Page 1 of Dreams and Dragon Wings
Benevolence
My uncle cursed me when I was three days old.
I don’t remember that day, but my aunties—the pixies Brisa, Glorana, and Velda—have told the story so many times that I can see it as if I do.
The way the sunlight spilled into the throne room, turning my bassinet gold. The excitement rippling through the room as every courtier in Drakara gathered to honor their future king.
The hush that fell whensheappeared. A rare and precious Jewel—the most powerful of the fae—who dared to step into a room full of dragons for the first time since the end of the Jewel Wars.
Her name was Liora, the Queen of the Jewels, and she came with a vision from the Great Weaver Himself on her lips.
“He will be a great king,”she prophesied.“A king who will take a Jewel instead of a dragon for his queen, and together they will heal the rift between our peoples and bring about an era of peace and prosperity the likes of which the world has neverseen.”
But my parents had only moments to rejoice before my uncle, Malice, arrived and doomed us all. Succumbing to the Shade darkening his heart, he twisted the Great Weaver’s blessing into a curse.
“Madness,”he decreed instead. The Jewel from Liora’s vision would drive me to it. And our love would be our undoing.
After I donned the Corona Ignis—the crown of the dragon kings—and came into my full potential, my hunger would drive me to consume my Jewel’s power for my own.
And then the guilt of killing the woman I loved would consume me.
I was thirteen when my aunties finally told me the rest.
How my father, wild with grief, ordered every Jewel to either relinquish their power to the Living Waters—the source of all magic—or be hunted down and slain to spare me from this fate. Including Liora.
Including Liora’s three-day-old daughter.
How Liora chose to declare war on my people for a second time in our shared history rather than agree to surrender.
How, with her final breath, she begged my aunties to take her child, Aurelia, through the Door separating our realm from the human world, to hide her in the kingdom of Briarhold. Far from my father. Far from Malice.
Far from me.
But there is no distance she could have journeyed that would have spared the last living Jewel from that. Not truly. Because the Great Weaver had made His plan known.
And He always finds a way in the end.
Chapter 1
Aurelia
Seventeen Years Ago
Imet my first dragon the day I turned thirteen.
Sunlight spilled through the trees bordering our garden, painting the grass in patterns of gold and shadow. I traced my fingers over the silken petals of the roses my mother had planted when we first moved to this cottage.
Pink ones, sweet-smelling and delicate.
The clatter of plates floated toward me through the open window. My parents were inside preparing my birthday cake.Mother had promised me a rare treat this year—chocolate—and Father had been secretive for days, hiding something in his workshop that I wasn’t allowed to see.
I was certain it was a new dress, though. Father made the best dresses.
And soon, the fine ladies of Spindleton would surely realize that, too.
I twirled in the garden in my old dress, basking in the warmth of the early summer day. The faded pink fabric fanned out around my ankles, now too short for me.
But I didn’t mind. I was only a commoner. No one cared about the length of my skirts. And besides, I was alone.
