Read Chapter 26: The Third Turn

The infirmary tent smelled of blood and burnt ozone. Elara lay on a cot too narrow for the wings of memory that still beat inside her chest, and every breath she took was a lesson in absence.

Ignis was not there.

She knew this the way she knew her own heartbeat. The space where his warmth had lived was hollow now—a socket where a tooth had been ripped out, raw and smarting. She reached for him across the miles, the way she had done a hundred times, a thousand times, and found nothing but the silence of open sky.

"Easy," Sera said, pressing a cool cloth to Elara's forehead. Her hands were steady, but her eyes were not. "You've been unconscious for two days. Your body needs—"

"Where is he?"

Sera's jaw tightened. "South. We tracked him as far as the Riftwater. He's... wild, Elara. Not hostile, but not himself. He doesn't respond to any call."

Elara tried to sit up. Pain lanced through her ribs, and she remembered the fall, the crash of stone, the moment the ward's white light had torn through her chest and ripped the bond out by the roots. She remembered Ignis's scream. She remembered choosing him anyway.

"He'll come back," she said, and even she could hear the lie in it.

Sera didn't answer. She didn't have to.

The tent flap rustled, and Cedric ducked inside. His face was pale beneath its grime, his arm bound in a sling, but he moved with purpose. He looked at Elara, then at Sera, and something passed between them that made Elara's stomach clench.

"What?" she demanded. "What's happened?"

Cedric pulled up a stool and sat heavily. "It's not what's happened. It's what's happening." He paused, gathering himself. "The severing worked—Voss's spell is broken, her corruption shattered. But the ritual you started on the altar... it's incomplete."

Elara blinked. "I thought—the light—I channeled it. I broke the bonds."

"You broke *riders'* bonds to their dragons. That was the blade that cut Voss's puppet strings. But the spell beneath it—the one that's been draining the dragons for decades—that was tied to the summit's own heart." Sera knelt beside the cot, her voice dropping low. "The ward recognized your bloodline because it was *built* for your bloodline. Your ancestors laid the foundation of this binding. And now that it's been half-untied, it's unraveling."

"Slowly," Cedric added. "But not slowly enough. Sera's been tracking the surviving dragons through her own fractured bond. They're weakening. Not from Voss's spell anymore—from the ritual itself. If it's not completed, every dragon on the continent will fade into stillness within a fortnight."

The words hit Elara like a physical blow. A fortnight. In her mind's eye, she saw the orphaned mounts in the academy stables, the wild herds in the northern crags, the ancient matriarchs who had outlived empires. All of them, dying. Because she had reached for a light she didn't understand.

"Complete it," she said. "Tell me how."

Sera shook her head slowly. "The ritual doesn't take *a* bloodline. It takes *the* bloodline. The one that started it." She met Elara's eyes. "Your parents were killed because they refused to finish what their own ancestors began. Voss didn't want the ritual completed—she wanted it *exploited*. She wanted the bond-power without the cost."

"What cost?"

"The bond," Cedric said quietly. "The ritual requires the sacrifice of a bonded pair." He looked at the empty space above Elara's head, as if expecting a dragon to be there. "A rider must give up their dragon willingly. Their bond must be severed on the altar, in the presence of the ward. That break is what frees the magic to rebalance."

Elara laughed. It came out broken, jagged. "I already did that."

"No." Sera's voice was gentle, too gentle. "You severed the bond to *save* your dragon. But the ritual requires a bond severed in *trust*—a rider releasing their dragon with full knowledge that the dragon will choose to leave. It's not a wound. It's a choice."

The hollow in Elara's chest pulsed with fresh fire. "Ignis didn't choose to leave. He was ripped from me. I did that to him."

"And in doing so, you proved your worth to the ward." Sera gestured at Elara's chest, where the white light had once coiled. Faint threads of it still glimmered beneath her torn shirt, pulsing like a second heartbeat. "It marked you. That light—it's not just power. It's a claim. The ward chose you as its hand."

"So I can finish the ritual."

"You can. If you have a bond to sacrifice." Cedric leaned forward, his voice rough. "But you can't bond with a wild dragon, Elara. Bonds aren't one-directional. He has to choose you back. And right now, he doesn't even know himself."

Elara closed her eyes. The darkness behind her lids was vast and empty, and she tried to find Ignis in it—the flicker of his fire, the weight of his presence. Nothing. Just miles and miles of nothing.

"How do I find him?" she asked.

Sera exchanged a look with Cedric. "Aldric thinks he knows. There's something in the old records—a place dragons go when they're unmoored. Not a lair, not a nest. A *proving ground*. If Ignis is there, he'll be beyond any call you could make. You'd have to go yourself."

"Then I go."

"You can barely stand," Cedric said flatly.

"I don't need to stand." Elara swung her legs over the cot anyway, ignoring the screaming protest of her muscles. "I need to walk. To climb. To find him." She looked at her friends, at the hope and fear warring in their faces, and felt something harden in her chest. "I burned our bond to ashes to save him. I can't leave him out there, wild and alone. I can't let every dragon in the world die because I was too afraid to try again."

Sera opened her mouth to argue, but Elara cut her off.

"If the ritual needs a willing sacrifice, then I'll make it willingly. I'll find Ignis. I'll ask him to choose me again—or to choose to leave me forever as a gift to his kind." She rose, swaying, and gripped the tent pole for support. "Either way, I finish this. One way or another, the dragons survive."

Cedric stared at her for a long moment. Then he nodded slowly, the ghost of a smile tugging at his lips. "You're either the bravest person I know or the most insane."

"Both," Sera said, but she was already gathering her kit, checking bandages and salves, preparing for a journey none of them fully understood.

Elara looked past them, out through the tent opening, to the pale sky where a wild dragon's silhouette ought to be. The ache in her chest was enormous, vast as the distance between them.

She would cross it anyway.