I Spent My Last Night in His Arms Before Sacrificing Myself at Dawn

The wind that swept across the battlements of Aretia carried the first real chill of autumn, a biting cold that had nothing to do with the season. It smelled of ozone and something else, something acrid and wrong that clung to the back of the throat. Below, the valley was a patchwork of defiant green, but my eyes were fixed on the horizon, searching for the specks that would become dragons.

They are close, Silver One, Tairn’s voice rumbled in my mind, a low thrum of agitation that vibrated through my bones. And they are wounded.

Andarna added a faint, worried pulse to the bond, a flicker of anxiety that was entirely her own.

The first of the scout wings appeared moments later, three dragons flying in a ragged formation that spoke of exhaustion. They were not soaring; they were fighting the air for every foot of altitude. As they drew closer, I saw what Tairn had already sensed. The sun glinted off the scales of a large brown, but the light was interrupted by jagged, black gashes along its flank and wing. From this distance, it looked as though the dragon had been coated in tar that dripped in thick, sluggish lines, staining the air behind it.

Xaden stood beside me, silent. The gray light of the overcast sky did little to soften the hard lines of his face. His hand rested on the pommel of the black blade at his hip, his knuckles white. I could feel the shift before I saw it, the way the shadows in the alcove behind us deepened, gathering at his feet and churning like smoke over boiling water. A low, guttural sound of fury escaped his throat.

The lead dragon, a green piloted by a fourth-year named Kaia, stumbled as it landed in the courtyard below. Its landing was a controlled crash, its talons scraping stone with a sound that set my teeth on edge. Kaia practically fell from her saddle, her face pale and streaked with grime. She ignored the healers rushing toward her and her dragon, her eyes locking on us.

“General Riorson! Wingleader Sorrengail!” Her voice was raw, breaking over our titles.

We were down in the courtyard before she finished speaking, the wind whipping my silver-braided hair across my face. The smell was stronger here. Metallic and foul. I looked at the green’s wounds. The black substance that oozed from them wasn’t clotting. It was actively eating at the edges of the scales, a creeping corruption that was sickening to behold.

“Report,” Xaden commanded, his voice dangerously level.

Kaia swallowed, her gaze darting toward the blighted horizon she’d just fled. “It’s a new leader. We never saw him, just his power. He doesn’t just draw from the earth. He… drains it. The ground turns to gray dust. Trees wither in seconds. We flew over a river, and the water was just gone. It’s a dead zone, sir. And it’s spreading.” She took a shuddering breath. “Our dragons… the wounds won’t heal. The magic is wrong. It’s a poison that drains life.”

A cold dread, sharp and absolute, coiled in my stomach. This was a power beyond anything we had faced. A weapon that didn't just kill, but erased. Beside me, Xaden’s shadows writhed, no longer confined to his feet but climbing his legs, twisting around his arms like living things. His rage was a palpable force, a cold wave that washed over me, but it did nothing to warm the ice forming in my own veins. We were watching the world die, one blighted patch of land at a time.

Force was not enough. We could throw every rider, every dragon, every bit of steel we possessed at that creeping blight, and it would consume them all. Xaden’s rage was a wildfire, but this was a flood, patient and absolute. It couldn’t be fought; it had to be stopped at its source. While the healers worked frantically on the dying green dragon and Xaden began barking orders for new patrol routes, I turned away. There were no answers in the courtyard, only more questions and the stench of decay.

I found my way to the Archives, the heavy wooden doors closing behind me with a soft thud that sealed out the rising panic. Here, the air was still and cool, thick with the dry, sweet scent of aging paper and leather. It was the smell of history, of accumulated knowledge, and it was the only comfort I could find. Dust motes danced in the thin beams of light slanting from the high, narrow windows.

Jesinia was already there, a stack of scrolls at her elbow, her brow furrowed in concentration. She looked up as I approached, her expression grim. “I heard the scouts returned.”

“It’s worse than we thought,” I said, my voice low. I pulled a heavy tome from a nearby shelf, its cover worn smooth with time. “They have a new leader. The power he’s using… it’s like a plague. It drains the life from everything, and the wounds it inflicts don’t heal. They fester.”

“A corruption of life-draining magic,” she murmured, her gaze distant. “The old texts are filled with warnings, but nothing so specific. Nothing on this scale.”

For hours, we worked in near silence, the only sounds the whisper of turning pages and the scratch of Jesinia’s quill as she translated passages from the ancient dialects. The initial dread had settled into a grim, methodical focus. We searched for anything: accounts of similar blights, forgotten signets, rituals of purification. Every path led to a dead end, another story of a battle won with swords and fire, tactics that were useless against an enemy who could turn the very ground beneath our feet to ash.

