Page 32 of Sereis
The traders exchanged panicked looks, suddenly understanding that their generous host had been playing a different game entirely. The warmth of the room felt oppressive now, the smoke that had been pleasant now choking, the wine in their stomachs turning to lead.
"We should—we didn't know—" the lead trader stammered.
"No," Sereis agreed, standing from his throne with liquid grace. The ice dissolved behind him, returning to the floor without a trace. "You didn't know. But you've been so very helpful in your ignorance."
He gestured to me, and I understood. Moving to each trader in turn, I refilled their cups one last time—not with wine, but with water so pure it would burn through the intoxicants in their systems, leaving them stone-cold sober to contemplate what they'd just confessed.
"Rest now," Sereis told them, though it wasn't a suggestion. "Tomorrow, you'll repeat everything you've told me, but this time preserved in testimonial crystal that cannot lie. Lord Solmar's schemes are about to unravel in ways he never anticipated."
But there was no time to rest.
No time to preserve testimony.
No time for anything.
There was a rumble, faint at first, distant, but growing louder by the second. Sereis and I exchange worried glances. The rumble was suddenly so loud that I couldn’t think.
The wall didn't crack or crumble—it simply ceased. One moment the Amber Parlor's perfect dome of compressed starlight held us in warm contradiction, the next it exploded inward in a rain of fragments that sang death as they fell. Not shattered—unmade, as if five separate gods had decided this barrier shouldn't exist and reality had no choice but to agree.
They came through simultaneously, five Dragon Lords in their true forms, and my human mind tried to reject what it was seeing. Davoren arrived as living magma, not flesh and scale but molten rock somehow holding the shape of a dragon. His scales glowed cherry-red between cracks of obsidian that split and reformed with each movement, and the heat of him turned the air into a weapon that seared my lungs with each breath. Wherehis claws touched the floor, stone liquified, creating pools of lava that would burn for days.
Zephyron manifested as barely contained storm, his scales the gray of thunderheads with lightning crackling between his wings in patterns that hurt to follow. The electricity didn't just spark—it lived, reaching out with curious tendrils to taste everything metal in the room, making the crystal pipes sing with static. His eyes were the white-blue of lightning strikes, and when he breathed, thunder rolled from his throat.
Garruk's arrival broke something fundamental in the palace structure. He was too massive for the space, his mountain-form demanding room that didn't exist, forcing reality to accommodate him through will alone. His scales weren't scales but compressed granite, each one a boulder that could crush a house. When he moved, I heard avalanches, felt tectonic plates shifting in my bones. The floor cracked in spider webs from his weight, fissures running up the walls like the palace itself was reconsidering its shape.
Morgrith existed as contradiction—shadow given draconic form, his edges bleeding into darkness that moved wrong. Looking directly at him made my eyes water, made my brain insist he wasn't there while my instincts screamed he was everywhere. His scales seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it, creating a void in the shape of a dragon that suggested terrible things waited in the spaces between what we could see.
Caelus whirled in as silver wind and hail, not quite solid, not quite gas, but something between that changed with each heartbeat. His form shifted constantly—now serpentine, now classical, now something that had too many wings and not enough body. The temperature plummeted where he passed, frost forming on surfaces that had been warm seconds before, my breath becoming visible clouds that he seemed to breathe in with pleasure.
But it was the figure on Davoren's shoulder that made my stomach drop. Kara—it had to be Kara from the way she sat with perfect balance despite the molten heat beneath her—rode the Fire Lord like she belonged there. Her golden bonding marks blazed war-bright across exposed skin, creating their own light that competed with Davoren's magma glow. She held a spear of condensed flame that looked more real than reality, its point focused to atom-sharpness, and her expression was harder than I'd ever seen on someone so young. The collar at her throat—dragon-scale that matched Davoren's hide—marked her as thoroughly claimed, thoroughly transformed, thoroughly dangerous.
The traders had gone beyond panic into a kind of vacant terror, their minds simply refusing to process what they witnessed. One had fainted, crumpling into the furs. Another had wet himself, the sharp ammonia scent cutting through the smoke and ozone. The youngest—the one who'd shown the contract—was praying in a language I didn't recognize, eyes squeezed shut, rocking back and forth.
Sereis moved before I could process the danger, his hand closing on my wrist and pulling me behind him as he rose. Ice formed around us instantly—not a shield but a statement, black ice so pure it looked like frozen void. Through it, I could see the other Dragon Lords distorted into nightmare shapes, their fury turned into something even more terrible by the refraction.
"Sereis!" Davoren's voice wasn't meant for human throats—it was the sound of mountains exploding, of pyroclastic flows that buried entire civilizations. "You will face judgment!"
Even through the ice shield, I felt the accusation like a physical blow. Judgment. They thought Sereis had orchestrated the theft, the betrayal. They'd come for war.
"You bring destruction to my domain based on a lie." Sereis's voice carried absolute zero, the kind of cold that stopped atomsfrom moving. He stood perfectly still, but I could feel the power gathering in him, winter itself preparing to defend its master. "Whatever fiction has been fed to you, I demand the right of explanation before you violate sacred hospitality."
"Explanation?" Davoren's massive head swung toward us, and I saw death in those molten eyes. "Your servants tried to slay my consort. They used your colors, your authority, your weapons. You think words will undo that betrayal?"
"I think," Sereis said with deadly calm, "that someone has played us all for fools. But if you insist on combat before conversation—"
Davoren attacked mid-sentence. Not a warning shot or testing strike but a full commitment of power. The blast of superheated magma he expelled could have leveled a city district, turned stone to glass, made the very air combust. It came at us like a horizontal volcano, all that molten fury focused into a stream of destruction.
Sereis raised his hand almost lazily, and winter answered. Not ice—ice would have vaporized instantly. This was cold as a concept, as a fundamental force, compressed into a shield that absorbed heat the way black holes absorbed light. The magma hit and simply stopped existing as heat, transforming into something else entirely. The impact sounded like a thousand bells shattering in harmony, like music made from destruction.
Caelus was already moving, using the distraction of the frontal assault to dart around our flank. "My property!" he shrieked, and I realized with sick certainty he meant me. "The thief who cost me my servant! She's mine by right of debt!"
Sereis pivoted without looking, his other hand creating a localized blizzard that manifested from nothing. The temperature differential was so extreme that ice crystals formed from the moisture in Caelus's own breath, creating a cloud that blinded the Wind Lord completely. At the same time, Sereismaintained the shield against Davoren's continuing assault, defending on two fronts with an ease that spoke of centuries of combat experience.
"Yours?" Sereis's voice had dropped to something beyond cold, beyond winter. This was the voice of entropy itself, of the heat death of the universe. "Nothing in my domain is yours, wind-dancer. Not the girl, not the air you breathe, not even the possibility of your continued existence if you persist in this foolishness."
The other Dragon Lords were positioning themselves for attack, surrounding us with mechanical precision. Five against one, even in his own domain, even with all his power—the odds were impossible. My transformed body, strong as it had become, trembled with the need to help, to do something other than cower behind Sereis's protection.
But I could feel his will through the bond we'd begun but hadn't sealed, his absolute command that I stay hidden, stay safe, stay out of the path of dragon warfare that could unmake me with a stray thought.
