Page 61 of Bonded By Stone & Blood
The drakestone chains shatter.
And I am gone.
Irreversibly falling over the edge. The part of me that reasons, that considers, that holds the line between ruler and ruin folds inward like paper and a form of darkness unfurls in its place. I feel my skin shift. Feel the midnight crawl from my core outward—up through my chest, over my throat, across my jaw—turning every inch of me dark as the space between stars.
My vision bleeds out. When it returns, everything living blazes slate-blue and trembling against the cold cathedral dark, mapped in heat and heartbeat and threat.
I start moving.
The first two don't register me until my fist passes through the chest of one and my wing snaps the jaw off the other. The crack of cartilage is loud. A satisfying sound that disgusts whatever is left of me that can still feel disgust. It barely fades before I have another by the wing joint—the thick socket where the membrane anchors to the shoulder—and I pull. It gives witha tearing pop that silences the gargoyle mid-scream. I drop him. Step over him.
The vanguard breaks apart. They scatter and regroup and scatter again. It doesn't matter.
I am not hunting. I am erasing.
My palms strike the nearest gothic arch. The ancient earth magic doesn't ask permission anymore. It moves the moment I move, pouring out through my talons in concussive waves that ripple through the cathedral stone like I am its heartbeat and it has been waiting centuries for this exact permission.
The arch collapses. Then the buttress beside it. Six gargoyles vanish beneath the rubble in a single rolling shockwave, and the sound is enormous—a grinding, catastrophic groan that shakes the mountain itself. Dust and frost plume into the black sky like exhaled breath.
I don’t slow down.
I crush a skull with my left hand. Bite down through a wing membrane with my teeth. Drive my elbow backward into a collarbone trying to flank me and feel it powder on impact. The smell is everywhere—burning blood, ozone, the acrid chemical bite of snapped drakestone, and underneath all of it, underneath everything?—
Sabine.
Her blood.
Still warm. Still here.
I pivot toward the altar and that is when I see him.
Tharros.
He is panicking. I can read it in the heat map of him—the frantic flare at his chest, the way his wings pull tight and asymmetrical. His trap has become a slaughterhouse.
Tharros is raising his war-blade over Sabine's kneeling, bleeding body with both hands.
The terror that hits me belongs to the part of me that remembers a different darkness—a sealed cavern, screaming that went on for days. Hatchlings. My sister. My family. My warriors. Everyone I could not reach through the stone and the sulfur and the crushing, suffocating weight of a mountain I trusted.
Everyone I held and lost because I was not fast enough.
Not this time. I hit him like something falling from orbit.
We explode off the altar platform together—stone cracking beneath the launch point, bodies slamming through the cathedral's remaining upper wall and into the open freezing air beyond.
The blizzard swallows us immediately. Wind like a blade, snow like ground glass, and Tharros roaring against my throat as we tumble upward into the clouds. I don’t let go.
We punch through the first cloud layer together.
Then the second.
He bites into my shoulder. Finds the old scar tissue from the massacre—deep, badly healed. I barely feel it. I slam him sideways into the cliff face and the impact shudders through the granite and through him and through me and he loses his grip. I catch his wing before he can recover his flight. I fold it wrong.
He screams.
We fall thirty feet before his instincts kick in and he rights himself, and then we are fighting again—mid-air in a blizzard above a shattered cathedral, two Alphas who have circled each other for centuries finally with no more politics between them. He claws for my eyes and nearly reaches them. He spins inside my grip and slams his horns against my jaw and my vision ceases out for half a second.
Half a second is all he gets.
