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The ledge vanished from beneath my boots. The world tilted sideways. Gravity seized my body, dragging me down into the terrifying, three-thousand-foot void at a blinding, crushing velocity. The howling wind tore at my gear, deafening my ears, ripping the air straight out of my lungs.

I closed my eyes, opened my arms to the infinite dark, and fell into the sky.

THIRTY-SEVEN

The wind did not just blow; it stripped the breath straight from my throat.

Gravity seized my body with crushing momentum, dragging me down into the void of the caldera at a blinding velocity. The world tilted into a blur of grey mist, jagged obsidian spires, and distant pools of crimson lava that rushed up to meet me.

Five seconds of freefall. Ten seconds.

The air turned bitterly cold, ripping at my dark, tangled hair and threatening to tear the leather travel gear right off my frame. My bruised, roughly mended ribs throbbed with white-hot agony under the relentless acceleration, but I kept my eyes wide open, staring straight down into the abyss. I didn’t scream. I didn’t pray to the three silver moons. I simply held my arms wide to the freezing sky, my pulse hammering a frantic war drum against my ribs.

Fifteen seconds. The razor-sharp basalt spires of the valley floor were no longer small splinters—they were massive, blood-stained teeth reaching up to impale me. Two hundred feet. One hundred feet. Fifty feet.

Now, my soul demanded. Now!

The sky didn’t open with a gentle catch. It detonated.

At the absolute last possible second—just as the shadow of a jagged rock spire loomed large enough for me to count the cracks in the stone—the world went dark.

I didn’t smash into cold, unyielding granite. My body collided violently against a wall of broad, ice-cold, opalescent scales.

The force of the deceleration knocked the remaining air completely out of my lungs in a wet, strangled gasp. I slammed hard into the deep, natural recess between the massive shoulders of a titan. My arms instinctively shooting forward to hook around the heavy, bony ridges of its spine. The momentum dragged an agonizing wince from my lips as my bruised ribs strained.

The Nyxalith had caught me.

The Twin Eclipse—the legendary, shadow-draped sovereign of the northern sky—had dived out of the high volcanic mists at a speed that defied nature, sweeping its colossal winged frame beneath my falling body just feet above the rocks.

The titan snapped its vast wings open—sails of obsidian laced with veining silver—catching the thermal updrafts rising from the lava fields. The sheer wind pressure generated by the stroke shattered the basalt spires beneath us into a shower of black gravel as the beast pulled out of its dive, banking sharply upward in a soaring, vertical climb toward the clouds.

Perched between its massive shoulder blades, I pressed my chest flat against the cold, shimmering scales, my fingers digging into the natural grooves of its hide. Directly beside my head, the phantom shadow-head erupted into existence; a solid, terrifying duplicate made of pure, starless void, and both skulls tilted back toward the heavens.

The Nyxalith let out a roar.

It was not a mortal noise. It was an acoustic shockwave of absolute sovereignty that shattered the quiet of the island. The sound vibrated straight through the scales, through my bones, and directly into the core of my soul, declaring to every living entity on Isath Nalore that the Twin Eclipse was no longer alone.

The answer was instantaneous.

From the high basalt caves, from the deep ironwood thickets, and from the smoking volcanic fissures across the entire five-mile expanse of the caldera, every single dragon on the island answered.

A chorus of deafening roars exploded into the sky. Dragons launched themselves off the cliffs in a chaotic, glorious surge of scales and fire. The sky above the volcano became a swirling arena of predators, all rising in unified, instinctual acknowledgment of the supreme titan leading the flight.

Directly to our left, slicing through a thick plume of sulfurous steam rising from a deep subterranean trench, came a sleek, terrifying flyer.

It was an Umbrax—a Shadow Striker.

The beast was a medium-sized, lethal engine of silent death, covered in onyx scales so dark that they seemed to drink the ambient light around them. It moved with fluid grace, its long, whip-like tail cutting through the ash as it clawed its way up the side of the volcano.

My breath caught in my throat as my gaze locked onto the dark beast and then my heart stopped entirely.

A figure was clinging to the high basalt shelf directly above the ascending Umbrax.

His dark leathers were torn, singed with black ash, and stained with dried blood. His jaw was set into a line of pure steel, and his chest was heaving with the exertion of someone who had just dug his way out with his bare hands.

Caspian.

He didn’t wait for a saddle strap. He didn’t ask for permission.