"This isn't your domain," I said softly. Not a question.
"No." His voice was strange. Careful. "This belongs to the space between. The veil I tore during the sacrifice—the barrier between life and death, being and unbeing." His starlight eyes fixed on the darkness ahead. "Something has made its home in that liminal space. Something that doesn't answer to shadow or light."
Understanding settled into my chest like a stone.
The veil he'd damaged to give up his dragon-nature. The same veil that Evara's soul had been caught behind for ten thousand years. Something had found a way to exist in that impossible space, to grow and change and prepare itself for birth.
"We go anyway," I said.
It wasn't a question either.
His answer was to step forward, pulling me with him through the threshold his shadows couldn't cross.
The darkness swallowed us whole.
My new senses struggled to process what surrounded us. Colors shifted across the wet stone in patterns that hurt to follow, impossible hues bleeding into wavelengths that human eyes had never been built to perceive. I saw violet that wasn't violet, gold that existed somewhere beyond the spectrum, shades that my transformed perception had no names for and probably never would.
These were colors from the birth of the universe. Light that had existed before the first star learned to burn.
The air grew warmer as we descended, wetter, pressing against my skin like something alive. I tasted salt on every breath—but also something else. Something sweet and intoxicating, a scent I knew from dreams that weren't entirely mine.
Extinct flowers.
The smell of blossoms that had been dust for ten thousand years, now growing somewhere in this impossible space between worlds.
My bloodline connection blazed brighter with every step. I felt the thread pulling me forward, taut as a bowstring, singing with recognition. Whatever waited ahead—whoever waited ahead—my blood knew her. My bones knew her. The gift that had passed through generations of wound-walkers recognized its origin.
The passage narrowed, then widened, then opened into something that stole what remained of my breath.
A grotto.
The sea had carved this space over centuries—patient water wearing away patient stone until a perfect circle emerged from the rock. The walls curved upward into darkness, smooth as the inside of a shell, glistening with moisture that caught the impossible light and scattered it like captured stars. A pool filled the chamber's floor, black water still as glass, reflecting colors that shouldn't exist.
And in the center—
Rising from the pool on a bed of crystallized light—
An egg.
Not a dragon egg. I knew what those looked like now, had seen them in Morgrith's memories through the bond, understood their vast scale and ancient power. This was something else. Smaller, but no less significant. A drake egg, perhaps—but even that didn't feel right.
The egg was beautiful and terrible—shell like hammered silver, veined with gold that pulsed in time with a heartbeat I could feel singing through my blood.
I watched the cracks multiply across its surface, thin lines spreading like frost on glass, like roots seeking water, like something inevitably finding its way toward light. Each fracture spilled radiance in colors my transformed eyes still couldn't name—impossible hues that belonged to the space between worlds, wavelengths that had existed before the universe decided on its spectrum.
Through the bond, I felt Morgrith's emotions crash against mine like waves against stone. Awe so vast it bordered on terror. Fear that this might still somehow fail after all the searching, all the false leads, all the millennia of waiting. And beneath both—desperate hope. The kind of hope that hurts to carry, that makes you afraid to breathe too hard in case you disturb it.
This was what he'd been searching for. What all the Dragon Lords had been searching for.
The key to healing Valdris. The soul that might undo what had been broken ten thousand years ago.
A larger crack split the shell's surface with a sound like breaking crystal.
Then the pieces began to fall.
They didn't shatter the way eggs normally do—didn't tumble into the black pool to float or sink. Instead, each fragmentdissolved before it could complete its descent, returning to pure energy, to the magic that had formed them. Light scattered in all directions as the shell unmade itself, piece by piece, revealing what had grown inside.
Not a drake.