Page 175 of The Shattered Rite
At first, she expected it to offer another set of leather leggings. Another battle tunic. But no.
From the wall, where unseen mechanisms lived, a form emerged.
The room did not give her battle leathers.
It did not choose the practical lines of a warrior, nor the simplicity of a rider.
Instead, when Eliryn turned toward the table, her eyes adapting to Vaeronth's vision, the garment waiting for her was nothing less than a declaration.
The gown shimmered dark as garnet in the hearth’s low light—a bodice sculpted in deep crimson silk, boned with blacksteel threading and adorned with intricate gold filigree. The detailing curled like living vines over her ribs and collarbone, each twist of metalwork shaped into roses half-unfurled, petals glinting like pressed sunlight. Gold chains looped from her shoulders, draping delicately around her throat before joining at the hollow of her collarbone, the fastening shaped like a dragon’s eye.
Beneath, the bodice flowed into a sweeping skirt of sheer black panels layered over blood-red silk, slit high to bare her thighs as she moved, a deliberate echo of both grace and threat. Down the center fell a silk banner embroidered with curling thorns and a stylized dragon, its coils laced in molten thread, as if the creature had been stitched in fire itself.
Her arms were left bare, the gown designed not to conceal but to display: the twisting marks of her dragonbond glowed faintly along her skin, spiraling from wrists to shoulders, luminous against her gold and crimson frame. On her back, where the shift dipped scandalously low, the full spread of her dragon’s sigil would be visible—an ancient script of scales and wings etched across muscle and bone, alive with the slow pulse of Vaeronth’s magic.
She swallowed.
A queen’s dress.
A conqueror’s armor.
A dragon’s legacy.
Not something worn by choice. Something chosen for her.
She rose from the bed and stepped toward it without further thought. When her fingers brushed the silk, it felt like flame.
And when she dressed, every chain, every clasp, every weight of gold whispered the same truth:
Tonight, the realm would see her.
Not as a girl.
Not even as a rider.
But as power made flesh.
Her dragon marks flared faintly along her skin, shimmering in the candlelight, almost as though the dress itself had called them forward.
When she reached for the boots the room usually offered her, she found none.
“Really?” she muttered.
Vaeronth’s voice curled around her mind, low and deliberate.Barefoot… you look like a god returning. Like prophecy draped in silk and thorns. They will not remember your face, Eliryn. They will remember your silence, and your marks. And the sound of your steps, bare against stone, as you walk toward fate.
That earned a soft, almost bitter laugh from her. “Well. Practical as ever.”
She knelt beside the mirror, combing her fingers through her hair, working it back into warrior’s braids with slow, methodical care. Each twist was an act of quiet defiance. Each tie, a prayer. She left the ends loose down her back, the coppery strands streaked with deeper crimson as Vaeronth’s light shimmered faintly against them.
She did not braid her hair to look beautiful.
She braided it to be unbreakable.
When the knock came, she was ready.
“Dragonrider.”
The voice beyond the door was unfamiliar—a guard’s, but not one she recognized.
