No ceremony. No pledge. Just the way the Vlachy started to look at me after the dragons landed—like I was the last tree left after the fire, and they'd decided to build a home in my shadow.
Only a few dozen of them remained. The rest had been slaughtered, broken into names only remembered in whispered cooking songs and empty tents.
Still. I would return to them.
If there was a world left to return to.
When I returned.
I walked among their rebuilt camp with something like reverence and something like guilt. They had lost everything. And still—they stayed. One woman pressed dried herbs into my hands. Another gave me a polished shell. A child touched my sleeve and then ran away.
Soileen was waiting in the forge-tent, surrounded by steam and ash and five other women whose names I barely knew and would never forget.
They had done the impossible.
And it smelled like leather, smoke, and magic.
The dragon saddles were laid out on massive frames—elevated by rope cradles to simulate dragon height. Not one of them was alike. They weren't mass-produced. They were sculpted.
Each base was formed from triple-braided hide reinforced with scaled plating taken from old battlefield wrecks—repurposed armor, melted and forged again. Bone struts curved like ribs across the undercarriage, distributing weight across the spine. The stirrups were adjustable but curved, wrapped in cloth from mourning shrouds. The reins weren't reins—they were cords of woven hair and spirit-thread, meant for light touch and soul steering, not control.
The main saddle—Ari's—was midnight black, trimmed in embroidery stitched by hand. Beneath the seat, a charm: a rune of balance, pressed in silver. I reached for it.
"It's done," Soileen said behind me, her voice rough from smoke. "She'll hold."
With effort and some borrowed strength from my own magic, I lifted the saddle. It was too heavy for a mortal alone. Ari was resting by the ridge, wings folded, breath slow and deep.
I moved toward him with reverence.
He blinked as I approached. One massive golden eye. No sound. Just acknowledgment.
"I need your help," I whispered.
My magic pulsed through my hands—threading the straps into existence, tightening cords, adjusting the harness as the saddle floated into place. It settled between the peaks of his shoulders like it had always belonged there.
"There," I said, softly. "Now we're real."
A small sound pulled my attention.
The baby dragon—Bonnie—had scooted close to the edge of the camp, pressing her small, shining body to the side of the larger dragon.
To Bonnie.
Sibelle Orlion.
She was crouched beside her, whispering something I couldn't hear. The baby ignored me. Didn't even look.
I stepped closer.
"She's… ignoring me," I said.
Bonnie didn't look up.
I looked down at the tiny dragon's head as she nuzzled into Bonnie's cloak, small eyes blinking slowly.
"She still loves you," I said.
Bonnie scooped her up.
"That's instinct," she said. "Not recognition."
She stood, cradling the dragon like a mother, like a stranger.
"You'll learn that soon enough," she said. "Spend more time with Ari."
I flinched.
Bonnie saw.
She looked back toward where Ari now dozed, the saddle resting perfectly on his back.
"You think he's still your love," she said softly. "But he isn't."
My throat closed.
Bonnie's voice gentled, but the words still cut.
"The longer you stay with him, the more you'll see it. What you loved… he had to let it go. He shed it when he became what he is."
"He's still Ari," I whispered.
"No," Bonnie said.
And this time, she said it like a death sentence.
"He's a beast, Mila. And beasts don't love the way men do."
I looked at her.
At the woman everyone whispered about, bowed to, blamed.
At the water spirit-turned-warrior who still carried the scent of salt and fire in her hair, who held a creature she claimed was not hers, and who had the gall to tell me that love couldn't survive this.
I stepped forward.
"So that's it?" I snapped. "You just gave up on your daughter, gallivanting with a pirate, and you judge me for having hope?"
Bonnie blinked slowly.
"I didn't give up," she said.
"You're saying Ari's gone. That what we had—what we have—was burned away with one choice. But maybe that's just what you do. Maybe you think every time someone changes, they become a monster."
