Page 31 of The Reckoning of Starlight

Before death could settle, he sensed the dragon’s power rolling through the roots. Brittle stalks straightened. Green ran through broken stems. New leaves budded, and flowers opened to the dark.

Jassyn poured life into her, and she returned it to the soil. A cycle of ruin and rebirth, again and again.

His arms trembled, sweat trailing down his spine, and he lost track of how many times the earth died and bloomed.

The light in his palms guttered, flared, guttered again, until the last of the scorched scales sealed into glossy black plates. Hide closed beneath them, no longer split and burning.

Jassyn stepped back, heart racing, breath rasping in his throat.

Around them, the garden stood whole and green, keeping no record of what it had cost.

Jassyn stood before the dragon with his hands empty, the last of the light fading from his palms. He’d mended what he could, though her hunger remained.

And he still didn’t know what to call her.

“Do you have a name?” he asked gently.

Perhaps the only thing not yet stripped from her.

The dragon blinked, his reflection fracturing across the crystalline facets of her eyes.

She showed him empty soil. Lightless caves. Roots reaching for water and finding only dust.

The Heart of Stars had burned too much away, searing through the roads between language and thought. Where memory should’ve gathered into a name, only ash remained.

Jassyn’s chest tightened. “If you can’t remember,” he said softly, “maybe I can help you find your way back.”

A rumble stirred in her chest. Her jaws began to part, and Jassyn tensed before he could stop himself.

A single flower unfurled on her tongue, pale and three-petaled.

A trillium.

His lungs emptied.

That flower claimed him still, outlined by scales above his brow. Once, it had been inked there to mark him as Vallende property. Servitude written where every eye could see it. Ownership made beautiful enough for court.

But the dragon couldn’t know what it meant. She had no name left to give, no memory whole enough to shape into speech. So the earth provided what she could not.

A flower offered in a maw built to devour.

Jassyn reached out with trembling fingers and lifted the trillium from her tongue, a mark of bondage returned to him as something tender and living.

“Blossom,” he whispered.

Ridiculous for a dragon, he knew that. Not a name worthy of her might. Too gentle for what she’d survived.

But a placeholder. A promise for renewed life.

“Until you remember who you are.”

The dragon exhaled, and magic spilled from her, rich with root and rain and the deep mineral hum of stone warmed beneath an open sky. It coiled around him the way Cinderax’s flame had, ancient power poised at the edge of his skin, offered and waiting.

For once, nothing was being taken.

Jassyn’s throat tightened.

Then he nodded.