Page 11 of Sereis
"The trial," he said, and his voice harmonized with itself, becoming something that transcended sound, "is over."
He didn't transform—he exploded.
One heartbeat he was a man in wine-stained robes. The next, reality itself seemed to tear as something massive erupted into being. The throne shattered beneath him. The platform cracked.Dragon Lords who'd thought themselves prepared scrambled back as air displaced with thunderous force.
The dragon that replaced Sereis defied comprehension.
Scales like captured aurora borealis, shifting between blues and greens and colors that didn't have names. Each scale contained its own inner light, as if stars had been frozen mid-death and forged into armor. Wings that seemed made from frozen starlight itself, translucent and solid at once, impossible geometries that hurt to perceive directly. His eyes remained white, but now they were the white of the empty places between stars, the white of absolute zero, the white of endings and beginnings.
He was beautiful. He was terrible. He was mine, the bond sang, as surely as I was his.
His roar turned the truth-wine to ice in every goblet. Created a blizzard in the enclosed space, snow manifesting from nothing. The volcanic heat that should have made ice impossible here simply . . . stopped mattering. His will overwrote physics.
Caelus invoked ownership law, shouting about contracts and possession and the price he'd paid. Davoren roared something about the trial, about justice, about ancient law. Other Dragon Lords called for order, for reason, for restraint.
Sereis ignored them all.
One talon wrapped around me—claws longer than my entire body but gentle, so gentle I barely felt the pressure. He lifted me like I weighed nothing, cradled against scales that should have frozen me solid but felt like coming home through the bond.
Then he looked up at the volcanic glass ceiling, that perfect sphere that had contained Dragon Lord conclaves for a thousand years.
And he went straight through it.
The ceiling didn't break—it fractured, erupted, ceased. A million rainbow fragments fell like deadly rain, each piecesinging a different note as centuries of embedded magic released at once. The sound was beautiful and terrible, like the world's most violent symphony.
Wind hit me hard enough to steal thought, but Sereis's talon curved, creating a pocket of still air. We rose through smoke and shattered glass and the chaos of seven Dragon Lords shouting at once. His wings—those impossible wings of frozen starlight—beat once, twice, and we were above it all.
The last thing I saw through the destroyed ceiling, before distance and dragon-flight stole it away: Caelus's outraged face, red with fury at losing his property. Davoren's dawning realization that something far more significant than his accusation had just occurred. Morgrith's shadows writhing with what might have been laughter. Garruk's deep sorrow, as if he'd known this would happen.
And Kara.
Kara was smiling. Just slightly, just barely, but unmistakably smiling. Like she recognized something in this impossible escape, this violent claiming. Like she understood what it meant to be chosen so completely that ancient laws and Dragon Lords and the world itself became secondary to the claiming.
Her hand rested on her stomach, over the life growing there, and her golden marks pulsed in time with something that looked like approval.
Then Sereis banked hard, wings catching wind that shouldn't exist at this altitude, and the Conclave vanished behind us. Ahead lay the Northern Range, his territory of ice and isolation.
No—our territory now. The bond sang it with every wingbeat, every breath, every impossible moment.
I was no longer a servant. No longer property. No longer Miraof the ash wastes who'd been sold to pay grain debts.
I was Sereis's mate, marked by ice and claimed by winter.
Chapter 3
TheFrostVeildidn'temerge from the blizzard so much as the blizzard parted for it, drawing back like curtains to reveal what had always been there, waiting. My first glimpse stole the breath from my lungs—not a palace built but something grown from compressed winter itself, every surface pulsing with inner light that matched the rhythm of my thundering heart. Ice that shouldn't exist, architecture that shouldn't stand, beauty that shouldn't make my body respond with heat when everything around me was frozen.
Sereis landed on a platform of pure crystal that sang beneath his claws, each impact creating harmonics that resonated in my bones. The vertigo hit immediately—not from height but from impossibility. Towers spiraled downward instead of up, twisting into depths that couldn't exist in the mountain we'd approached. My eyes tracked one spire and found it somehow above us and below us simultaneously, existing in multiple places like a reflection caught between parallel mirrors.
"Welcome to my domain," Sereis's dragon voice thrummed through the bond more than the air, and I felt his satisfactionat my wonder, his pleasure at bringing me here. “To your new home.”
Bridges stretched between the towers, delicate constructions of frozen breath that looked like they'd shatter if a snowflake landed wrong. But I watched a servant—no, there were no servants, the figure was made of animate ice—walk across one carrying what appeared to be books, and the bridge held firm. Everything here defied logic, defied physics, defied the careful education my father's tutors had drilled into me.
My dismount from Sereis's back was less graceful than I'd hoped. My legs, still trembling from the insanity of the flight, barely held my weight. The crystal platform was smooth as glass but somehow not slippery, another impossibility to add to the growing list. I stood on shaking knees, the torn remnants of my dress offering little protection against the wind that should have been bitter but felt merely cool against my flushed skin.
Gardens. There were gardens here, in this place of eternal winter. I could smell them—roses made of ice that released actual perfume, their scent mixing with something darker, headier, that I realized was coming from Sereis himself. The dragon-scent that had marked Caelus was here too, but different. Where Caelus smelled of salt and sky, Sereis carried winter storms and midnight, promises of things that happened in the dark when the world was sleeping.
"The palace exists partially outside normal space," he explained, and I heard amusement in his tone. "Your human mind will adjust. Eventually."