I could feel the heat rising behind my eyes, too many nights without sleep, too many days holding this rebellion on my back like it was the last bone in my spine. The baby dragon's breath fogged in the air between us.
"Maybe it's easier for you," I said. "To believe that once a man becomes something more, he can't love you anymore. That he stops being yours. That way you don't have to admit what you married in the first place."
I stepped closer. "You married a monster who thought he was a god. And now you're warning me not to love someone who's done nothing but fight to stay good."
Bonnie smiled. Just a little. It wasn't unkind.
"Every man thinks he's a god," she said. "This one just happens to be right."
The air left my lungs.
Bonnie looked down at the small dragon in her arms, gently stroking the bridge of her nose with one finger. The baby purred—soft and strange and distant.
"No one knows the horror of loving a beast more than I do," she said. "And it's not about goodness, Mila. It's about scale. About what happens when the person you love becomes something large enough to eclipse you."
She looked up.
"And whether they remember not to step on you when they move."Because there it was again—that whisper of fear I'd buried since Ari changed. Since his wings tore the sky, since the golden-black scales replaced the man's skin beneath my hand.
He hadn't stepped on me.
But maybe one day, he would.
Bonnie turned away.
And I was left in the silence of knowing that we were both in love with things we could no longer touch the same way.
****
We left nothing behind but breath and promise.
The Vlachy stood at the ridge, eyes turned skyward, watching their dragons rise. They didn't cheer. They didn't weep. They just stood—scarred, small, surviving. The world would remember them not as a people, but as the ones who saw us off.
Ari crouched low, saddle gleaming with the runes Soileen burned into the leather with her own blood. I climbed onto his back and did not look down. Beside us, Bonnie mounted her silver beast, her skin now moonlit steel and windburnt salt, her eyes hollowed into something beautiful and wrong.
We gathered at the summit, my siblings - everyone except for Lasicus whom I appointed to stay behind and guard Aazor.
Volmira's wings shimmered like frost. Salacia stood at the edge of the cliff, trident planted, her hair billowing. The ocean behind her murmured a final benediction.
"Are you ready?" I called.
Dragons rose.
Wings tore the air open.
And then we broke.
Not upward, but outward—ripping into the heavens, bodies unraveling into luminous particles. Stardust.
It hurt.
Not the kind of hurt you cry from—but the kind that makes you remember being born.
My skin turned to energy. My bones sang. Ari howled, not in pain but in release, his form fracturing into gold and shadow, spiraling behind me. Bonnie followed—silver arcs, molten breath. We bled light into the void, our war-flesh dissolving into brilliance.
The stars accepted us.
And Hunat opened like a wound.
****
The sky above Veyron's Crown was blackened.
No banners flew. No guards stood. No weapons fired.
Only ruins.
The citadel was split open like a cracked tooth. Roads buckled. Vaults lay exposed, their knowledge blown to ash. Smoke curled from the spires like breath from a sleeping beast—except no one slept here anymore.
We landed hard, stumbling from brilliance back into body.
My knees hit the ground.
Ari circled overhead once, then settled behind me with a groan of stone on stone. His wings twitched. His tail cracked a crumbling wall.
Bonnie dismounted silently.
Bara stepped beside me, stunned. "Where… where are they?"
Volmira said what none of us wanted to say.
"They're gone."
I stood slowly.
The capital lay open before us—burnt out, hollowed.
Theron had been here.
He had made it bleed.
But he hadn't waited.
And whatever message he left behind—it wasn't one of surrender.
It was something else.
A warning.
****
Hunat smelled like a library dying.
Ash choked the boulevards. Statues lay decapitated in courtyards slick with soot. The wind carried flakes of white marble and burned parchment, and everything felt like it had once meant something.
Now it was just silence in formal wear.
We split into groups, picking through what was left. Volmira flew low, scouting the upper levels.
She sifted through what remained of the Prism Archive, fingers twitching as she touched what used to be memory. Bara stalked through the ruins like a wolf with her teeth already bared, muttering about cowardice and unfinished wars.
