Read Chapter 24: The Price of Truth

The white light around Elara’s arm pulsed with a warmth that had nothing to do with the freezing air of the altar chamber. Voss stood across from her, one hand pressed to the bleeding gash at her side, her smile a thin, bloodless line. The corrupted beast hammered against the tunnel behind her, each blow shaking dust from the ceiling.

“You think you understand sacrifice, girl?” Voss’s voice was hoarse but steady. “You think your little ward-light makes you brave?”

Elara’s fist tightened. The light coiled up to her elbow now, humming with a frequency she could feel in her teeth. Beside her, Cedric had drawn his sword, though his hand trembled. Sera was whispering something in a language Elara didn’t recognize, her eyes fixed on the altar’s carved surface. Anya stood near the far wall, close to the narrow fissure that led to the escape route she’d memorized hours ago.

“You murdered my parents,” Elara said. “You told me that to break me. But I’m still standing.”

Voss laughed, a dry, brittle sound. “I told you that because it’s true. But you’re right—there’s more. You want the whole truth, little spark? Then have it.”

She spread her arms wide, ignoring the blood soaking through her sleeve. The beast crashed against the tunnel mouth again, closer now. A stone chunk the size of a fist broke free and skittered across the floor.

“Every rider in that academy—every dragon chained to them—do you know why they’re dying? Why the sickness spreads even as my spell holds them together?” Voss’s eyes glittered in the ward-light’s glow. “Because there is no bond anymore. There hasn’t been for generations. I manufactured it. I stretched it, fed it, kept it alive with pulsing life-force drawn from the dragons themselves. Every day they spend ‘bound’ to their riders, they bleed. The bond you all worship is a leech.”

Elara’s stomach turned. She thought of Ignis—warm, fierce Ignis—who had flown her here on exhausted wings. Whose eyes had dimmed with fatigue that she’d blamed on the journey.

“You’re lying,” Cedric spat.

“Am I?” Voss tilted her head. “Ask your own dragon. He’s outside this mountain, isn’t he? Too weak to fight. Because I made him weak. I made all of them weak. And then I gave them to you, and you called it honor.”

Sera’s whispering stopped. Her face was pale, drawn. “She’s not lying,” Sera said quietly. “The wards here—they show me the truth of the anchor spell. It’s parasitic. It’s been parasitic for two hundred years.”

Elara’s breath caught. “Then why are they still alive at all? Why hasn’t it killed them?”

“Because I don’t want them dead,” Voss said, almost gently. “I want them mine. A dragon that serves freely is a liability. A dragon that serves because it has no choice—that is power. The sickness is the price of coercion. They wither under a bond that was never meant to reach so deep.”

The light coiled tighter around Elara’s arm, almost painfully. She looked down at it, at the white veins threading through her skin, and felt the altar humming beneath her feet. It knew her. It had known her parents.

“And me?” Elara asked, her voice low. “What am I to this?”

Voss’s smile returned, sharp and knowing. “You are the failsafe. The bloodline that could break it all—if you had the courage. The wards chose you because you are the last thread of the true bond, the one that was never enslaved. Your parents died trying to sever the spell. I stopped them. And now you stand in the same place, with the same choice.”

“What choice?”

“To break every bond. All of them. Yours included.” Voss took a step forward, and the beast roared behind her, a sound that shook the chamber. “Not just my chains—all chains. The dragons would be free. Truly free. But the spell that sustains the riders—that keeps them linked, alive, breathing in tandem with their mounts—it would collapse. Every rider would feel the rupture. Every dragon would be torn loose. Some would survive. Many would not.”

Elara’s heart slammed against her ribs. “You’re asking me to kill people.”

“I’m telling you the truth.” Voss’s voice was flat now, stripped of mockery. “The dragons are dying because they are caged by the bond itself. Your sudden heroics? Your little plan to purify the summit? It won’t work. The ritual doesn’t cleanse the sickness—it ends the bond. All bonds. And if you run from that, they continue to rot, slower but certain, until there are no dragons left at all.”

“She’s trying to manipulate you,” Anya said sharply from the corner. “She doesn’t want the bond broken either—she’s been feeding on it for centuries.”

Voss didn’t even glance at her. “She’s right. I don’t want it broken. I want it preserved—my way. But I’m also honest enough to tell you that your way will kill them. Choose freely, Elara. You wanted freedom for the dragons? There it is. The cost of real freedom is real loss.”

The corrupted beast’s claws scraped through the tunnel mouth. A massive, twisted head pushed through, jaws dripping black ichor. Voss raised a hand, and the beast paused, waiting.

Elara looked at the altar. The white light was no longer just around her arm—it was rising now, climbing toward her chest, pulsing with a rhythm that matched her heartbeat. The carvings beneath her feet glowed with answering light, and she felt the shape of something enormous beneath the mountain. Not a spell. A room. A vault. Something that had been sleeping here for centuries, waiting.

Sera stepped closer, her voice barely a whisper. “The ritual,” she breathed. “It’s not purification. It’s severance. The wards are keyed to your bloodline. You’re the key, Elara. You always were.”

The light reached her heart. And in that moment, Elara understood what the summit had been trying to tell her all along.

She looked at Voss. At the beast straining behind her. At Cedric, who was staring at her with desperation. At Anya, who had slid one hand back along the wall, ready to flee.

“You said the dragons are dying because they’re not free,” Elara said slowly. “You said my parents died trying to break it. And you said—if the bonds all break at once, riders will die.”

Voss nodded.

Elara’s hand closed over the white light around her chest. It burned cold, brighter than any flame.

“Then that’s the price.”

She drove her palm against the altar.

The world went white.