Chapter 2 The Crown’s Bait
The chains came off at dawn.
Kaelin blinked against the cold light pouring into the cell as guards unlocked her shackles. Her wrists were raw, skin blistered where the warding sigils had burned through flesh.
“Up,” one snapped.
Kaelin rose without a word. Every step sent sparks of pain up her spine, but she kept her head high. The worst thing you could give a prince or any noble was your fear.
They led her through corridors of blackstone and obsidian, where gold-threaded banners of the Crown’s dragon sigil hung like silent witnesses. The palace reeked of old smoke and sanctified blood. Every torch was fitted with dragonfire crystals the same relics the empire had ripped from living beasts.
At the end of the hall, great double doors opened to the war chamber.
A map of Varelia burned across the center table, glowing lines of light marking rebel territories, old dragon roosts, and the broken frontier known as the Ashlands.
Prince Ardyn stood before it, his back to her. When he turned, the morning sun caught on his armora gleam of forged gold and molten silver.
“Kaelin Dravyr,” he said, voice smooth as smoke. “Welcome to the service of the Crown.”
“I didn’t agree to serve you,” she replied.
He smiled faintly. “You did when you chose life over death.”
Her jaw tightened. “I chose to wait for a better chance to kill you.”
The guards tensed, but Ardyn only laughed a soft, unsettling sound. “Good. I prefer soldiers who still have teeth.”
He gestured to the map. “Our intelligence reports an uprising in the southern Ashlands. Rebels call themselves the Ashwing Order. They’ve taken refuge near the ruins of Fyrhold the last dragon city.”
Kaelin’s pulse quickened. Fyrhold. She’d heard the name whispered by relic smugglers, always with reverence and fear. A city said to lie buried under mountains of glass, where dragons fell when the skies first burned.
Ardyn continued, “You’ll go there. Infiltrate their ranks. Earn their trust. I want their leader Taren Voss alive. And I want their relics.”
Kaelin stared. “You’re sending me into a rebellion that kills anyone with magic, to spy for the man who burns them.”
“Precisely,” he said. “They’ll never suspect you’re mine.”
She barked a hollow laugh. “I’m not yours.”
Ardyn stepped closer, eyes catching light like a blade’s edge. “You will be. Every ember answers its flame, Kaelin. And I am your fire.”
He reached out, brushing a finger against the sigil at her throat. Pain shot through her chest as the mark burned beneath his touch her fire reacting to his.
Kaelin gasped and stumbled back.
“Your bond is unstable,” he said softly. “Defy me, and that fire will consume you from within.”
“Then I’ll burn,” she hissed.
He smiled, almost tender. “Not yet.”
They gave her clothes a fitted set of dark leathers, reinforced with steel stitching and the faint shimmer of dragon glass. Her old blade, blackened from the duel, waited beside them.
As she strapped it on, a guard approached with a small silver pendant the same sigil the prince had used to burn her mark.
“Keep it close,” the guard muttered. “It will track you.”
Kaelin arched a brow. “You mean control me.”
He looked away. “Same thing, in this empire.”
By dusk, she was mounted on a sleek black drake-steed, flying east beyond the palace walls.
Coalspire faded behind her, its smokestacks stabbing at the horizon like the bones of dead giants. The wind cut through her hair, sharp and cold. The city below shimmered with emberlight the glow of industry built on dragon corpses.
Everywhere she looked, she saw reminders of what her kind had lost: relic forges powered by scales, soldiers wielding dragonbone spears, banners woven from shed wings.
Varelia didn’t just kill dragons. It fed on them.
Kaelin gripped the reins tighter, jaw clenched. If she had her way, she’d see it all burn.
She reached the Blackridge Pass by nightfall, where the empire’s control thinned and the Ashlands began. The mountains loomed like sleeping beasts, their peaks glimmering faintly with veins of crystalized fire ancient dragonfire frozen mid-breath.
She set up camp in the shadow of a broken watchtower. The air here tasted different wilder, unchained.
As she unrolled her blanket, a voice echoed from the darkness.
“You’re far from the Pits, Emberborn.”
Kaelin spun, blade drawn, flame flickering along the edge.
A man stepped into view tall, cloaked, face half-hidden by a scarf. His left arm was wrapped in bandages that shimmered faintly red beneath the cloth. His eyes, when they met hers, glowed like dying coals.
“Taren Voss,” she said before she could stop herself.
He tilted his head. “So the prince’s hound knows my name.”
“Then the prince’s hound must not be very good at hiding,” she snapped.
He smiled slightly. “No. Just very bad at lying.”
In one swift motion, he disarmed her. The blade flew from her hand and embedded itself in the ground behind her. She stumbled, reaching for fire only to feel it gutter, strangled by the pendant at her throat.
“Wards,” Taren murmured. “Clever. Ardyn always did love his chains.”
Kaelin glared. “You know him?”
“Once,” he said. “Before he started burning people like you.”
He studied her face for a long moment, something shifting in his expression. “Your eyes… I’ve seen them before.”
“You haven’t,” she lied.
He stepped closer, close enough that she could see the faint ember scars tracing his neck. “I knew your mother. She helped us hide the last of the dragon eggs before the Crown took her.”
Kaelin’s breath caught. “You’re lying.”
He shook his head. “The rebellion isn’t hunting dragons, Kaelin. We’re protecting them.”
For a heartbeat, the world tilted.
All her life, she’d believed dragons were gone extinct, burned from the skies. But if Taren was telling the truth…
“Then where is it?” she demanded. “The egg.”
He smiled faintly. “Sleeping. Waiting for someone who can wake it.”
“And you think that’s me?”
“I don’t think,” he said, turning away. “I know.”
The pendant at her throat burned suddenly hot. Ardyn’s voice crackled faintly through it cold and distant.
“Find the rebels. Report their location.”
Kaelin’s pulse raced. She looked at Taren, at the fire in his eyes, at the trust he didn’t yet realize he’d given her.
For a moment, she saw another path one not chained to a prince or a prophecy, but to truth.
Then she tore the pendant from her neck and crushed it under her heel.
A flare of magic hissed into the air, severing the Crown’s hold.
Taren raised a brow. “That’s one way to make friends.”
Kaelin smirked. “You have no idea.”
Far away, in the heart of the palace, Ardyn Varell felt the signal die.
He stared into the firelit map, expression unreadable.
“So,” he murmured. “The Emberborn thinks herself free.”
He smiled, slow and certain. “Let her burn the path. I’ll follow the smoke.”
That night, as Kaelin slept beside the dying fire, a dream found her again.
She stood in a vast field of glass where dragons once fell, a newborn heartbeat echoing be
neath the ground.
And in the darkness behind her eyes, a voice ancient, terrible, and soft whispered:
Wake me, child of flame. The world has forgotten fire.
