Chapter 17 The Ember That Remembers
The storm didn’t let me breathe. It pressed in from every angle lightning coiling around Eryndor’s wings like molten chains, wind slicing across my face sharp enough to draw blood. It felt like the world had cracked open just to swallow us whole.
Eryndor’s claws dug into my shoulders, not enough to break skin, just enough to remind me I wasn’t going anywhere. The heat radiating off him was unbearable alive, ancient, furious.
“Hold still,” his voice vibrated through my bones, not loud, but absolute. “The current isn’t meant for mortals.”
“I’m not” I started, but he dove.
The sky inverted. The storm spun into a whirl of white-gold fire, and we plunged straight into its heart. My ears popped. My lungs burned. The air thinned until my vision spotted with black stars. I clawed at his wrist, trying to push him away, but he only tightened his grip, wings slicing open the cyclone like he owned it.
A roar shook the clouds. It wasn’t thunder.
It was something deeper. Older.
Something waiting.
A shape moved inside the storm.
For a second, I thought it was another dragon—bigger, darker, and wrong. Its silhouette flickered across the lightning wall, a jagged, impossible outline. My chest tightened. My scars lit up as if the thing recognized me.
“What is that?” I choked out.
Eryndor didn’t answer. His jaw tightened, eyes flicking toward the shape only briefly, as if acknowledging it gave it power.
That was the first moment I felt him afraid.
He dove lower, wings snapping together as we dropped through a slit of blinding gold. And then
Silence.
Total, crushing silence.
We broke through the storm layer and entered a vast pocket of stillness an impossible hollow carved in the sky. The air glowed faintly, suspended with drifting embers that didn’t burn. They floated like fireflies, humming with ancient rhythm. My skin prickled.
Eryndor released me gently, lowering me onto a black obsidian platform suspended in nothing. It reflected no light, absorbing every ember that touched it.
I stumbled to my knees, dizzy. “Where… are we?”
“A fracture,” he said. His voice was strained now, almost human despite the monstrous form. “A memory the world hasn’t forgotten. A place between breath and flame.”
“That explains nothing,” I snapped, forcing myself upright. My legs felt like glass. “Why bring me here?”
His wings folded around him as the dragon shrank bones grinding, limbs contorting, until he stood on two legs again, human-shaped, golden-eyed, the stormfire still flickering faintly beneath his skin.
Eryndor looked at me. Really looked.
“You were unraveling,” he said softly. “Your heart was syncing with the fragment you awakened. If I hadn’t pulled you out, it would have consumed you.”
My throat tightened. “You don’t care if I live.”
“Incorrect.”
He stepped closer. The heat radiating from him made the air ripple. “If you die, so does the fire that once belonged to me.”
There it was. The truth, like a blade pressed to the spine.
“It’s just power to you,” I said. “Just something you want back.”
“No,” he said, jaw clenching. “It’s something you deserve to understand.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but the platform shuddered. Embers spiraled upward, gathering into a wind pattern that circled us. The air pulsed with voices whispers layered over whispers, overlapping in a language I didn’t know but somehow recognized.
The same language that had haunted my dreams since childhood.
Eryndor watched my reaction carefully. “You hear them.”
“What are they?”
He hesitated. For once, the truth weighed on him. “Memories of your lineage. The echoes of the fire your bloodline once carried.”
A chill washed through me despite the heat.
“My… what?”
“You think you are the first,” he murmured. “But your flame didn’t begin with you. It didn’t even begin with me.”
The platform cracked. A seam opened beneath my feet, glowing with molten gold. The light rose and wrapped around my ankles, pulling images with it blurry, shifting, too fast to understand.
Women.
Cities burning.
Dragons bowing their heads.
A girl with my eyes but someone else’s scars, screaming as the sky split open.
“No,” I whispered, stumbling back. “Stop.”
The images vanished as abruptly as they came. The platform sealed itself again. My pulse thundered.
“What the hell was that?”
“The truth,” Eryndor said quietly. “You carry a fire older than mine. Older than any dragon alive. You were never meant to walk the world blind to it.”
“Then tell me,” I said, stepping forward despite the tremor in my voice. “Why did my parents hide this? Why did they die without telling me?”
His eyes softened a rare, brutal thing.
“Because the ones who came before you were hunted,” he said. “Because your kind were betrayed. Because if the Guild learned what you were…” He exhaled, jaw tightening. “…they would burn every city to ash trying to control you.”
My stomach dropped.
“Why me?”
“Because you survived what none of them did,” he said. “And because the thing waiting in the storm wants you alive.”
The dark shape I’d seen earlier.
The wrongness in the lightning.
“What is it?” I whispered.
His gaze flicked upward, dread flickering in the gold.
“Not a dragon. Not a spirit. Something that witnessed the fall of your line and waited for the chance to finish what it began.”
My breath caught.
“It has been searching for you since the night your parents burned.”
My knees went weak. Air left my lungs.
Everything went quiet in my head. Too quiet.
“I need… I need to get back to Mira,” I whispered. “She’ll be looking for me. She’ll think I’m”
“She’s safe for the moment,” he said. “But going back without control will kill you both.”
I glared at him. “I don’t need control. I need answers.”
“You cannot outrun what’s awakening in you.”
He stepped closer.
“You can only become it.”
I shoved him back.
“Don’t.”
His expression didn’t change, but something in the air did a shift, like he’d been waiting for me to push him.
“You want the truth?” he murmured. “Fine.”
The embers around us surged, forming a spiral of molten script. Heat rose until I couldn’t breathe. My skin burned from the inside, pulsing in time with a heartbeat that wasn’t mine.
“Your fire is waking,” Eryndor said. “And when it fully does”
The storm above us cracked open.
A roar tore through the sky.
The dark shape plunged downward, breaking into the fracture, its monstrous wings blocking out all light.
Eryndor grabbed my arm so tightly I gasped.
“It found us.”
The platform shattered beneath our feet.
The world fell away.
I screamed as the storm swallowed everything.