Frostbound Dragon's heir

CHAPTER 9

The morning of the Emperor’s inspection arrived with a brutal, sun-drenched clarity that felt like a mockery. Oros was transformed into a city of gold and noise, the streets choked with citizens cheering for the man who had orchestrated the erasure of my family. 

I moved through the crowd like a freezing blade in a velvet sheath.

Theo had provided the decoy—a masterfully crafted replica of the Binding Chain, weighted with lead and etched with runes that mimicked the dragon-steel’s aura.

It was a brilliant forgery, but it wouldn't hold the truth. It would only hold the gaze of the Emperor for long enough for me to vanish.

"Remember," Theo whispered as we stood in the shadow of the Repository’s outer colonnade, his voice barely cutting through the blare of imperial trumpets. "You are not a warrior today, you are a shadow, boy. If you react, if you let the spirit break the surface, you won't just die—you’ll be a cautionary tale for the next century of students."

"I know," I muttered.

My left hand was screaming with a white-hot agony that defied the fact that the flesh was frozen solid. The Binding Chain, still wrapped beneath my tunic, was vibrating against my ribs.

The procession began, a suffocating display of power: Sunfire legionnaires in armor so bright it pained the eyes, trailing a carriage of obsidian and solar-glass. And then, he stepped out.

The Emperor.

He was older than I remembered from that night in the glacier, his face etched with deeper lines, his hair a shock of premature white, but the eyes—those cold, calculating holes—were identical. 

As he began to walk toward the Repository entrance, the world around me seemed to warp. My memory of the massacre shifted into the present: the smell of blood, the screams, the sight of his boot pressing into my mother’s cooling body.

He stopped a few feet from me to address the Repository High Proctor. As he turned, his profile was illuminated by the harsh, unfiltered light of the sun. My fists clenched as my gaze lingered. It wasn't just a royal decree that had destroyed my house; it was him! This man’s personal cruelty.

The dragon spirit within me sensed the prey and a low growl rumbled throughout my entire body.

The floor began to frost.

It started as a fine, crystalline rime, invisible to the jubilant crowd, but it was spreading rapidly. The stone tiles beneath my feet turned a brittle, deathly white, the temperature around me plummeting until the air shimmered with the extreme cold.

"Evander?"

The voice was soft, hesitant. I jerked my head up. Liora was standing not up to ten feet away, her eyes fixed on me. She wasn't looking at the Emperor, she was looking at my face—and for the first time, she saw the boy who had been buried under three days of glacier-ice. She saw the void where my humanity used to be.

The color drained from her face. She stepped back, her hand moving to her throat, her gaze darting from the spreading ice around my boots to the frozen, mask-like rage on my face. 

In that moment, with a sinking feeling of panic, I realized that she knew. She didn't know what I was, but she knew that the grounds-keeper she’d been kind to had ceased to exist.

I ignored her with an effort. At this point, I couldn't afford to care. The Emperor was moving toward the vault entrance, flanked by his personal guard. The path was open for me and I couldn’t be distracted.

I fell into the flow of the laborers, clutching the decoy chain beneath my cloak. The crowd surged as the Emperor reached the threshold, and in the crush, I moved in quickly. I went in like a liquid, moving through the gaps, my presence strangely overlooked, as if the cold radiating from me made people subconsciously shy away.

I reached the pedestal finally. The real Binding Chain had been moved to a temporary display stand for the "official inspection." In the chaos of the security detail repositioning for the Emperor’s arrival, I had a window of exactly three heartbeats.

I moved with the fluid, unnatural speed of the spirit. One hand swapped the weight while the other snatched the true relic. The decoy hit the velvet with a dull, heavy thud, and the real chain vanished into my tunic, instantly cooling the fire in my chest.

Success!

I turned to slip away, my pulse hammering a frantic, triumphant thump against my ribs. I had the anchor and now had the proof. I just needed to reach the side gate where Theo was waiting.

But then, the world stopped.

The Emperor, who had been listening to the High Proctor drone on about historical preservation, suddenly stopped mid-sentence. He dragged his gaze away from the Proctor and looked straight at the vault.

He turned his head, his gaze sweeping across the room with the casual precision of a predator, and locked onto mine.

The crowd seemed to fade in that instant. The sounds of the city, the trumpets, the armored guards—it all dissolved into a dull, distant roar. The Emperor’s face didn't hold the surprise of a man confronted by a thief, nor the anger of a king confronted by a rebel.

He simply smiled.

It was a slow, terrifying expression that didn't reach his eyes—a smile of pure, patient anticipation, as if he’d been sitting in a trap waiting for the bait to trigger.

He didn't move his lips, and he didn't raise his voice to be heard over the room. He simply tilted his head, his eyes boring into mine, and whispered a single sentence that sliced through the noise like a sharp piece of ice.

"Hello, little Vornic."

My blood turned to ice. The frost, which had been confined to my boots, erupted. A violent, uncontrolled surge of power ripped from my lungs, coating the entire pedestal in a thick sheet of ice.

The room erupted in shouts of panic and The Sunfire guards turned, their blades erupting into solar-flame, and I stood there, trapped in the center of the vault with the most powerful man in the world watching me like I was a toy he’d finally decided to break.

The chain against my ribs vibrated, not in fear, but in recognition. It wanted to be used at that moment for destruction. And as the guards closed in, their armor glowing with the heat that had killed my brother, I realized that the Emperor wasn't hunting a dragon.

He was herding one.