Page 67 of The Book of Legends
A low growl rumbles through the stones beneath my feet. Not heard—felt.
Malachi.
At the castle’s edge, where the tower casts its long shadow over the trees, the dragon watches. I look up.
And I see him.
Kainen descends the steps carved into the tower’s side, his armor loose at the shoulders, his movements slower than usual—as if the weight of war clings to him like a second skin. His gaze locks on me, and for one heart-wrung second, I feel like a secret he’s trying to keep from himself.
“What happened?” I ask, my voice barely a breath.
He says nothing.
Instead, he moves past me, stopping just short of the scorched stone wall that marks the courtyard’s edge. His hands are stained with blood. Not his.
The urge to touch him claws at me. To carry some of the weight he never admits he bears.
But I don’t. I can’t.
Because touching Kainen was never safe. Not then. Not now.
At last, he speaks—his voice low, threaded with something ancient. “The border’s breached.” He swallows hard and looks up. “It’s mourning.”
The look he gives me cleaves the air between us. There’s something wrong. Something bad. “Selene,” he says, voice rough as torn silk, “be ready. The Nightfallen are here.”
My breath catches in my throat.
Kainen moves toward me slowly, like he isn’t sure whether to worship me or destroy me. His breath brushes my lips—hot, dangerous, like the edge of a blade that wants to cut.
“In this cursed world,” he whispers, “the only thing I don’t understand is you.”
He pauses. “And I hate the unknown.”
I barely manage to whisper, “Maybe… I’m not meant to be understood.”
He smirks, slow and dark. “Then I’ll burn every kingdom until I do.”
And then he kisses me—hard. Like a declaration. Like a war.
The ash here is thick—toothick.
As I step over the shattered threshold of what once must have been a great estate, now drowned in ruin, it swirls like smoke around my boots. No one speaks of the House of Ash. Not even Nieve. Her lips close tight when I ask where he was taking me. Even Malachi growled when Kainen named it on our path.
Blade slung across his back, Kainen marches ahead of me, his cloak trailing soot in its wake. Though his silences are not uncommon, this one is weighted—like memory.
“What was this place?” I ask, my voice nearly lost in the hiss of wind sweeping through splintered beams and sagging eaves.
He doesn’t look back. “A haven,” he says, “once. Before the flames claimed everything.
Not just any fire. Dragon fire.
The bones of the place speak of that heat—long since gone, yet still pulsing in the stone. The walls whisper in a tongue older than time, and the ash shifts subtly beneath each step, as though it recognizes me.
“It’s haunting,” I whisper.
Kainen stops beneath the archway of a collapsing hall. “Every inch of Nythia is haunted.”
As we press forward through scorched corridors, a pressure builds in my chest. Burnt portraits hang in twisted frames—faces lost to time and fire. A broken harp rests in the corner, its strings snapped like veins.
