The bloom was still glowing when Ethan finally made himself stand.Aurelyn's voice had gone quiet in his chest the way a bell goes quiet—not vanished, just settled into something he could still feel if he pressed his attention against it, a warmth coiled under his sternum where the goddess's mark had once been cold. He did not press against it. Not yet. There would be time for the truth of the world later, whatever that meant. Right now there was a city that needed its Emperor to act like one."You should eat something," Celestia said. She had not left his side since the dawn, and her voice still carried the rasp of a night spent grieving instead of sleeping. Around them, the others had begun to drift back toward the lower city—Eileen already barking orders about triage tents, Liuyue steadying Fu Rong down the broken stair, Nina hanging back with on

The condolences came formally, in the days that followed, the way politics always eventually reasserted itself over grief: sealed letters from King Aldric of the dwarven holds, from the Illyanfir court, from three separate minor kingdoms Ethan had exchanged perhaps a dozen words with in his life. Most were sincere. A few, he suspected, were sincere and also carefully positioning themselves for whatever came next, because a city that had just survived a goddess's siege was a city other rulers wanted either as an ally or, if it looked weak enough, as an opportunity.Ethan spent two full mornings simply answering them, Marlowe at his elbow sorting the genuine from the merely opportunistic with a discernment that surprised him—the acolyte had, it turned out, spent enough years quietly observing the Cathedral's own political dealings to have developed a sharp instinct for which condolences carried real we

The formal dedication took place a week after the funeral, once the roads were clear and the last of the foreign delegations had arrived to pay their respects at the grave itself rather than merely in letters.The keep's height had been transformed in the intervening days—not grandly, not with the kind of gilded ceremony Carosso's old protocols might once have demanded, but carefully, by hands that clearly understood the difference between honoring a memory and performing one. Aelinsira's own gardeners, on loan from Illyanfir for the occasion, had cleared a modest ring of the surrounding ash and coaxed a border of hardy mountain flowers to take root around the bloom itself, so that the saint's grave no longer sat alone in scorched earth but within the beginnings of an actual garden.Aelinsira performed the rite in the old way—no grand spectacle, jus

She went to Garrick first, because Garrick had fought beside more strange and half-understood things in his long career than anyone else Ethan knew, and if anyone in Carosso had once, somewhere, heard rumor of a dragon that owed no allegiance to any Warden at all, it would be him.She found him in his own cramped office off the training yard, boots up on a desk cluttered with requisition forms and half-empty mugs, and laid the question before him plainly, without preamble: had he, in all his years soldiering, ever heard so much as a rumor of a dragon that answered to no god's leash."Wild dragons," Garrick said, considering, setting his boots down and reaching for a mug of something that smelled sharp enough to strip paint. "Aye, there's old stories. Nothing I'd swear to." He rummaged through a stack of yellowed papers on a shelf behind him, the kind of disorga

The world, as it turned out, allowed it for eleven more days.The messenger who found her came not from Carosso, but from the mountains themselves—a weathered old trapper named Hask, half-frozen, who'd tracked her by the smoke of her cookfires after hearing, from a terrified hunting party fleeing back down toward the lowlands, that something enormous had been seen circling the highest peaks at dusk, wings dark against a darker sky, far too large to be any bird and far too alive to be the wind playing tricks on frightened men.Hask had spent the better part of two days working out Celestia's likely position from the hunting party's frightened, half-coherent account, reading the terrain the way only a man who'd trapped these mountains for thirty years could, before finally cresting a ridge and spotting the thin grey thread of her cookfire smoke rising from