“Draven has grown soft.”
The accusation lands like a blade wrapped in silk. I feel my jaw tighten, loyalty rising instinctively, forged through centuries of blood and survival at his side. Soft is not a word that has ever belonged to Draven. Yet the doubt plants itself anyway, a splinter beneath the skin.
“He has a mate now. A family.”
Images fracture across the compound’s walls, reflections that shimmer and vanish before I can fully grasp them. Fire is licking at rooflines, and smoke is threading through open doors. The echo of a scream I cannot hear but feel vibrating in the hollow space between my heart and my throat.
Weakness wrapped in the shape of everything Draven loves.
Heat blooms on the horizon, wrong-colored and deliberate, devouring the edges of structures with the patience of a slow execution. The scent of burning blood saturates the air, thick enough to choke, and my dragon roars inside my chest,desperate to answer, to unleash the annihilating fire that has always been my answer to fear.
I cannot move.
The darkness leans closer without crossing any measurable distance, its presence tightening around me like a winter vice.
“Let’s see how strong hereallyis…”
The compound ignites in silence.
Flame consumes without sound, an impossible, suffocating spectacle of destruction that unfolds as though time has decided to savor the process. I feel every imagined loss as a physical impact, ribs compressing, lungs refusing to draw air that no longer exists.
“… when everything he loves burns.”
The shape beside me unravels slowly, threads of shadow peeling away with deliberate finality. The cold rushes in to fill the void it leaves, absolute and merciless, and for a single, devastating second, I am left alone with the certainty of what I have just witnessed.
My dragon thrashes against the cage of my body, fire clawing for release that will not come.
The ground disappears.
I am falling through frost, smoke, and memory—
I wake with heat flooding my veins, the phantom taste of ash thick on my tongue, my hands already clenched as though I have been fighting something I couldn’t see.
My fire comes before breath does.
The nightmare forces the dragon forward without permission. Flame spills from my throat in a sudden, brutal surge, streaking across the wall in molten light that chars into darkness as quickly as it arrives. By the time the fire collapses into curlingsmoke, I am upright, spine locked, instincts braced for a battle that exists only in the echo of sleep.
I sit here in the dark, chest heaving, the air in my room carrying the mineral-sharp smell of burned plaster and my own smoke.
My veins are lit up—I feel it without looking—that molten red crawl beneath the skin of my forearms that comes when the Dragonfire surges. I press my palms flat to my thighs and breathe through my nose, long and measured, forcing the dragon back behind my ribs where it belongs.
Most dreams evaporate.
This one doesn’t.
The visuals burn off, the sequence breaks apart, but the feeling remains lodged under my ribs like shrapnel. I’ve been dreaming of the shadow for weeks now. Longer, maybe, if I’m honest with myself about when the unease started bleeding into my sleep. Each time it comes closer. Each time the cold it carries lingers a little longer after I wake.
Nothing scares me.
I’ve burned my way through five centuries of things that should have, and I’m still here, still upright, still breathing smoke into the morning dark of a room that smells like scorched paint.
But this is different.
This isn’t fear. Fear, I understand. Fear has a shape, a source, a solution. What the shadow leaves behind is something else entirely, a pressure like the vacuum between heartbeats, as though it reaches into my chest and squeezes out every molecule of air, and the space it leaves behind doesn’t fill back in the way it should. I don’t have a word for that. I’ve never needed one before.
I sit with it for another minute, then I reach for my cigarettes.
***
