Page 76

I stopped beside a massive, skeletal ribcage half-buried in the ash. I didn’t spin around wildly. I slowly tilted my head, using the corner of my peripheral vision to scan the high, jagged ridge fifty paces above my position.

Gotcha.

In the gap between two towering basalt pillars, a shadow shifted.

It was subtle. A patch of absolute dark that was infinitely deeper than the natural cast of the mountain stone. Within that dark, two burning, slitted golden pupils flared for a single fraction of a second.

The moment I turned my head to lock my gaze directly onto the spot, the shadow vanished.

There was no sound of leather wings. No clatter of loose stone. The shadow simply dissolved into the air like ink spilling into clear water, leaving behind nothing but empty stone and drifting ash.

My pulse stuttered against my ribs, a cold spike of adrenaline clearing the remaining exhaustion from my blood.

It didn’t leave.

The Nyxalith hadn’t launched back into the high mists of the peaks to return to its nest. It had looped back. It was following me.

A game of terrifying, psychological cat-and-mouse began as I pushed deeper into the high passes.

The shadow did not attack. It didn’t strike from the clouds, it didn’t roar, and it didn’t block my path. It simply trailed me. A silent phantom lingering at the absolute edge of my perception, testing my endurance and watching my every step.

It was playing with the terrain, using its rare shadow gift to blend seamlessly into the environment.

Half an hour later, as I crossed a narrow, ice-slicked stone bridge spanning a fifty-foot volcanic chasm, I caught another glimpse.

I looked down into the dark abyss below the bridge, and my breath caught in my throat. Reflected in a quiet, stagnant pool of mercury at the bottom of the chasm was not my own disheveled face.

Reflected in the silver water was the colossal, opalescent head of the Nyxalith, hovering directly over my right shoulder. Its slitted golden eyes were burning in the reflection, its massive, black-toothed jaws half-open, its shadow-head floating right beside it like a twin nightmare.

I spun around instantly, my daggers slashing through the freezing air in a lethal arc, my knees bending into a defensive fighting stance.

“Show yourself!” I shouted, my raspy voice echoing off the canyon walls.

The space behind me was completely empty.

There was no massive reptile standing on the bridge. There was only the howling wind, the biting cold, and the empty basalt trail leading up toward the caldera. When I looked back down into the silver pool at the bottom, the reflection was gone.

“You miserable, arrogant beast,” I spat into the quiet, my knuckles turning white around the hilts of my blades as cold sweat trickled down the back of my neck.

It was testing my mind. It was trying to see if the female who had saved its hatchling would break under the psychological weight of being hunted by the ultimate predator. It wanted to see if I would run, if I would panic, or if I would let the volatile magic in my blood erupt in a desperate display of self-defense.

I am not going to break for you.

If you want to eat me, you come down here and do it yourself.

I sheathed my daggers with a sharp click, turned my back on the empty bridge, and kept walking.

By late afternoon, the terrain changed dramatically.

The narrow passes opened up into a monumental, ancient amphitheater of black stone. The threshold of the Interior Caldera.

The scale of the caldera was staggering. It was a cratered valley five miles wide, rimmed by a circle of jagged, active volcanic peaks that spewed thick plumes of crimson-tinted smoke into the dark sky. The valley floor was a nightmare of boiling sulfur lakes, vast fields of jagged obsidian glass, and cavernous nests carved directly into the sheer stone faces of the surrounding cliffs.

This was the heart of Isath Nalore—the sacred hunting ground where the highest-tier dragons nested, fought, and claimed their territory.

I stood on a high, rocky shelf overlooking the rim of the caldera, my boots hovering just inches from a drop into the smoking abyss below. The heat rising from the interior was intense, washing over my shivering frame in blistering waves that smelled of melted iron and raw ozone.

The silver brand on my right shoulder reacted violently to the location. The mercury scar burned with a fierce luminescence through my leather tunic. The runes for The Hunted and The Bound pulsing in a rapid rhythm against my bone.