A groan dredges from my throat, like someone just grabbed a handful of my guts and ripped them free. Another.
Another.
I groan until nothing’s left—just a hollow ache that feels terminal.
Tyroth spits beside me, mutters a barbed command.“Zugthen, Bharon.”
Feast.
I hear his retreating steps, forcing myself to look back over my shoulder. Up into the eyes of the death I deserve.
All the air escapes my lungs.
The once-majestic creature limps toward me, frayed wings loose at his sides, dragging through the magma with each hobbled step. He doesn’t gleam in the molten light as he did, his scales gone matte, talons so long they almost curl in on themselves, making his movements slow.
Pained.
Again meeting Bharon’s dark eyes, I struggle to find a single ember.
What’s left of my heart breaks into tiny pieces …
He destroyed you, too.
I drop my head, heaving breath while I wait for everything to stop. For the soul-splintering hurt to end.
Please end—
A cold breeze curls past the broken runes, planting an icy kiss on my cheek that I certainly don’t deserve.
All my breath knocks free as a warm claw closes around me, talons scraping stone as they pluck me from the ground, jolting me with a blaze of pain that has nothing on the flare eroding what’s left of my heart.
I wait to be brought toward Bharon’s mouth and tossed in. Chewed on. Wait to be dished the brutal punishment I’ve earned.
Instead, he pulls deep whiffs of air.
A moment of stillness, then everything lurches forward in galloping increments before we launch.
Plummet.
Then we’re no longer in the hot sulfuric air but buffeted by clumps of snow and wind so cold I’m half convinced I’m being scored across the sky like a bit of sketching coal. And perhaps I’d believe just that, were it not for the sound of beating wings.
It takes me too long to realize we’re flying north, toward the sun.
Even longer to accept that Bharon’s not going to give me the death I crave.
“Grand Chancellor, I swear on my accolades,” Roan pleads from the white stage beneath us all, the buffed surface gleaming like a Moonplume moon. He splays his shackled hands toward the many golden buttons securing his filthy, bloodstained Runi robe. “The bookevaporated.”
I frown, gaze lifting from the proceedings to scan the murmuring crowd of witnesses. Perhaps a hundred male Runis packed within the uppermost mezzanine, leering down, come to watch the persecution of one of their own.
“Evaporated?” the Grand Chancellor echoes, tapping his sharp nails against the curved armrest of his white-stone throne that looks like a dragon claw. “Surely I misheard.” He gestures about the chamber to the other fourteen councilmembers stationed around the ruling stage, perched on similar thrones of their own, all butoneempty. “Speakclearerso my tri-beaded Brothers can hear.”
Many of the members lean further forward, all shrouded in hooded robes of white. Most so aged only their daely dose of bloodstone keeps their skin from looking like wrinkled parchment.
But you can see it in their eyes, gone milky with age. In the way they move—slow, like they’re built from heavier stuff than the rest of us.
Roan clears his throat, raises his voice. “You did not mishear, Grand Chancellor. And I swear to you, this is no folly.” He folds into a wobbly bow that shows the ladder of ribs protruding from his back—skeletal compared to when I saw him last. When he knocked on the door to my suite, asking if I had time to speak.
After feasting, I’d said. But then I’d received a moonshard lead. My first in over a phase. I was gone before the aurora set without a word of goodbye to anyone.
