Seren watches, stuck in place.
Her heart bleeds, but more than that, it breaks. For the kind of love she’s never known. The kind of endless, undying choosing that she’ll never live out. She hates herself for it. Hates that she’s being selfish in the face of such tragedy.
Revryn sings to her now. A lullaby. He strokes her hair, traces his thumb along the curve of her cheek like a father putting his child to sleep.
Somewhere in the background, chaos detonates. Roars rip through the skies. Buildings crumble. But Seren is trapped in a reality she will only ever watch from the outside.
More roars ring against the periphery of her awareness.
More chaos consumes the surrounding buildings.
It pulls her from the loss, for just a heartbeat, and that’s when she realizes?—
FUCK.
Tarrakai approaches at speed, wings pinned back, mouth open, fangs bared. Sound crashes back in, vision crystallizing in an instant, Seren’s instincts sharpen.
He sweeps low, charging straight at her.
Seren runs, breathless and broken, but she runs.
Another roar reverberates off the only building left standing.
And she sees them…
The unit of Caelorian soldiers approaching, swords raised in one hand, Aether shields in the other.
There is nowhere to hide. Virellin is rubble and carnage and fire.
She keeps running, and she smells it first—the sulfur. Then heat licks at her back, her feet, as if it’s chasing her through the carnage.
She half-turns, half-stumbles, and behind her, it is a furnace. A wildfire. Roaring in a channel of obliteration, scorching the soldiers from existence with nothing more than a single breath.
Tarrakai.
Ender of Kingdoms.
Most powerful Melder in history.
He does not merely fly. He dominates. The sky bends around him as though the world itself remembers what he is. Massive wings beat once, twice, sending shockwaves rippling through smoke and ash as Tarrakai surges upward again. Dragonfire spills from his jaws in violent torrents, consuming entire battalions in seconds. Soldiers scatter beneath him like insects fleeing a storm.
No. Not a storm.
A reckoning.
Seren stares upward, breath caught somewhere between awe and terror as Tarrakai tears across the fractured sky with enough force to make the world feel impossibly small.
This is not power as men understand it. Not crowns. Not armies. Not magic stolen through blood and fear.
This is somethingother.
Something primordial.
History remembered.
Myth made flesh.
The Ender of Kingdoms has returned to the skies of Aevryn, and for the first time in decades, the realm remembers what it means to fear the heavens.