Bonnie moved without expression.
Ari stayed back—too large for these streets, too wild. He perched on the edge of the shattered Parliament Tower like a gargoyle, watching over us.
I walked into the heart of the city.
The old garden of oaths still stood—half burned, cracked, but intact. Names were carved into the stones. Promises. Pleas. Lovers trying to immortalize something before time chewed it up.
I pressed a hand to one.
The date had faded. The person who carved it? Gone. Maybe waiting. Maybe dust.
"We regroup," I said when we all came back together. "The Snake's not here. But someone will be."
"He's in Millennia," Bara said quietly. "That's where his power folds inward. That's the only place left."
"And it's where he wants us to go," I replied. "He didn't flee. He baited us. This is a trap."
Volmira looked at me. "And you want us to spring it?"
"I want to end it."
Bonnie tilted her head.
"I'm fairly certain dragon fire can burn through the lattice," she said. "Millennia is built on woven spellcraft. Nothing structural. Just layers of magic, holding shape."
"You're sure?" I asked.Bara snorted. "Then let's set your legacy on fire."
I shook my head. "I don't like it."
"So don't like it," Bonnie said. "But do it anyway."
I looked around at what was left of Hunat. The city that had once built stars. That had once believed in better.
There was no one left to save here.
Only something to finish.
"Mount up," I said. "We ride for Millennia."
****
Millennia shimmered like a mirage stitched to the skin of the world.
It rose from obsidian cliffs like a jewel buried in velvet, spires blooming upward in slow spirals, windows glinting like open eyes. There were no gates. No defenses. Just silence. The kind that was ready.
Ari's wings beat the air beside me, steady as my own heart. Below, the city waited.
I felt the magic before I saw her.
She stood alone in the plaza of woven light, where the glass-etched streets met at the center of the city's oldest spell-ring. She did not flinch as dragons descended. She did not shield her face from their fire-blown breath.
She stood.
Still.
Unbothered.
Untouched.
Vectra.
She was dark as molten stone, bald, statuesque, her scalp marked with whorls of silver ink—constellations of purpose and pain. Her robes were so fine they might have been liquid, and around one wrist: a single silver ring. The Assigner's mark.
The one who stitched his will into circuitry. Who whispered at his elbow when gods fell. Who catalogued every rebellion and filed it into silence.
She bowed her head slightly as I stepped from Ari's back.
"Mila of the Vlachy," she said, voice a calm thread through the air. "You're back."
Behind me, the others shifted. Volmira's wings lifted. "You know why we're here," I said.
"I do."
She gestured behind her. The spell-ring pulsed beneath her bare feet, threads of light unraveling with each step like a stage being built mid-performance.
Vectra led me through a corridor of light that moved as we walked—architecture rearranging itself to her will. There were no doors. No ceilings. Just shifting planes of geometry and spellcraft and the faint hum of power so old it didn't remember being born.
Her tattoos pulsed faintly with silver light. The ring around her wrist caught the shifting sun and turned it strange.
"Do you want to know who I really am?" she asked without looking at me.
"No," I said.
She smiled. "Liar."
We reached a chamber that had no entrance, only arrival. The floor was woven glass. Below it, I saw stars—real or constructed, I couldn't tell. A high-backed chair of braided light awaited her. She didn't sit. She floated.
Literally.
Her body lifted off the ground, just a handspan, but enough to remind me that she wasn't what she seemed.
"You want war," she said.
"I want peace," I replied. "But I'm willing to buy it in blood if that's the only currency he understands."
"And you think dragons are enough?"
"You think I'm just his mouthpiece," she said. "Just another priest in the pantheon of his shadow. But I was here before Millennia. Before Hunat. Before he chose Theron's face. Before there were names."
I tilted my head.
"What were you before?"
She smiled, and this time, it felt like drowning.
"I was a system," she said. "A protocol. An instinct made flesh. I was written by the first language and spoken into being by accident."
"You're not a person," I whispered.
