Page 9 of A Court of Darkness and Dragons

Can you feel him? I asked, my voice quiet in the storm of wind rushing past us.

Kaelith didn’t answer right away. Her wings beat steadily beneath me, every motion purposeful, but I felt it, her mind stretching outward. Searching. Like a pulse of magic sent through the threads of the world, reaching for Siergen’s presence like a beacon in a storm.

The bond between dragons was ancient, primal, and even deeper than ours.

And what came back was silence.

Not distance. Not resistance.

Absence.

He’s not dead, I told myself. He can’t be.

But Kaelith recoiled from the void she found, and for the first time since I’d known her, I felt something raw erupt through our bond—panic. Not fear. Not dread.

Fury.

Not the wild, snapping kind she directed at our enemies or even at me in our early days. No, this was different. The usual dry irritation she always held for Siergen, his riddles, his smugness, his wry humor, was gone. In its place was a cold, calculating rage. One that chilled my bones.

The others revere him, she murmured in my mind. But I…

You love him, I finished for her.

She didn’t reply. She didn’t have to.

I leaned low over her neck, my fingers threading into the thick, warm ridges of her scales. “We’ll find him,” I said aloud, more to her than myself. “We have to. He’s the only one who can unite them. Especially the lost horde.”

Kaelith didn’t speak again, but her wings angled downward, sharper now, like her fury had become fuel.

We glided lower, the forest spreading beneath us like a shivering sea of green and gold. The early light helped—dawn bleeding slowly across the horizon, gilding the trees and cliffs, igniting the edges of the rocks with fire. I scanned the canopy, searching for any flash of red scales, any sign of broken trees, or scorched earth.

But the Hollow was vast, the land uneven, mist still clinging to the lowlands.

And there was no sign of Siergen.

Not yet.

Kaelith stilled mid-flight.

Her wings didn’t falter, but her body tensed beneath me like a drawn bow, every scale alert with sudden awareness.

What is it? I asked, already bracing.

A void, she whispered through the bond, her voice low and hollow. But not like Siergen’s absence. This is… something else.

She angled her wings, gliding into a steep dive that forced the breath from my lungs. Wind roared in my ears as we cut toward the earth, toward the edges of the Hollow where trees grew twisted and silent, their leaves blackened at the tips as if they’d once burned and never healed.

The land below warped as we approached. Not in shape—but in feeling.

The air grew dense, heavy, wrong.

“It’s like we’re flying into a heartbeat,” I muttered, fingers tightening around the saddle’s edge.

Kaelith didn’t reply, but I felt her revulsion through the bond. It’s magic, she finally said. But not alive. Like something that was once alive... and was hollowed out from the inside.

We neared a ridge of stone, as jagged and black as obsidian, and that was when I saw it—coiled between the roots of the twisted trees, just beyond a craggy outcrop near the Hollow’s rim.

A disturbance.