My hope was beginning to fray, thinning into the same gray dust Kaia had described. I was rubbing my tired eyes when Jesinia made a small sound, a sharp intake of breath.

“Violet, look at this.”

I moved to her side, leaning over the crumbling manuscript she had carefully laid open. The script was archaic, the ink faded, and part of the page had been eaten away by time. She pointed a slender finger at a specific passage.

“I can only make out fragments,” she said, “but it speaks of the First Rider. Not Warrick, but the one before the histories were unified. It mentions a relic… the ‘Cor Cordis Primi Equitis.’”

“The Heart of the First Rider,” I translated, my pulse quickening.

“It says it can… magnify a rider’s gift.” She squinted, tracing the faint lines of the next sentence. “The words are difficult, but the meaning seems to be an amplification… a thousand times over.”

A thousand-fold. The thought slammed into me with physical force. My lightning, amplified a thousand times. I could scour the blight from the entire border. I could incinerate the venin leader from a mile away. For the first time in weeks, a flicker of genuine hope ignited in my chest, fierce and bright.

“But there’s more,” Jesinia said, her voice dropping. She pointed to the last visible line on the fragment, a sentence that was starkly clear despite the decay around it. “It carries a warning.”

I read the words aloud, my own voice sounding foreign and distant. “The power comes at an unbearable toll.”

The words hung in the stale air of the Archives, a chilling counterpoint to the sudden, wild hope in my chest. An unbearable toll. Jesinia and I stared at the fragment, but the answers weren’t there. The rest of the page was gone, lost to damp and time, leaving only the promise and the threat.

An hour later, I stood before the assembly in the war room. The mood was grim, the faces around the large stone table etched with fatigue and a creeping despair that mirrored the blight on the horizon. Brennan was there, along with Imogen, Bodhi, and the other ranking officers of the revolution. Xaden stood at the head of the table, his arms crossed over his chest, his expression unreadable.

I placed the translated fragment on the table, my hand surprisingly steady. “We’ve found something,” I began, my voice carrying in the sudden silence. “An old text, pre-unification. It speaks of a relic called the Heart of the First Rider.”

I explained what we’d learned, focusing on the amplification. “It is said to magnify a rider’s signet a thousand times over.”

A wave of murmurs swept the room. Desperate eyes lifted, faces filled with a dawning, fragile hope. A thousand-fold… it was a power that could turn the tide. A power that could win.

“It’s a myth,” Xaden said. His voice was flat, cutting through the rising optimism like a shard of ice. Every head turned to him. “A fairy tale written in a dead language on a piece of rotted parchment. We’re not betting the fate of this valley on a ghost story.”

“It’s more than we had an hour ago,” I countered, meeting his gaze across the table. The shadows around him were still, but I could feel the tension radiating from him, a warning I refused to heed.

“The text mentions a warning, does it not, Sorrengail?” he pressed, his use of my surname a deliberate distancing. “An ‘unbearable toll’?”

“Every day we send scouts out to face that blight is a toll,” I shot back, my voice rising slightly. “Every dragon that returns with wounds that will not heal is a toll. We are already paying, Xaden. This is a chance to stop it.”

“By chasing a legend into the unknown?” He pushed off from the wall, his movements slow, deliberate, and full of menace. “We don’t know what this ‘toll’ is. We don’t know if this relic even exists. What we do know is that the venin are at our border, and our focus should be on the fight in front of us, not some quest for a magical solution.”

“Your solution is to throw bodies at them until we run out!” a captain from the infantry snapped, his desperation making him bold. “Sorrengail is offering a weapon. A real weapon.”

The room divided instantly, voices rising in a cacophony of desperate hope and cautious fear. Brennan looked from me to Xaden, his face a mask of conflict.

“Violet,” Xaden said, his voice dropping low, for my ears only, though the entire room fell silent to listen. “I will not let you do this.”

The possessiveness in his tone, the sheer command, ignited a fire in my gut. “You will not let me?” I stepped forward, closing the distance between us until I could see the fury and the raw fear warring in his dark eyes. “My power is the strongest weapon we have, and you know it. This relic could make it the only weapon we need. I will not be sidelined while our world burns because you’re afraid.”

“I am trying to keep you alive!” His control finally broke, his voice a low roar that vibrated through the stone floor. The shadows around him erupted, coiling and snapping in the air.

“And I am trying to keep everyone alive,” I retorted, my hands clenched into fists at my sides. “That includes you. This is not your decision to make.”

His jaw tightened, a muscle jumping in his cheek. He looked at me as if I were a stranger, his eyes cold and hard. The hope that had filled the room moments before had curdled into a tense, suffocating silence. The chasm between us was no longer a quiet, unspoken thing. It was a gaping wound, torn open for all to see.