This is why Calira doesn’t cut deals with Melders—hot-tempered, short-sighted, emotional, grudge-holders.
“They trapped us like this, stole our purpose, forced us to live insidethese,” he gestures to his own form with disgust. “Like we’d forget flight,” Vren spits. “Fire in our lungs. Sky beneath our wings. Freedom carved into our bones.”
Freedom.
Calira wonders if she’s capable of such a feeling. Or it’s been refined out of her. Distilled her into something purely procedural.
Ronyn flicks his hair out of his eyes with an easy swish. “Well, lucky for you, I know a new witch who is decidedlynota cunt, and actually, rather lovely. Let me just get in touch,” Ronyn quips, and reaches for the amulet hanging from his neck.
He swallows thickly, his newfound truth slipping between the fissures in his performance.
“Good,” Calira says. “Because war is coming, and without The Barrier or the dragons, Dravara will cease to exist.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The answer rarely stands alone
Follow its path and truth is shown
Sobriety has leftRubi’s mind loud and inescapable. Thoughts overlap, instincts sharpen, and she feelseverything. For the first morning in a decade, she has not picked up her flask. Has not snorted dreamroot or sucked down brask. Has not escaped from the harsh realities of her past choices and losses and heartbreaks. Has not numbed the memories of the ones she left to die—the blood that’s permanently on her hands.
Twice already this morning she’s reached for substances that are no longer there. Once for the flask at her hip. Once for dreamroot tucked into a pocket she emptied before sunrise. The absence feels strange. Like phantom pain. She has seen soldiers scratch itching arms that no longer existed, their bodies following routines long after the limb was gone.
Instead, she strides through the halls of Elarion Castle, making her way to the library.
The doors stand open, as they always do. No guards. No wards she can feel. Just knowledge, laid bare and waiting for those patient enough to sift through it. The air shifts as she crosses the threshold—cooler, quieter. The scent of parchment and ink replaces the sharp bite of alcohol and heated tinctures, and for a fleeting moment, it feels like stepping into another world entirely.
Rubi does not slow to admire it. Libraries have never called to her the same way plants have.
She moves with purpose, boots striking stone with quiet intent as her gaze sweeps the towering shelves. The library rises in tiers, ladders crisscrossing between columns of texts that stretch higher than most buildings. Order lives here. Systems. Catalogs. A place designed for scholars who have the luxury of time.
But Rubi does not. Because somewhere beyond these walls, the world is already moving toward catastrophe again, and Rubi refuses to spend this collapse high as Stars too.
Her hands move before her mind fully catches up, pulling volumes from shelves without consulting the indexing tables. Apothecary records. Botanical compendiums. Dissertations on alchemical binding. She stacks them on the nearest desk, the pile growing uneven and precarious as she works.
The first book is useless.
The second offers theory, not application.
The third is worse—written by someone who has never handled the substance they describe.
Typical scholars. Forever hypothesizing and never experiencing.
Rubi exhales sharply through her nose and moves on.
Hours pass without her noticing. The light through the high windows shifts, softening from gold to pale ash, but Rubi does not lift her head to track it. Her fingers are ink-stained now,the pads of them smudged from turning too many pages too quickly. Books lie open in a loose semicircle around her, some facedown, others marked with scraps of parchment torn hastily from margins.
Seren would hate the way she folds the corners of pages. The way she annotates them.
Rubi doesn’t care.
None of it fits. Rubi resists the urge to sweep the entire godsdamned table onto the floor.
The binders described here dissolve cleanly. Break down in water. Respond predictably to heat. They behave the way compounds are supposed to behave—obedient to the rules of the body, to the logic of chemistry.
The substance she found does none of that.
Rubi stills, one hand braced against the table, the other hovering over an open page she has stopped reading.
