Vren pinches the bridge of his nose, huffing a breath of disbelief.
“You’re fucking impossible,” he groans.
“Shut up and Meld. You’ve been talking about this moment for years and now you’re delaying it for pretty words. Hurry the fuck up and do it,” she replies lazily.
He shakes his head.
But he doesn’t push.
Good.
The first shift is subtle.
A ripple beneath skin.
A distortion of form.
Then it takes hold fully.
His body expands, stretches, breaks past the confines of bone and flesh, midnight-blue scales forcing their way through, wings tearing open into the smoke-choked air as something ancient and immense reclaims what was always its own.
His eyes stretch open, depthless pools of black unfurling from behind the lid.
The sound that follows is not a roar.
It is a release.
Lara holds her ground as the transformation completes, as Vren—no longer a man—rises into what he was always meant to be.
A dragon. Not extinct. Not myth. Not memory.Living.
Even Lara—who has spent years refusing awe—feels something primal tighten in her chest at the sight of him.
The smell of sulfur and char escapes his throat in a plume of steam.
Power floods the air.
Her gaze lifts, tracking the distant chaos where Nyrielle’s forces tear through what remains of Virellin.
Lara’s gaze snaps back to him.
“Vren,” she says.
But he’s already lowered himself to the ground. She steps forward and mounts him without hesitation, a deep, ancient rightness settling into her bones. She won’t admit it, but it feels like home.
Perhaps she did not simply cage the Melders.
Perhaps she caged herself, too.
“Let’s fly,” Lara commands, and his wings expand, snapping down with the force of history remembered.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
The world may change through flame and fear
Yet love still calls the lost ones near
Seren does not understandwhat she is seeing at first. The battlefield has already descended into something unrecognizable—fire tearing through the city, magic colliding in violent bursts of light and shadow, the ground itself fractured beneath the force of it all. She has lost sight of where one fight ends and another begins.
