Page 28 of The Reckoning of Starlight

Then stopped.

A tremor ran through the muscles of her neck, rippling under moss and obsidian scales. He sensed starvation steaming from her open mouth, while a deeper command held her bite suspended a finger’s width from his flesh.

Obedience dictated by the Heart of Stars, Jassyn was sure of it.

Vines snapped around him, cinching wings, chest, throat. Thorns needled his skin, each point waiting for the slightest struggle to pierce.

Jassyn’s breath turned shallow. “Okay,” he rasped.

The vines tightened.

He extinguished his power, the glow around him flickering out. “No Essence.”

The pressure eased, but the threat remained close.

Slowly, Jassyn sank his awareness into the soil instead, into the dense network of roots where the dragon’s fear still hummed. He unwound the vines through his connection to the earth, coaxing each tendril loose.

The dragon chuffed as the plants fell away from him, retreating a single step.

“I can mend without Essence,” Jassyn said quietly. “If you’ll allow it.”

He drew from the ivy beneath his feet, pulling on its stored vitality. A muted green glow gathered around his soles, climbed through his legs, and settled into his palms as leaves withered and stems blackened, life reshaping itself into usable power.

The dragon’s claws flexed, sinking into the soil.

Jassyn studied the scorch marks carved across her neck and skull. “What happened?”

She didn’t answer with words.

She answered with everything else.

Images cracked against Jassyn’s mind—too fast, too bright, too many at once. Sensation without structure. Memory stripped of language.

Rainforest heat, thick as a second hide. Her jungle, grown over by centuries of slumber. Then sleep torn open—starlit chains burning through the place of dreams.

Jassyn saw Galaeryn’s face filling her sight. The king’s hand clamped down on her will, twisting until she splintered. Commands poured in where her thoughts used to live.

A portal. Darkness. Stone. Rot coating her throat. Hunger gnawing through her ribs without end.

Stone again. Tunneling. The same order hammered into her mind until her talons obeyed without her permission.

Dig. Dig. Dig.

The mountain groaned with every gouge.

Memory bled sideways. Stone closed in, pressing tighter with each chamber she carved. The mountain became a cage. Then came the two-legged whelps from the stars, always with their burning starlight. Their orders.

She was a dragon. She was…

She didn’t know.

Jassyn watched Kal surface next. The shape of him in a tunnel, the way his starlight shone bright.

She lunged.

Bit.

Crack.