Page 83 of Bound to the Shadow Queen
When I had worked my way through the new information, I turned back to the existing books on my shelf. What was I missing?
The book that had arrived on my first day back still sat innocuously on the top shelf, its slim, fraying spine standing out amongst the paler leather of the rest. I pulled it out curiously.
The leather felt older than the others, though I wasn’t sure why when the library stretched back millennia.
There was no title, so I flipped it open to the first page. The text was faded and difficult to read, and it took me several breaths too long to realize why my mind halted over the runes.
At first glance, they were sharper and more archaic. Each stroke was written almost hastily, and compared to the otherbooks on the shelves, the lines slanted ever so slightly to the right.
Drakmor. The word rushed out of me in a whisper of air.
This was an Unseelie book.
And if it was using Drakmor runes… it was about dragons.
I devoured the book.
It didn’t matter that I already knew most of the information, that I’d already pieced together as much from my own collection back home.
Reading it now, in Drakmor, in the language of the Skaldwings, sharpened details I’d only half-understood before. Nuances between words, edges to meanings that translations had always dulled.
What I couldn’t understand, though, was how and why this particular tome had ended up in the Winter Palace library, then in my personal study.
Although I still hadn’t figured out who had slipped the former queen’s journal into my possession, either.
According to the book, the dragons had been true shifters, more like the Lupine Unseelie. When they mated with the fae, they had given birth to children who had stronger mana than the other Unseelie fae, but lost the ability to shift into the dragon form.
That was how the original Skaldwing clans had been formed, one from each line of dragons.
I had known that much, but one of the nuances in this volume claimed that those fae had been Seelie. Which madesense, since all of the other clans were already another kind of shifter, and shifters could only mate with their own.
But it was certainly not something we learned growing up in the Shadow Clan.
I almost snorted when I got to a descriptor of the dragon ancestors themselves.
Dragons are known to be highly territorial… instantly incinerating anyone who is not one of their own.
That sounded like someone else I knew.
Images of winter-blond hair and aurora-green eyes clouded my vision before I shoved them away.
I read the line again. …instantly incinerating anyone who is not one of their own.
Was that why the Dragons had abandoned us? Because no others of their kind remained, and they were poised to wipe out the clans?
All except for one… at least, if Kaelen’s whispered claim was true.
Kaelen.
My quill pressed too hard into the parchment, ink blotting the page. I tried to reconcile the kind-eyed male who had spoken to me with the cruel brother who had followed.
If he had met me that night instead of his sadistic twin brother, would he have told me this? Or would he have fed me more prophecy and riddles, caught up in whatever vision his seer had spun? The same vision Kyros had hinted at when he hovered over me, bloody dagger in his fist.
Bile rose in my throat as the memory twisted in my chest.
The Thane of Stormbreak had looked at me as if I were an answer. As if I were meant to be the savior of the Skaldwings and all Unseelie alike.
I let out a rather obnoxious scoff and my sister raised her eyebrows. “What’s so funny?”
