Page 87
I sat high atop the Nyxalith’s shoulders, my tangled waves whipping in the sea breeze, my hands resting casually on the beast’s cold scales. My gear was burnt, my face was smeared with black soot and dried blood, and the brand on my shoulder glowed with a low luminescence.
I did not look down. I held my head high, my chin raised, my green eyes sweeping over the crowd with a cold detachment that mirrored the titan beneath me.
Standing fifty paces away on the timber dock was my father.
For the first time in my life, the granite mask of Fjörn Drakhar had completely shattered. His eyes were wide, frozen in absolute shock as he stared at the half-breed daughter he had spent a lifetime hiding in the dark. Beside him, the High Mages had dropped their staves, their faces pale as death, their lips trembling as they recognized the ancient, forbidden mark of the Twin Eclipse.
Across the beach, the other surviving candidates landed one by one.
Dax disembarked from his Sylvanis, wincing as he held his leather-bound arm, but his green eyes were shining with a triumphant glee as he looked at me. Mal slid off his Vorlith, stepping onto the sand with his usual stoic grace, though he bowed his head slightly in my direction—a quiet gesture of respect. Kaelor stood beside his blood-red titan, his pale face contorted into a mask of pure, bitter venom, his fists clenched so hard his knuckles bled as he realized his political leverage had been completely annihilated.
Then, the shift happened.
It began with the High Priestess, who disembarked from her Celestryx and immediately dropped to her knees on the wet sand, bowing her veiled head until her forehead touched the black grit.
Then, one by one, the high lords of the sovereign houses—the arrogant nobles who had called me “mortal dirt,” who had mocked my mother’s bloodline, who had treated me as a political pawn to be traded away—began to move.
A high lord from the Eastern Reach fell to his knees. Then a commander of the Vanguard tiers. Then the court ministers, the noble heirs, and the elite guard.
Like a wave crashing against the shore, every noble on the beach dropped to their knees.
They did not kneel out of courtesy. They did not kneel out of courtly etiquette. They knelt out of pure, instinctual self-preservation before an apex power they could neither control nor comprehend.
For twenty-three years, the kingdom had looked at me as a flaw in the royal line. A half-blood mistake, a placeholder princess whose only value lay in her submission.
In a single second, the lie was incinerated forever.
They were no longer looking at a half-breed placeholder. They were looking at a Dragon Rider. The sovereign mistress of the Nyxalith, the wielder of the eclipse, a force of nature that could tear their stone palaces to splinters with a single command.
I was a monster dressed in ash of midnight and gold.
The balance of power in the Kingdom of Nymeria had changed forever. And not a single soul on that beach would ever dare to address me as dirt again.
A low, heavy crunch of sand broke the silence to my left.
I slowly turned my head.
Landing on the wet shore twenty paces away, its black scales absorbing the moonlight like a void, was Caspian’s Umbrax. The Shadow Striker folded its sleek wings, its horizontal slitted pupils locking onto the Nyxalith with quiet, mutual respect between apex predators.
Caspian swung his leg over the ridge of the beast’s neck, stepping down onto the black sand with a heavy, deliberate stride.
My breath caught in my throat as I took him in.
He was changed.
The physical toll of the trial—the brutal crossing, the collapsed lava tubes, and the dark, subterranean magic of the island—had stripped away the last remaining threads of the High Captain who had walked into the Great Hall a few days ago.
His golden hair—once shimmering like sunlit wheat—had darkened dramatically. The bright, honeyed tones were gone, replaced by a deep, dark chestnut veined with threads of midnight, as if my shadows had permanently stained his locks.
But it was his eyes that made my pulse stutter in my chest.
Caspian’s eyes had transformed into a deep, intense, royal blue. They burned like dark jewels set inside his sharp, soot-stained features, carrying an unnatural, hypnotic depth that looked less like mortal sight and more like the infinite ocean at midnight.
It was as if every single time the shadows touched him, every time I drew on the raw magic of the dark to survive, it reached inside his marrow and made him a little darker. A little more lethal. A little more aligned with the power sitting beneath.
Caspian didn’t look at the King. He didn’t look at the kneeling nobles, the High Mages, or the ships waiting in the harbor.
He walked past them all, his heavy boots striking the wet sand in a slow, possessive cadence, until he stopped directly beside the Nyxalith’s massive shoulder.
