“Was he one of ours?”
“An exile?”
“Could he have served the Overlord?
“Has the sea finally given back our dead centuries later?”
I rolled my eyes at the last one.
Benedict raised his hands for silence, but the mutters rolled like thunder.
“Is it Thad?” someone asked.
My heart twinged at the reminder of the draken who’d left us, the half-demon, half-draken who’d helped us defeat the Overlord and taken over the remnants of his demon army. He’d taken them away from Dorea and through the desert, trying to find a better life for them.
“It has to be Thad!” another draken agreed.
“Yes, it wasn’t enough he’d taken one of our females!”
“Thad did it!”
I frowned. Thad had taken Xana, an unmated female with him when he left the island, but that had been her choice.
“We can’t stand for this! We can’t let it happen again!” yelled one of the younger, unmated drakens.
“No, it is not good,” Wyrren roughly grit out. The Elders looked troubled. I could understand that, but Xana would never mate after the trauma she’d been through. Her absence wasn’t hurting anyone. And as much as I missedThad and wanted to see him again, luckily this dead draken wasn’t him.
“Hunt him down!”
“Take her back!”
“We needallour females!”
“Enough!” Benedict’s voice cracked through the noise like lightning. The sound carried up the cliffs and across the water. Slowly, the murmurs died.
He looked out over them, the last of the drakens, the scarred, the survivors, and he somehow stood tall enough to make them all believe he was unshaken. The wind ruffled his hair, throwing it across his face in dark strings. The tide kept rolling in softly over our feet, washing over my claws and cooling my skin.
“We don’t know who he is,” he said, clear and firm. “We don’t know what he was or why he came home. But we will. At dusk, we will bury him here on the shore where we found him. Until then, the elders and I will learn what we can. All that matters is that a draken has returned home to us. That should be honored, no matter what else.”
Heads bowed and wings tucked.
Benedict glanced toward the oldest among us, the drakens who had seen too many wars and outlived too many names.
“Take him,” Benedict said gently, “with respect.”
The elders motioned for the younger guards to help lift the fallen draken. Sand scattered as they shifted and did their best to carry the body away on a hastily woven stretcher, scales glinting darkly under the sun.
Around us, rumors began to whirl again. They were quieter this time, carried by the wind. Hope, disbelief, fear. Every emotion born from the same impossible truth.
When the last of the crowd drifted back up the hill,Benedict turned to us. “The old ruins,” he said softly. “Now.”
We followed him through the winding path past the rebuilt walls where our new banners snapped in the wind. Sand gave way to thick ferns and tall grass, then tall trees that bent inwards with their own weight. The island felt suddenly smaller. It was like the air itself had drawn tight around us.
The elders were already waiting in the shell of the former palace where they liked to spend their days: old stone, half-repaired, its sides still scared from magma and the eruption centuries ago. Their wings folded close to their bodies, their faces unreadable. The old stone surrounded us as if the memories from a society removed from us could suddenly give us answers and bridge the gap between our lost generations.
Kieran helped me to the edge of a half-collapsed, old wall and lowered me to sit comfortably onto it. Ronan hovered at my shoulder. Benedict paced the stone platform, his claws wearing grooves in the hard floor.
Benedict began without ceremony. “You’ve seen him. You’ve seen the markings.”
