The shadows moved.
They curled toward me like eager pets, like flowers turning toward the sun. Dark tendrils brushed against my calves, wrapped around my ankles, pressed close with something that felt almost like affection.
I gasped. Pulled my legs up onto the bed, heart hammering. The shadows retreated immediately, sensing my fear, drawing back to their corners with what I could only describe as wounded hesitation.
"I'm sorry," I breathed. Absurd. Apologizing to shadows. But they werehisshadows, weren't they? Connected to him somehow, part of the vast power he'd sacrificed to save the world. And now—impossibly—they seemed to recognize something in me too.
I made myself climb out of bed. My legs were steadier than they should have been. My body felt strange—not wrong, exactly,but different. Like I was wearing clothes that had been altered overnight to fit a slightly different shape.
The chamber I'd slept in was beautiful in that impossible way everything in this place seemed to be. Bioluminescent blooms climbed the walls, pulsing gently in blues and silvers. The bed I'd left was piled with blankets that looked like captured night sky. And everywhere, everywhere, the darkness watched me with something like anticipation.
I found my way by instinct—or by the bond. The Sanctuary's corridors opened before me, shadows parting to light the path, leading me toward... something. Someone.
Him.
I could feel him now. A presence at the edge of my awareness, dimmer than it should have been, but unmistakable. The bond between us thrummed like a plucked string, drawing me forward.
The common chamber was vast and filled with people who shouldn't have been possible. Dragon Lords in human form, their mates pressed close, all of them turning to look at me as I stepped through the doorway.
But I only saw him.
Morgrith sat in a high-backed chair near the center of the room, and the sight of him made my chest clench with something between fear and longing. He was pale. Diminished. The shadows that had reached for him so eagerly in the ritual chamber now seemed uncertain, hovering at a distance like children unsure if their father would recognize them. And his eyes—those starlight eyes that had pierced me to my soul—had dimmed to something gentler. More human.
More fragile.
He looked up as I entered, and something flickered across his face. Relief, maybe. Warmth. A hunger I recognized because I felt its echo in my own chest.
"She wakes," Davoren said. His ember-eyes swept over me, lingering on my marked forearms, on the way shadows seemed to curl toward me even now. His expression was unreadable. "Changed, it seems."
"The bond took," Sereis observed. His glacier-voice held no warmth, but no judgment either. Simply fact. "The shadow-marks are already settling."
Around the room, the mates watched me with expressions ranging from curiosity to concern. Kara's fire-marks flickered at her throat. The storm-touched woman—Thalia, I remembered—had lightning coiling beneath her skin like restless serpents. They knew something I didn't. They saw something in me I couldn't yet understand.
"The ritual worked," Davoren continued, his voice cutting through my swirling thoughts. "We can feel it—Evara's soul is loose in the world, seeking a vessel."
The words should have brought relief. This was what Morgrith had sacrificed everything for, wasn't it? The chance to call back the soul that might heal Valdris, that might save them all.
"But we don't know where," Garruk rumbled. The mountain-lord stood like a stone pillar near the far wall, his mate—small and fierce—tucked against his side. "The soul will find a body with the right resonance. We have no way to track it."
"And meanwhile," Zephyron added, lightning crackling between his fingers, "our Shadow Master is a shadow of himself." His tone walked the line between dark humor and genuine worry. "He cannot shift. His powers are fragments of what they were. If Valdris moves against us before Morgrith recovers—"
"I will recover." Morgrith's voice was soft but immovable. "I got lucky. The bond will restore what was taken. Given time."
"Time is precisely what we don't have." Sereis's ice crept across the floor, an unconscious manifestation of his tension."The autumn equinox approaches. Just weeks before Valdris's seal weakens enough for him to break through. We cannot face him with one of our strongest reduced to—"
"To what?" Morgrith's starlight eyes met the Ice Master's glacier-gaze. "To something barely more than human?"
The words echoed. I remembered Zephyron saying the same thing during the ritual. The casual dismissal.Barely more than human.
But Morgrith wasn't looking at Sereis when he said it. He was looking at me. And his expression held something like apology. Like understanding. Like he knew exactly what it felt like to be reduced, diminished, made small by the words of beings who saw you as less.
The shadows in the room curled closer to us both.
And despite everything—the fear, the uncertainty, the impossible situation we'd found ourselves in—I felt the bond between us pulse with something that felt dangerously like hope.
Thegoodbyeswerebrief.Dragon Lords, it seemed, didn't linger over farewells.
One by one, they departed. They had territories to protect. A cult to hunt. Preparations to make for a war that might arrive in three weeks, in three days, in three hours.