Page 49 of Brutal Dragon King

A series of replies return to me telepathically in response to my question, all confirming that no one has seen her. Not the servants in the palace or the guards around the grounds have seen my human.

I lift my head toward the night sky, my dragon howling and releasing a thunderous flame of fire into the air. When I lower my head, my dragon pulse racing and soaring to dangerous heights, I find Ryu standing in front of me in his dragon form.

“No one has seen her running away?!”I roar mentally, taking a powerful step forward with dragon paws, looming over the chief of the royal guard. Anger has me seeing red.

Wherever Althea is, she could be in danger while she carries my child.

“No, Your Majesty,”Ryu replies, prompting me to roar in his face. He might be my closest friend in the kingdom, but he's done a great disservice by not being vigilant enough to see her escape.

Grunting in my mind loud enough so that he hears me, a flicker of fear ignites a spark in my chest.

I could lose both Althea and my child, and there's no time to stand around here and wait for these incompetent fools to find her.

Without breathing a word or a flame to Ryu, I flap my wings and push myself off my paws. When I'm high above the ground, I give another thunderous clap of my wings, letting out a shrill screech from my dragon throat before flying out toward the human village.

That's the only place I can think that Althea might have fled to. It's familiar to her, and she might still be on her way there on human feet.

But there's no sign of her on my way to the human village, no trace of her scent lingering in the forest to indicate that she was even there.

I stop, calming my frenzy to become more attuned to my senses. That's the only way I'll find her. I take a long, deep inhale, and then sniff the air to find traces of her scent to give me a better idea of which direction she’s headed in.

I close my slitted eyes, focusing on her scent when I catch a mild trace of it, but it’s not in the direction I expected. My eyelids flew open, my head snapping behind me as I let out a beastly grunt when I realized which direction she’d fled in.

She isn’t headed for The Emberlands.

She’s headed toward Wyrmwood Forest.

Panic sets in, amplified by my dragon’s possessiveness and anger that its mate had escaped the safety of the palace grounds. With one giant flap of my wings, I send my dragon up above the pine trees in the forest, shooting out pastel flowers from their roots with how powerful and frantic my dragon has become.

Flying toward Wyrmwood Forest, I pass the raging rapids of the Nayara River that connects from the mountains of The Spine and flows through the other kingdoms of The Shadowlands and The Aether Steppes—Kaidën and Jaidën’s respective kingdoms. The picturesque, serene abundance of beauty that lies in the realm of Nyxoria does little to soothe my frantic nerves, nor does the sound of the river water.

I pause, only to catch a brief glimpse of the waterfall that gushes from The Spine’s tallest mountain, my dragon sighing as a projection of distant memories come crashing into my mind the way the waterfall crashes into the bed of water at the bottom.

Those childhood memories were buried deep, memories of a carefree time when responsibilities and duties were nowhere near my mind. I’d often find myself at the top of that waterfall as a young dragon, using that point to determine if I was strong enough to use my wings, quick enough to beat the time it took to fly from the bottom.

When I’d fly to the top, I’d shift into human form, my heart racing with adrenaline as I’d sit on the rock and stare at the kingdom below, wondering what it would be like to hold so much power as the king. Then I'd close my eyes and trust-fall into the waters below with my dragon on standby.

I thought it would be fun to be the king, to rule my own kingdom, but I had no idea that I’d be so bound to duty, that I’d soon forget how to be carefree. So much so that I became fixed on the idea that a human was below me, and not a creature of the realm just as I am.

Back then, things were less complicated, even if Mother drilled it into our heads that dragons were the most superior beings of the realm. My brothers and I would listen to her tales about the creatures that exist here, and how the realm came tobe when there was a thunderous bang in the sky many centuries ago, and they’d all end with the immortal dragon shifters ruling their kingdoms to create balance in Nyxoria.

Stories my heir would have to hear while he learned how to fly as a youthful dragon, oblivious to the weight of responsibilities that would come in his future. My dragon sighs once more.

I do imagine that it’s a boy Althea carries.

When there’s a tortured scream in the distance, my ears barely catching the distant sound, I snap my dragon head back in the direction of Wyrmwood Forest.

Right now, I can’t help but think about the safety of my unborn child, carried in Althea’s womb as she roams the kingdom freely, vulnerable to the threats that lie outside of the palace grounds and even the village where she’s from.

The Wyrmwood Forest isn’t a safe place, littered with disfigured creatures and vines that have a life force and mind of their own. The forest is more like an exile ground where the cursed Wyrm lies dormant in the ground. Since it had been cast away there almost three hundred years ago, its life force destroys and mutates everything above ground.

I can’t believe that Althea has found herself there, and my dragon springs into action, flying as fast as I can to the forest, where I see her through the trees.

My momentary relief is cut short when I notice the vine curling around her ankle. She’s smacking it away, but it becomes more aggressive and yanks her off her feet.

I fly down as quickly as I can, shifting to land on human feet on the body of the vine. Althea’s eyes widen with horror as she stares at something behind me, then screams,

“Haidën! Watch out!”

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