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Mal didn’t move. He sat like a statue in the dark, his fingers locked so tightly around the hilt of his broadsword that I could hear the faint groan of his leather gauntlet.

Neither of us spoke. Neither of us dared to breathe normally.

The dark inside our tiny cave turned suffocating, thick with the knowledge that out there, in the silent woods, monsters were gliding through the air that could swallow us whole before we even knew we were being hunted.

I pulled my daggers into my lap, my knuckles white, my eyes wide in the pitch-black space.

The cold bit into my bones, the silver brand on my shoulder throbbed with a relentless fever, and the dead silence of the black forest pressed down on us like a tombstone.

I did not sleep.

And as the long, agonizing hours of the first night stretched toward dawn, the dark watched, waited, and refused to let us rest.

THIRTY-THREE

The pale grey twilight of dawn brought no warmth to Isath Nalore. It merely revealed the true layout of the graveyard.

As the suffocating darkness of our first night receded, the black forest emerged from the shadows like a city of petrified iron. The morning air was frigid and choked with fine volcanic ash that coated my tongue like dust. Thirty paces below our rocky ridge, the silver river flowed with a quiet, oily viscosity, casting a faint luminescence across the white dragon bones littering the ravine.

I sat at the mouth of our shallow crevice, my knees pulled tightly against my chest, my hands locked around the hilts of my daggers. I hadn’t slept for a single second. Every time my eyelids had grown heavy, the memory of that distant campfire—snuffed out in a single, silent heartbeat—had slammed into my chest like an iron fist.

Beside me, Mal stood up, his tall frame blocking out the pale grey light. He unlatched his heavy leather water skin, took a short, disciplined sip, and wiped his mouth with the back of a scarred gauntlet. The red mark my fist had left across his jawline yesterday had deepened into a dark purple bruise, but his eyes were completely clear and entirely focused on the trail ahead.

“We move now,” Mal said, his voice a low, raspy thread that barely carried past the basalt wall. “The fog is thickest at dawn. It’ll give us cover as we ascend toward the ridge of the interior caldera.”

I didn’t answer him. I simply forced my stiff, frozen joints to unlock, pushing myself up against the stone. Every muscle in my thighs and back screamed in protest; a sickening, dull ache settled deep into my bones. The brand on my right shoulder throbbed with a fever, a constant, physical reminder of the contract seared into my flesh.

We stepped out of the crevice, slipping back into the dense thickets of the black forest.

As we walked in single file—Mal taking the lead, his broadsword half-drawn, while I swept the flanks—a quiet, chilling realization began to take root in my mind.

In the courts of the citadel, the high lords spoke of the dragons as beasts to be conquered, mounts to be broken, or monsters to be slain. They treated the trial as an obstacle course of teeth and fire, a bloody spectacle designed to prove which high-born candidate possessed the strongest military bloodline.

They were wrong. Completely, catastrophically wrong.

The dragons of Isath Nalore were not driven by mindless, feral bloodlust. If they were mere beasts, the three candidates on the ridge last night would have been hunted, torn apart, and fed to a nest, leaving a bloody mess behind for the rest of us to find. But there had been no blood. No carnage. No mindless slaughter.

The fire had been erased. The males had been removed.

The dragons were not wild beasts inhabiting a wilderness; they were the architects of it. They were the sovereigns of this ancient, isolated realm. They did not hunt for meat. They hunted for intent. They read the bones of the trespassers walking their land. They evaluated the strength, the arrogance, the cowardice, and the willpower of every soul that dared to cross the black sand.

They are not monsters, I thought, my fingers tightening around the hilt of my dagger as a cold shiver ran down my spine. They are judges.

And every step we took deeper into their mountains was a trial before an unseen court.

An hour into our climb, the gentle slope of the petrified forest gave way to a violent, jagged terrain of collapsed basalt shelves and steam-venting fissures.

The canopy here was fractured, broken by the ancient seismic shifting of the active volcano above. Heavy, sulfurous mist rolled down the mountain in thick, grey waves, swirling around the massive trunks of the ironwood trees and clinging to the razor-sharp thickets of iron-thorns.

We were navigating the edge of a deep, narrow gully when a sound cut through the silence.

It wasn’t a roar. It wasn’t the thunderous beat of leather wings.

It was a low, wet, agonizing rasp. A clicking rattle that sounded horrifyingly like a dying child choking on its own blood.

Mal froze instantly, his boots locking into the ash, his hand snapping out to signal a full halt. His eyes narrowed as he scanned the swirling mist in the gully below us, his posture snapping into a lethal, defensive wire.

“Hold,” Mal whispered, his voice barely a breath. “Movement in the trench.”