"No," she agreed. "But I wear a very good imitation."
The ring on her wrist pulsed once. I didn't like how it made my stomach twist.
"I don't want war with the rest of the Tripolis system," I said finally. "There are planets under his care. People. You think this is just about one tyrant, but it's not. I'm not going to burn the stars to kill a god."
"Then you'll lose."
She said it so softly. So easily.
"War with him is not possible. Not in the way you're thinking. You can burn this city, yes. Dragons can tear down the spires. But he'll just build another. He'll conjure a new seat of power, braid a new people from starlight and marrow. Theron doesn't need armies. He makes them."
I stared at her.
"Theron," I said quietly. "Is that his name?"
She said nothing.
I laughed once, dry.
"Was he a man before he became a god?"
Still, she didn't answer.
Just floated a little higher.
I felt sick.
"So what's your solution?" I asked.
Vectra smiled again. The worst smile yet.
She reached into her chest—and I realized it was not flesh. Not truly. She was glass and machine and dream. Her hand vanished into light, and when it emerged, it held a sphere of writhing black flame.
"My solution," she said, "is peace. Compliance. Obedience. The end of resistance so thorough you forget you ever knew what it meant to refuse."
It wasn't an offer.
It was a monument.
I looked around the room. Looked at the shifting walls, the dead-silent air, the stars flickering below us.
And I realized what this was.
"This isn't a negotiation," I said, softly.
"No."
"You're stalling."
She tilted her head.
And I felt the breath leave my body.
I turned.
Ran.
The light warped as I ran back down the corridor, shouting, into the air, into the dragon's breath above us.
"He's not here!"
I broke into the open, my voice tearing through the street.
"HE'S ON VALORIAN!"
Wings rose.
Weapons clicked.
My scream echoed across the city's hollow bones.
"HE'S ON VALORIAN!"
And the trap closed behind us.
****
Nestor had not spoken in weeks.
He'd been seen shambling through the mangrove slums of Calineth, muttering to himself in the dead dialects of old miners and long-drowned priests. The children threw stones at him. The elders crossed themselves. His wife had locked the door and whispered to the neighbors: he's not sick—he's wrong.
And now, he stood on the pale-sand shore of Valorian, dressed in no more than tattered linen and a rusted chain, staring out at the sea with eyes that did not blink.
He did not drink.
He did not speak.
He waited.
Salacia found him there, exactly where she knew he would be.
The curse that kept the Assigner from setting foot on Valorian was older than the reefs. Neptune had written it into the water itself, a ward of breath and salt and sorrow. He who dares tear the sea shall not step upon it again.
But no one said anything about borrowing a man.
Nestor turned to face her.
His eyes were not his own.
They shimmered—white-gold, twin voids swirling with memory and intention.
"Salacia," he said, and the voice was too deep for the body it came from. Smooth. Wrong.
She stepped toward him. The tide curled around her ankles like a child reaching for its mother.
"Theron," she replied.
They stood in silence for a moment. The sea was quiet. The sky was darker than it should have been.
"You shouldn't be here," she said.
"I'm not," he replied. "Nestor is."
"Don't mock me."
"I still can't feel the sand," he added, almost musing. "Your husband's curse holds strong. The body moves, but I am not here. It's like wading through someone else's dream."
He lifted his hands and looked at them, studying the cracks in the knuckles. "Frail. But sufficient."
Salacia's trident rested lightly in her hand.
"Well, are we going to do this or keep yapping?"
He stepped forward. The sea hissed. The water recoiled. "I always liked you."
Salacia scoffed. "I heard your wife left you."
"She forgot her place."
"She made her own."
He stepped closer.
"Break the curse. Let me in."
Salacia stared at him.
At the man who was not a man. At the voice that did not belong to this ruined body. At the invader who wore a drunk's skin.
She raised the trident. She whispered the words.
Old words. Drowned words.
The sea pulled back.
The curse lifted.
Theron inhaled.
And smiled.
"I've missed the taste of sand."