Page 57 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

The ash is cold between my fingers. I press it into the stone-gray planes of my forearms in long, deliberate strokes the way my father taught me. It dulls the natural sheen of my skin, strips away any surface that might catch torchlight and give an opponent the gift of my position. A small advantage. Stupid perhaps, given what waits for me at the cathedral altar come dawn.

But ritual is ritual, and I perform it because it is the only thing left that my hands know how to do without shaking.

The private chamber is quiet. Cold, bone-deep and patient and indifferent to whatever bleeds inside it.

I stretch my wings to their full span, feel the familiar pull across ancient scar tissue, joints popping like splitting granite. Months of renewed use and they still ache at full extension. Centuries of dormancy carved its price out of me and I’m only now fully counting.

Rival clans have filled the surrounding peaks like a slow tide of carrion birds. I felt them arrive through the stone itself—territorial vibrations, heavy wings beating the cold mountain air, the dull territorial pulse of foreign Alphas settling intoposition. They are not subtle. They are not meant to be. This is a performance of inevitability.

The Alpha who bonded to a human female. The Alpha who wept into her hair in the dark.

Weak. I hear it in every distant wingbeat. Compromised. Finished.

I balance on the cold granite edge of the chamber floor, testing my weight distribution the way I would before an aerial clash—center of gravity low, wings half-furled, ready. My body remembers this even when my mind is fracturing. That is the only mercy the centuries left me.

"You've been rubbing that same spot for the last ten minutes."

Sabine's voice cuts through the silence from the far corner where she sits cross-legged on the stone, wrapped in her heavy wool coat, watching me.

I glance down at my forearm. She is not wrong.

"Ritual requires precision," I say.

"Ritual requires you to sleep at some point before dawn."

"Gargoyles don’t sleep the night before a trial."

"Gargoyles also didn't used to take human mates, so clearly some traditions are negotiable."

The torchlight catches the silver markings along her collarbone, the ones the bond carved into her skin like a claim written in starlight. She looks exhausted.

She is my anchor. The only fixed point in a world that has been tilting since the moment I opened my eyes to her blood.

Tomorrow that will be used against me.

I return to the ash.

My old commanderanchors himself at the chamber entrance with the crushing weight of a soldier hauling a death sentence.Vorgrym halts inside the room. He cradles a cloth-wrapped object in both hands, his reverence chilling my blood before he even speaks.

"Tell me," I say.

He unwraps it slowly. A drakestone signet—small, hexagonal, carved with the double-wing crest of the Ashwing high command. Beneath it, a folded strip of ancient hide covered in script that predates the cathedral construction by at least two generations.

"Where?" I ask.

"Sealed behind the ironwork of the inner gate. Inside the cavern wall." Vorgrym's voice is flat. "Deliberately mortared into the gap after the gate was locked."

He sets it down on the stone between us. "The signet belongs to Commander Rael."

Rael, who stood at my right during border campaigns before Vorgrym. Rael, who trained half the warriors still sleeping beneath this mountain. Rael, who carried hatchlings through a blizzard on the northern ridge the winter before the festival.

"The script is a correspondence," Vorgrym continues. "Between Rael and Sevrik Mourne. The arrangement began three seasons before the massacre. Rael agreed to seal the inner gate from within and breach the sulfur pocket in exchange for"—he exhales once through his nose—"for regional dominance. His own territory. Carved from what would remain of ours once Tharros had finished."

I hear every word.

I understand every word.

It is not rage. Rage I know. Rage is a clean thing, a heat that moves through the body and burns out the edges of grief before it can calcify. This is not that. This is the sensation of stone turning brittle from within. A slow, invisible fracturing along fault lines I didn't know existed.