Page 62

Behind us, a torrent of flame—violet and thick with the stench of ancient sulfur—curled over the top of the grinding ironwood gates. It incinerated the high marble steps of the altar in a single, roaring flash, melting the volcanic glass into bubbling slag. The High Priestess and her thralls vanished behind a wall of pure fire, completely cut off as the sixteen of us plunged headlong into the throat of the dark.

I ran until my lungs felt lined with crushed glass.

Every step sent a shock straight up my spine. The mercury scar beneath my leather gear was a cold anchor, humming against my bones as if trying to pull me flat onto the ground.

Around me, the candidate formation shattered completely.

Survival stripped away every shred of courtly discipline. Males from the western transfers shoved past one another, their boots slipping on the slick volcanic ash as they scrambled for cover. To my left, Dax was a dark, agile blur, his twin daggers drawn, his breath leaving his lips in ragged white puffs. To my right, Mal moved with the lethal efficiency of a predator, eyes locked on the looming shadows ahead, evaluating every rock formation for an ambush.

And directly beside me was Caspian.

The High Captain didn’t run with the frantic panic of the others. He moved with calculated speed, his broad frame effortlessly covering the rocky ground, his eyes cutting through the gloom. Whenever the terrain narrowed or a shelf of volcanic glass threatened to trip my stride, his broad shoulder was there, a solid wall guiding my momentum.

We sprinted through the narrow bottleneck of the basalt pass, leaving the inferno of the gates behind, until the high stone walls opened up and the dragon wilds swallowed us whole.

We ground to a breathless halt on the edge of a vast, sweeping ridge, ducking beneath the shadow of a towering basalt overhang to break our line of sight from the sky.

My chest heaved in violent gasps, my hands resting on my knees as I fought to haul air into my starved lungs. Cold sweat dripped from my chin, mixing with the salt crusted on my skin. I raised my head, wiping copper-red waves out of my eyes, and took in the landscape stretching beneath us.

The sight locked the breath right back in my throat.

The interior of Isath Nalore was not merely an island; it was a prehistoric continent forgotten by time, locked inside a ring of active volcanic peaks. The mountains rose like the broken teeth of a buried titan, their black summits piercing low. Rivers of dark crimson magma veined the distant slopes, casting an ominous red glow across the underside of the canopy below.

Sprawled across the valley floor was a forest unlike anything in the mortal realms or the Fae courts.

It was a black forest. The trees were colossal monoliths made of petrified, obsidian-like wood that absorbed the faint light of the moons rather than reflecting it. Their trunks were wide as siege towers, covered in dense, interlocking thickets of needle-sharp iron-thorns that twisted around the bark like rusted barbed wire. The canopy above was so dense with ink-colored needles that virtually no light hit the forest floor, casting the woods in a permanent twilight.

Cutting through the dark wood were silver rivers.

They weren’t water. They were wide, winding ribbons of dense, mineral-heavy liquid that glowed with a cold luminescence. The rivers flowed with a slow viscosity, looking like streams of mercury coursing through the black ash of the valley floor. The pale glow from the water was the only light beneath the canopy, casting twisting shadows across the terrain.

And then my gaze landed on the valley floor itself.

Littered across the black sand, tangled in the iron-thorn thickets, and half-submerged were bones.

Not the delicate skeletons of Fae, but the monumental, fossilized remains of ancient dragons.

Colossal ribcages rose out of the ash like the vaulted stone arches of ruined cathedrals, large enough for an entire squad to set up camp inside their shadows. Massive, horned skulls lay half-buried in the soil, their hollow eye sockets staring blindly at the dark sky. Centuries of snow, ash, and volcanic sulfur had bleached the bone to a stark white, creating a violent contrast against the obsidian earth. The valley was an open-air graveyard of apex predators.

I stood frozen on the ridge, the cold wind whipping my clothes around my frame, my mind struggling to comprehend the scale of the wilderness before us.

In the courts of Nymeria, the high lords built grand stone palaces, shaped intricate boundaries, and spoke with supreme confidence about their dominion over the realm. They believed that bloodlines, titles, and ancient magic made them masters.

Looking out over the dragon wilds, the arrogant lie of my entire existence shattered into a thousand useless pieces.

The Fae were not masters. We were not rulers.

We are trespassers, I realized, the truth dropping into my gut like lead.

We were frail parasites crawling across the skin of a world that didn’t belong to us. This island had existed long before the first Fae court was raised, and it would exist long after our bones were ground to dust. The dragons didn’t care about political alliances, royal names, or silver stripes on a collar. To the beasts nesting in those peaks, we were nothing more than noise.

“It’s a slaughterhouse,” Dax breathed beside me, his usual swagger completely absent as he stared down at a dragon skull large enough to crush a fortress wall. “They don’t just hunt here. They die here.”

“They fight for territory,” Mal corrected softly, his voice barely a whisper against the wind. He gestured toward a massive ribcage that had been snapped cleanly in half. “When a dragon grows too old, or too weak, the younger beasts tear them apart to claim their peak. The bones are boundaries.”

Caspian stepped to the edge of the rocky shelf, his chest rising and falling in steady rhythms as he surveyed the black canopy below. The honeyed darkness veining his golden hair seemed to drink in the eerie light of the silver river below us, his sapphire eyes cold and analytical.

“We need to move off this ridge,” Caspian stated, his deep voice slicing through the silence. “We are completely exposed up here. If a high-tier flyer catches our silhouette against the sky, we won’t even have time to draw steel.”