Page 23 of The Shattered Rite
Wings folded like waiting blades. Scales of black and bronze glimmered as if the earth itself had melted and re-formed him. His horns curved like a crown. His eyes—
Oh gods. His eyes.
Twin suns—molten and endless—locked onto her.
Her lungs forgot their purpose. The air between them was a living thing, thick and trembling, as if even the wind feared to move in his presence.
And Eliryn, practical to the last, nearly whimpered.
“Okay,” she rasped, heart hammering so hard it shook her vision. “That’s… that’s a dragon.”
He stepped forward, each movement rippling through the earth like distant thunder. The ground trembled beneath her boots; dust shivered in the air.
When you call, I rise.
The voice didn’t pass through her ears—it struck straight into her bones, rattling the air from her chest.
“I didn’t know I was calling,” she whispered.
You have been calling since the day you first drew breath.
Her throat worked, but nothing useful came out. “…Cool,” she managed. “That’s not alarming at all.”
Heat rolled over her in a slow, suffocating wave. His breath was warm and metallic, edged with the sharp tang of scorched rain and stone cracked by lightning.
I am Vaeronth… the Endbringer.
The name landed like a warhammer against the silence—final, unyielding, carved in the language of endings.
It didn’t just settle in her ears—it pressed into her bones, etched itself into the space between her heartbeats.
She laughed. Not because it was funny, but because if she didn’t, she was going to start crying, and once she started, she wasn’t sure she’d stop.
“I’m not ready,” she whispered, half to herself. “I’m really not.”
You are.His voice rumbled like a storm clawing its way over mountains.While I have been waiting, you were becoming.
“Gods, that’s intense,” she said, her laugh breaking into something breathless.
Behind Vaeronth, the pool flared with sudden light, igniting from within until it glowed like a second sun. Golden fire rippled across its surface, not burning, but alive—patterns spiraling outward in runes older than the first kings. The light caught his wings as they spread, vast enough to blot out the pool entirely, and the shadows they cast rippled and bent as though they too were alive. Shapes formed in them—dragons, battles, crowns, storms—prophecy given form.
Speak the words.
Her stomach dropped. “I… I don’t know them.”
You do.
And gods help her, she did.
They rose from somewhere hollowed out inside her—a space she hadn’t known was waiting. The syllables were not hers, yet they belonged to her. They tasted of copper and rain, of smoke from a long-dead fire.
Her lips parted, and the first word escaped like a thread pulled from the world itself.
“I offer not just breath,” her voice cracked, “but all that I am…”
The vow came in fragments and floods, each syllable dragging up memories she had never lived, pain she had never felt, triumphs she had never claimed. Images burst behind her eyes: a sky full of wings, a world blazing with magic, the roar of dragons as they wheeled above armies.
Her voice trembled. Her body shook. Tears she refused to name burned down her cheeks as the weight of each word branded itself into her very marrow.
