Page 30 of The Reckoning of Starlight

But this one had. This creature before her, cloaked in the acrid stink of Emberhart flame.

Her attention narrowed. Vines tightened around Jassyn’s ankles, as if measuring whether he would pull away.

“I’m bound like you,” he said. The words barely carried. “I can’t leave either.”

Hunger writhed again—blood bursting across her tongue, jaws closing around a meal that had ended too soon.

She wanted more. The craving pulsed against his mind, primal and impatient.

The dragon stepped toward him. Her head bowed low, nostrils flaring as she drew in his scent.

Scalebound.

Not prey.

The pressure behind Jassyn’s eyes eased.

He staggered as her memories receded like floodwater, leaving him standing in the wreckage of what she’d shown him. His awareness settled back inside its own borders—the ground beneath his feet, green earthen light still glowing in his palms, the Bramblemaw breathing above him.

Her hunger still moved through the soil, gnawing between his ribs now too, grafted there by memory. He could mend her scorched hide, but starvation had no wound to seal. Kitchen scraps might dull the edge for an hour, but the solution to her suffering waited somewhere darker.

The Bramblemaw lowered her massive head, crystalline eyes leveling with his chest. Vines curled around her talons, moss swaying from the ridges on her back.

By dawn, Farine would discover what Elashor had delivered to the estate—a beast prepared for unveiling. She’d parade this creature by draping the dragon’s scales in flowers, decorating her captivity.

They were both trapped here.

Jassyn severed the thought before it rooted deeper in despair.

“I can mend your wound,” he insisted again. This much, at least, he could do. “And if the Heart that binds you is somewhere inside this estate…” His gaze moved past the garden to the sleeping manor beyond. “I’ll find it.”

A plan coalesced, assembling itself from the pieces he’d already gathered. The servant in the corridor had obeyed a single tendril of coercion. Others would too. He had to believe it.

The estate hummed like a hive, and it didn’t register him as a threat. Just another drone, a decorative ornament moving through its halls, too broken to become dangerous. He could sow commands like unnoticed seeds, order others to search for the relic.

“We’ll find a way out,” Jassyn said, quieter now. “Together.”

The dragon exhaled a low chuff that stirred the surrounding leaves. Slowly, she turned her neck, revealing the worst of the injury.

Scales had cracked and sloughed away, exposing hide slick with a sickly sheen. Heat simmered beneath the surface, old fire buried under living tissue.

Jassyn had seen what sunfire left behind when Vesryn freed Cinderax and nearly scorched everyone else. The magic nested deep in flesh and kept devouring from the inside out.

He laid his palm, glowing with life, against the obsidian plates beside the wound. A tremor rippled through the scales, but the dragon allowed his touch.

Jassyn studied the laceration and understood the cruelty of its persistence. A dragon rooted in soil and life should’ve been able to draw the earth into herself and coax her own hide closed.

Unless she’d been forbidden relief.

Her memory pulsed behind his eyes—Elashor’s will driven through the Heart of Stars after the mountain, punishment for the prisoners who’d escaped, for the raid she’d failed to stop.

The fire would remain, burning to teach obedience.

Jassyn’s fingers curled against her scales.

Then he closed his eyes and reached deeper into the earth. A living pulse rose to meet him, climbing through his bones and into her wound.

Leaves withered around them. Vines blackened. Petals wilted and fell as he drained the garden.