Zabina
The dream returns.
As it always does. As it has never truly left me.
I'm climbing the steps. Each one echoes in a silence that weighs too heavily. At the top, the figure of the dragon with outstretched wings watches me with stone eyes. Everything is dark. The kind of darkness that casts no shadows because there's nothing to create them.
My mother is on the altar.
The priests surround her in their white robes, murmuring something ancient that makes my skin crawl. She turns her face toward me.
"Run," she whispers. "Run, Zabina."
Someone raises the dagger.
Brings it down.
I wake with a choked gasp.
The ceiling is high and made of dark stone. The torches burn with a steady light that doesn't flicker. My shoulder aches, but the wound is bandaged.
I sit up slowly in the bed.
I'm alone.
Where am I?
I try to stand and fall to my knees. I crawl toward the balcony, and when I reach the wall, I steady myself and rise with effort.
I'm definitely not in the castle.
I find the door and walk slowly toward it.
The hallway is empty.
I move forward, not knowing exactly where I'm going, following something that isn't a sound but a pressure, a call coming from deep within this unsettling place, as if something in its depths knows I'm here and has been waiting for me.
I must be in some kind of temple.
But what am I doing here?
I run a hand through my hair and grab a lock of it.
My eyes widen.
It's white. In its natural form.
But…?
The last thing I remember is Abisai being by my side.
Where are you?
I descend some steps, leaning against the rocky wall.
I turn down a narrower, colder corridor.
And then I hear them.
A chorus of voices. Almost angelic. Soft, pure, beautiful. They sing in a language I don't understand, but my blood recognizes. They call me. Draw me in. Promise me answers.
I follow the sound.
The gem on my chest glows. It's turned scarlet.
The steps lead me deeper. The hallway narrows. The air grows colder. The voices become clearer, more insistent, like a chant that seeps into my mind and won't let me think of anything else.
I arrive in front of a tall bronze door.
It's slightly ajar.
The air that escapes is icy and smells of something I recognize without knowing from where. Like the scent of something deeply loved that has been lost for a long time.
I push the door open.
The chamber is circular and tall.
The walls are covered with niches carved into the stone, dozens, hundreds of them, arranged in rows that stretch up beyond the light. And in each niche, resting on dark stone, there is a gem.
All of them dark.
All of them lifeless. Like eyes closed forever.
My knees give out.
I fall to the floor, unable to stop myself, my hands splayed on the ground as I try to contain the agitation growing in my chest.
And then the voices explode.
They're no longer angelic. They're desperate. Furious. Painful.
Thousands of voices of white dragons, silent for two hundred years, all speaking at once inside my head.
I cover my ears and scream. My ears bleed from the pressure.
"They tore out our light."
"They hunted us like beasts."
"They took everything from us."
"Revenge."
"Revenge."
"Give us revenge."
The images strike me without mercy.
A silver dragon running across the rooftops of a burning village with a hatchling in her claws.
An old man kneeling in the snow with his hand on his empty chest.
A young woman watching the sky as the light slowly, slowly fades from her until there's nothing left.
Families burning.
Children crying.
Black dragons. Humans. Demons.
All of them after the gem. All of them guilty.
I sob into my hands. I can't stop it. Their stories, their pain, their rage accumulated over two centuries — it all falls on me at once.
Why?
Then the voices change. They grow darker, more demanding.
"Traitor."
"Traitor. Traitor. Traitor."
"No," I whisper.
"You slept in the black dragon's bed. You let him mark you. You gave away your light."
"It's not true," I say, but my voice comes out broken.
"Look at yourself."
I lower my eyes to my arms.
Dark, living symbols climb from my wrists, growing as I watch them, reminding me with every heartbeat of what happened and what I am now.
A scream gets stuck in my throat.
I stand with trembling hands. I take a step back. Then another.
The voices continue, and I want to leave, want to run, but something stops me.
That same pressure from before, that call that isn't a sound but something older.
I turn.
And I see it.
In a niche in the far wall, smaller than the others, as dark as all the rest, there's a gem that calls to me without words. With recognition.
With something that has been waiting my entire life for me to come here.
I walk toward it.
My fingers brush against it.
And in that touch, the vision hits me without warning.
The stone temple. The priests. My mother on the altar, just like in the dream, surrounded by white robes and forgotten incantations.
But this time, I see something the dream had never shown me before.
A child.
Twelve years old, maybe. Dark hair tousled over his forehead. Dark, terrified eyes of someone doing something he knows he shouldn't but believes he has no other choice. His trembling hands hold something small and cold.
A dagger.
I recognise it.
And it destroys me in a way no arrow, no hunt, no year of loneliness ever could.
Abisai.
The child is Abisai.
I watch him step toward my mother with the dagger in his hand. I watch him plunge the blade into her chest. I watch him tear the gem from her with fingers that don't tremble and cold eyes as her lips form a single word that never leaves them.
The gem in my hand suddenly turns ice-cold.
I drop to my knees on the chamber floor, unable to breathe, unable to think, with my mother's gem clutched between my fingers.
"You weren't supposed to see this."
Vacul's voice comes from the doorway.
I don't move.
I can't.
I only tighten my grip on my mother's gem.