Frostbound Dragon's heir

CHAPTER 10

The vault doors slammed shut with the weight of ancient, enchanted iron, sealing the inner sanctum into a tomb of our own making.

The gold-filigreed guards didn't rush me with drawn blades. They formed a perfect, suffocating circle, their weapons held low, their faces blank behind sun-etched visors. They were waiting for an order that never came because the Emperor was already standing right in front of me.

He didn't look like a tyrant at that moment. He looked like an archivist who had finally found the missing volume to a collection he’d been curating for decades.

"You really are a persistent creature," he said, his voice echoing against the cold stone. 

He gestured toward the shattered display case, then toward the frost-crusted floor where the true Binding Chain was currently tucked against my freezing skin. "I must thank you for bringing that back to me. It is so much harder to forge a new anchor than it is to simply reclaim the one already tuned to your frequency."

I backed away, my heels scraping against the ice-slicked marble. My left hand was a dead, aching block of ice, and the dragon spirit inside me was thrashing—not in terror, but in a strange hunger. 

I reached for the frost, but the air around the Emperor felt... wrong. It was dead? Like a vacuum of mana where no power could manifest.

"The stable," I rasped, my voice hitching with the cold realisation. "The horses. You knew."

"Of course we knew," the Emperor said, as if explaining a simple math problem to a child. "A bonded heir is a beacon, Evander. You think the frost is a secret? Every time you breathe, you signal your location to the very artifacts you’re trying to steal. We didn't need to hunt you. We only needed to provide you with a target."

He gestured to the side of the hall. Out of the shadows emerged Theo—the man who had given me the ledger, the man who had promised to help me break the Empire. He wasn't in chains like I’d have expected. He was standing calmly beside a High Inquisitor, adjusting his robes with practiced ease.

"Theo was my best field agent," the Emperor continued, smiling at my shattered expression. "He’s been baiting these accidents for years. It’s the only way to draw out the surviving heirs of the elemental houses. You’ve been very helpful, really. You’ve brought the last piece of the Vornic puzzle right into my hands."

My world collapsed right there and then. The ledger, the maps, the 'secret' rites—it was all a theater, a carefully constructed script designed to lead me into this exact room, at this exact hour, with the Binding Chain in my possession.

"Why?" I screamed, the frost on my clothes flaring into a rough, defensive aura. "Why keep me alive?"

"Because," the Emperor said, stepping closer, his shadow falling over me like a shroud, "a dragon-bond is a volatile thing. It requires a vessel that is alive, sentient, and capable of suffering. The spirit is too weak to be extracted, but if it is completed—if the rite is finalized while the vessel is under my absolute control—then I don't have to worry about a dragon in the ice. I will have a god I can wear like a suit of armor."

He signaled to the guards and two of them stepped forward, their gauntlets wreathed in flickering, orange solar-fire—the kind of heat that could sear through armor and bone alike.

"Bring him to the inner chamber. Prepare the ritual site."

I surged forward, a desperate, suicidal impulse to reach the Emperor’s throat, but the room buckled. A wave of force slammed into my chest, pinning me to the floor. The frost in my veins turned sluggish, turning from a weapon into a cage as the Emperor’s magic suppressed the spirit.

I was being dragged toward the back of the vault, my boots leaving long, pathetic furrows in the ice, when I saw her.

Liora.

She stood near the dais, her silk dress perfectly pressed, her eyes devoid of the warmth I had mistaken for humanity. My heart surged with a pathetic, desperate hope. 

She had seen me…she knew who I was. She was the only one in this court who had looked at me with anything approaching mercy.

"Liora!" I gasped, my voice breaking. "Please! You don't know what he's doing! He’s going to kill everything—he’s going to turn the world into a graveyard!"

The guards halted for a second, waiting for a royal intervention. I looked at her, searching for that flicker of curiosity, that light of kindness I had banked my entire existence on.

Liora didn't rush to my side. She didn't look at the guards with indignation. She looked at me with the indifference one might show a specimen in a glass jar, then, she turned her back on me.

She walked toward the Emperor, her movements graceful, practiced, and cold. She stopped beside him and bowed her head, a perfect picture of the dutiful, imperial daughter.

"I told you the stable boy was him," she said, her voice clear, steady, and utterly devoid of empathy. "He was easier to catch than I anticipated. The Vornic pride was always his greatest weakness."

She paused, then looked up at her father with a thin, sharp smile. "You owe me, Father. I want the archive keys for the Southern Sector."

The Emperor laughed—a low, satisfied sound that vibrated in the soles of my feet. "Done. You’ve done well, Liora. The hunt is over."

I felt the air leave my lungs, not from the magic, but from the crushing weight of the deception. The kindness, the conversations about my 'grandfather,' the concern for my cold—it wasn't a trap I had stumbled into. It was a hunt I had been led through by the person I had started to trust.

I hadn't been an accidental discovery, no. I had been a project from the day I survived the glacier attack.

As the guards hoisted me to my feet, dragging me toward the dark, yawning maw of the ritual chamber, I looked back one last time. Liora was already walking away, her pace brisk and efficient, her mind likely already on the next sector she would map, the next heir she would hunt.

The cold in my chest shifted. The dragon spirit stopped thrashing and it went silent, a sudden, terrifying stillness that felt like the bottom of a glacier. The fear was gone, replaced by a clarity so sharp it felt like a razor blade sliding behind my eyes.

They wanted me alive so I could be a vessel.

I leaned my head back, my eyes tracking the flickering torches on the walls, and I let the spirit settle. If they wanted a weapon, I would be the sharpest one they had ever forged.

But they had also forgotten the most important rule of the North: you can cage the frost, you can guide it, and you can even try to command it.

But you can never, ever stop it from freezing the hand that holds it.

The ritual chamber doors closed behind me, and I didn't scream. I just waited, the hunt was over, but the war was only just beginning.