The council chamber smelled of rust and rotting silk.
Kael Draven stood beneath the stained-glass sigil of his house — a crown ringed in thorns, dripping crimson — and tried not to flinch as the screams echoed from the dungeons below. Another "witch" burned. Another rebel silenced. Another offering to the curse they still pretended wasn't real.
At the far end of the hall, King Vaeron, the Blood Throne himself, lounged on his iron seat with a goblet of something far too warm. His black eyes glittered like obsidian.
> "They say it was fire," the king said slowly. "Real fire. Golden. Alive."
Kael kept his face still. "We've seen wild magic before. Desperate peasants throwing powders in the air—"
> "No," interrupted High Priest Mourn, voice dry as parchment. "This was drákari fire. The old kind. The cursed kind. The kind we buried three centuries ago."
A hush fell. Even the flames in the sconces dimmed.
Kael's pulse stirred — not with fear. With something colder.
> The dragons are gone. They must be gone.
But the scent of scorched steel and shattered sky had traveled faster than any scout. A border village in the west, Ashgrave, burned in seconds. Royal troops turned to ash. Survivors raved about a girl, her eyes lit with gold, her voice filled with storm.
> "We'll send the Nighthunters," said King Vaeron. "She is to be captured. Bled. Studied."
"And if she's not alone?" Kael asked, softer than he meant to. "What if there are more like her?"
The king only smiled, revealing teeth like daggers.
> "Then we finish what we started three hundred years ago."
Kael left the chamber before they could chain another rebel to the altar.
The castle hallways were empty, but shadows followed him like ghosts. Blood lanterns flickered along the stone walls, glowing faintly red with the life drained from the prison cells below. Every drop a secret. Every secret a curse.
He ducked into the Hall of Names, a long corridor carved with the bloodlines of the vampire kings. His name was etched near the bottom — Kael Vaeron Draven, Crowned Prince of Eternal Night.
He hated it.
Behind a torn velvet curtain, a hidden door led to a forbidden room. One only he and the seers ever entered.
Inside, Kael kept a mirror. One that didn't show vampires. Only blood. And sometimes, truth.
He lit a single candle. Whispered the ancient phrase in dragon-tongue — a language he was never meant to know.
> "Tairas vul'dari. Reveal what sleeps beneath the skin."
The mirror shimmered.
For a moment, Kael saw himself not as a prince, but as something else. Eyes filled with flame. Wings in his shadow. Blood that pulsed not with hunger… but with memory.
> Dragonblood.
> You are not what you think.
And then the image vanished — just as the scream of a raven split the sky.
A message arrived, bound in black bone.
Kael broke the seal.
> "The girl is headed east. Toward the ruins of Verath. The dragon temple. She is alive."
> "And her blood burns."