Chapter 4 Dragon Keeper
VEXHALIS'S POV
I went back inside immediately after the maid took the human girl away. I reached my bedchamber in quick, strides; there was no need to traverse the castle, for the balcony was located on this very same floor, connected directly to my private quarters. I shut the door behind me, turning the lock with an echoing click.
I walked slowly toward the far wall, where a massive rectangular mirror took up a full section of the stone. A single, faint crystal light hung above it, casting a pale glow over the glass.
As I stood before my reflection, I heard it.
Through the stone floors and the quiet expanses of the castle, the faint, muffled sound of the human girl’s cries reached my ears. Vampiric hearing was a curse when one desired absolute silence, but tonight, the sound was nothing more than an irritation. I did not feel sad for her. I could not feel sad for her, even if I wished to. I had no heart to process or understand an emotion as fragile and pathetic as grief. I only possessed a cold, calculating brain—a mind that perfectly understood the logical reason why she was weeping.
She had lost her parents in the raid. It was a simple sequence of cause and effect. She had said it herself; they were the Dragon Keepers before they chose to transfer the blessing upon her and send her away. They were undoubtedly dead by now, slaughtered by the human king’s hounds.
As I continued to stare at myself in the glass, processing the new information the girl had brought into my kingdom, a strange irritation flickered beneath my skin. I wondered why she felt familiar.
She looked familiar. It made no sense. There was absolutely nothing special about her appearance. Many humans—even the ones I kept within my borders to work the fields or serve the lower courts—had the exact same ordinary color of hazel eyes and chestnut hair. It could be nothing. It should be nothing. Yet, for some reason I could not fathom, my mind insisted it was not a mere coincidence. I felt a persistent, nagging certainty that I had truly seen her somewhere in the past. It felt like a long, distant memory fading at the edges, but the harder I tried to grasp the thread, the more it slipped away.
I groaned, shaking the useless thoughts from my head.
Reaching up, I unclasped my long night robe and pulled it off, letting the fabric fall to the floor. This was a ritual I performed almost every night, standing in front of the mirror, staring at the physical manifestation of my own emptiness.
My eyes locked onto the brutal, jagged scar running down from my left shoulder, cutting violently across my chest, and stopping just as it reached my stomach.
I raised a pale hand, tracing the silver scar with the tips of my fingers. I closed my eyes, trying to force my mind back into the shadows of my past, begging for a memory of how it happened. But it was entirely a blur. I did not know it. I could not see it. No matter how many centuries passed, I still did not know how I had received this horrific scar. I did not know how my very heart had been carved out of my chest, nor did I understand how I was still alive, standing and ruling as a king, despite having an empty cavity where a pulse should be.
I groaned again, my fingers pressing harder into the scar as I closed my eyes against the frustration.
I thought of seeking answers, but the options were exhausted. I did not want to travel down to the Infernal World to confront my father. I knew the Infernal King would not have any answers for me. I had gone to the depths of his dark realm before, demanding the truth of my missing heart, and I had returned with nothing worthwhile. My father only offered riddles and mockery, leaving me with the same hollow chest I had arrived with.
Instead, my mind drifted toward my mother.
She was the one who had left me when I was still young. The exact age was another detail lost to the fog of my early years, another memory I could not remember. But I felt it in my bones—if I had bones capable of feeling—that she would be the only one who held the answers to my carved-out heart. She was the one who knew what had been stolen from me, and why.
But the problem was simple: I did not know where she was. I had tried everything. I had hired the most powerful witches across the realms, paying them in gold and blood to track her signature, but not a single one had come back with anything useful. They all believed she was dead. They claimed her soul was no longer tethered to the living world.
But I knew she was not dead. A mother who leaves a curse like this behind does not simply perish without a trace.
I let out a long sigh, opening my eyes to look at the empty glass one last time. I picked up my robe, sliding it back over my shoulders and tying it loosely around my waist. The room was cold, but the temperature meant nothing to a corpse that ruled a throne.
I walked over to the grand bed, throwing myself down onto the dark sheets. I rested with one arm draped over my face, staring up into the dark canopy above.
Against my own volition, my mind drifted back to the floor down below. The human girl’s weeping had finally grown quiet, replaced by the breathing of a mortal who had succumbed to sheer exhaustion. The new Dragon Keeper was entirely at my mercy, a fragile creature holding the key to an ancient power, sleeping right beneath my feet.
I closed my eyes, the silence of the castle settling in around me, but the memory of her hazel eyes refused to leave the dark behind my eyelids.
