Chapter 170 Angry dragon

Chapter 170 Angry dragon
Nyx’s POV

Noctharys felt wrong before we landed. Not sirens or smoke or any of the obvious signals that something had gone badly in our absence. 

Something in the air when Caelan traced us through that was different from how the castle usually received us. The warmth that normally rose to meet me through the floors coming slower, thinner like something had interrupted it mid-breath.

Caelan felt it too. His hand tightened around mine before he let go. His eyes moving over the entrance hall with the specific attention he used when he was cataloguing rather than simply looking. 

Two guards near the inner door were standing with the rigid posture of people who had been told to look normal and were overcorrecting. A third was missing from his usual post entirely.

“Where is Aldris?” Caelan asked the nearest guard.

“The eastern watch, Your Majesty.” The guard’s eyes flicked to me then away. Too quickly.

I pressed my fingers against my chest where Drakthar lived. The bond was there, always there but the feel of it was wrong in the way a familiar sound was wrong when you heard it from the wrong direction. 

He was present but pulled away from me. The connection stretched thin and humming with something I couldn’t name except that it made the back of my throat ache.

Vera appeared at the top of the entrance stairs. She had clearly been watching for us. Her fae ears were tilted forward at their most focused angle. Her hands were clasped in front of her with the some of the stillness she used when she was managing anxiety she didn’t want to perform.

“He left the cave,” she said before either of us reached her.

I stopped walking in sjcok. “When?”

“Yesterday morning. We didn’t notice immediately because he’s done it before. Once but briefly, after you left.” She came down the steps toward us. “But he didn’t come back. And when Maret went to check the lower passage she said the cave felt empty. Empty.” She looked at me with those clear eyes that always saw more than was comfortable. “Where is he, Nyx? Can you feel him?”

I closed my eyes and focused through the bond properly. But the surface awareness I had been using since the river in Ashvara but the deeper reach. The one that required concentration and occasionally gave me a headache. 

Drakthar’s presence came back to me like a sound from very far away. He was furious in a way that was nothing like his usual dry heat. He was somewhere elevated. The bond always felt different when he was above ground level, something about the pressure and the connection between them that I never fully understood.

“He’s east,” I said, opening my eyes. “High up.”

Caelan was already moving. The volcano at Noctharys’s eastern edge was not technically a volcano in the active sense. It has been dormant for several centuries, long enough that the Lore had stopped treating it as a geological fact and started treating it as a landmark. 

The dark cone of it is visible from the upper castle windows on clear days. Nobody went there. There was no reason to go there. It was simply part of the landscape in the way that old things became part of landscapes. 

Drakthar was sitting on the rim looking so scary. I gasped at the sight of him like this. 

We saw him from a distance still moving through the lower forest.  Even from that far away the scale of him was startling in the way it sometimes still was after months of the bond. 

He was in full form, obsidian against the grey sky, his wings folded but his posture nothing like the dormant stillness of his cave. He was facing east and the amber light that usually moved through his scales like a slow pulse was absent. 

He looked like he had been carved from the same dark stone as the volcano and had decided to stop pretending he was anything else.

“He’s been up there since yesterday morning?” Caelan asked. 

His voice was firm but I knew him well enough now to hear the thing underneath it which was that a dragon sitting on a dormant volcano radiating cold fury for thirty-six hours was not a situation anyone could look controlled about.

“According to the guards, yes.” Vera was beside me, her breath coming slightly harder from the pace. “He hasn’t spoken to anyone. He won’t respond through the bond?”

“Not in words.” I kept walking. “He’s letting me feel it, which is different. That’s intrntional. He wants me to know he’s there.”

“What does it feel like?”

I thought about how to answer that honestly. “Like standing next to something very old that has decided it’s done being quiet about something it should have said a long time ago.”

Caelan said nothing. He had heard me.