throat blazing with fire. The flames roared up in a blistering wave of heat and its claws caught Sirrax across his left wing, tearing through membrane and bone with surgical cruelty, while razor-sharp talons ripped through muscle and sinew.
Sirrax's scream of pain echoed across the valley as he went into an uncontrolled spiral, his damaged wing unable to provide the lift needed to maintain altitude, tearing him out from under me. Pain, his and mine flashed along the bond both ways, and I was barely aware of Jalend’s grip on my hand, desperately trying to hold on as Sirrax dragged me down into the smoke below.
The wind ripped the air from my lungs, a screaming counterpoint to the agony that flooded my senses from Sirrax. His pain was my pain, a white-hot fire searing through my own wing bones, my own flesh. The world was a blur of smoke and whirling fire, the ground a rushing nightmare of shadows and steel.
Legs still tangled in the leather straps that bound me physically to Sirrax, Jalend’s grip was the only thing keeping me from plummeting into the heart of the carnage. His face, contorted with effort and terror, was inches from mine. “Hold on!” he roared, his voice a raw tear in the fabric of chaos. His dragon, Imperia, shrieked, her wings beating a desperate tattoo against the air as she fought the violent downward drag of Sirrax’s dead weight.
My arm felt like it was being ripped from its socket. I could feel his fingers slipping, slick with sweat or blood. Below, the battle raged on, a vision of Inferi I was about to join. A living shadow lashed out, swallowing a soldier whole not twenty feet from where we were going to hit.
For a heartbeat, his grip tightened, a final, defiant refusal. Then my fingers, slick with sweat and blood, slipped from his grasp. The last thing I saw before the smoke swallowed us was Jalend's face, a pale moon in a sky of burning stars, contorted with anguish as he screamed my name into the chaos of the night.
The battleground rushed up to meet us, beneath a blur of fire and screaming sky, and I closed my eyes as the earth rose up to claim us both.
20
The moment my fingers lost their grip on Livia's hand, something inside me shattered like glass hitting stone. I watched her disappear into the smoke and chaos below, her name tearing from my throat in a scream that was lost among the sounds of battle. The sight of her face—pale, terrified, but somehow still defiant—burned itself into my memory as she vanished into the hellish landscape beneath us.
For several heartbeats, I couldn't move. Couldn't think. Couldn't do anything but stare at the roiling darkness where she had fallen, my mind refusing to accept what had just happened. Around me, the battle raged with supernatural fury, but all I could hear was the echo of my own voice calling her name.
Then, a rage unlike anything I had ever known surged through me, a white-hot fire that burned away all shock and despair, leaving only a single, murderous purpose. My gaze found Valeria. She was wheeling her silver dragon away from the attack, a look of smug, venomous triumph on her face. She thought she had won.
