Page 22 of The Shattered Rite
She collapsed to her knees.
The dragon didn’t move.
Didn’t roar. Didn’t reach for her.
Just watched.
Silent. Endless.
Not a savior.
Not a god.
Just a question.
And somehow, impossibly, she was its answer.
She wasn’t chosen.
She’d simply… arrived.
Bruised. Bleeding. Lost.
And the dragon—who had waited lifetimes—was no longer alone.
Not prophecy.
Not destiny.
Just inevitability.
Her breath shuddered once. And in the hush that followed, she whispered, broken but alive:
“…Well. Shit.”
And the dragon finally blinked.
Chapter 6: The Flame of the Last Bond
“When a soul answers the call of Flame, even the void trembles.”—Unknown
The obsidian pool shimmered in the dark like starlight caught beneath glass.
Eliryn’s heart pounded—not from fear, not exactly, but from the deep, nauseating certainty that something was about to change. Something final. Something big.
She really hated “final.”
The air thickened. She felt it shift, like the whole cavern was holding its breath.
From somewhere deep beneath the stone, something ancient stirred.
Bound by blood and bound by soul. In silence I burned, awaiting your call.
Her throat closed. She didn’t think the voice was inside her mind so much as around it, like the air itself had decided to speak.
She stepped back. Probably the least heroic move she could’ve made, but reasonable.
Then the surface of the pool cracked open—like glass spiderwebbing—and from that impossible shimmer, something rose.
