Total pages in book: 152
Estimated words: 154368 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 772(@200wpm)___ 617(@250wpm)___ 515(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154368 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 772(@200wpm)___ 617(@250wpm)___ 515(@300wpm)
Pyrran could feel her dreaming too.
Not the details— those belonged to her—the dreams slipped along his naked body.
Warm.
Safe.
Honeyed.
Pyrran inched closer to inhale their mate and Korin's arm tightened around her waist.
Even unconscious, his brother was a sentinel. His jaw was set, his body curved around Sol like a wall of bone and muscle. The faint iridescence of Korin’s dormant shift shimmered just beneath the surface of his skin.
Korin would not let Pyrran unexpectedly grab her again.
Guilt sank deep within Pyrran’s heart.
Do not worry, brother. I have learned my lesson. I will never doubt you again.
There had been a time—before Sol, before the bond cracked open every sealed chamber in his chest—when he had dreamed of a moment like this.
He had been the sharper brother.
The one who burned first and thought second.
The one the elders had crowned before the human kings had united and killed them.
The elders had claimed that the twins had too much power, too much fire, and no anchor.
Two Pyrathryx twin dragons burning through the world without anything cold enough to hold them still.
Pyrran had leveled a mountain range before his second century.
Korin had boiled a sea. Before all died, they had feared the twins and not because they were cruel, but because they were uncontained and an uncontained fire did not choose what it burned.
Sol would be the containment.
Her ice would never weaken their flame. It would focus it.
Give it edges.
Make it precise where it had only been vast.
Pyrran could already feel the difference in his own body since the bond had begun forming. There was now steadiness in his soul, his aethercore, that had never existed before.
Now he knew without a doubt that their soul mate, a dragon with the power of ice, would be their true anchor.
A Cryovareth.
Pyrran still could not fully accept it.
Sol shifted in her sleep. A small sound left her throat — barely a breath — and the bond between them flared warm against his sternum. His dragon pressed hard beneath his ribs, straining toward her the way flame strained toward air.
He steadied himself and let the pulse settle.
Then he studied Sol's sleeping face — the soft part of her lips, the dark fan of her lashes, the way her dark brown skin held the moonlight.
All this time, they had believed the Cryovareth dragons were extinct.
During the Shattering War, the human armies had targeted them first. Of course they had.
The ice dragons were the archivists.
The memory keepers.
They held the histories of every dragon bloodline sealed within glacial vaults that stretched for miles beneath frozen mountain ranges. If humans wanted to erase dragonkind from the world's memory, they had to destroy the Cryovareth first.
And they had.
Pyrran remembered. He and Korin had been little boys—barely past their first decade.
The news had rippled through the remaining clans like a crack splitting stone.
The Crystalline Citadel had fallen. The great libraries shattered. Every monolith melted or broken open and looted for the Aethercores preserved inside.
The elders had wept. Their souls—the Worldspark within them—had dimmed, and for three days, every living dragon felt a cold so deep it had nothing to do with temperature.
An entire race.
An entire element of dragons silenced.
The Pyrathryx—his kind that wielded fire—had raged. They had burned seven human cities to cinder in retaliation, and it had changed nothing.
The Cryovareth were still gone. Their eggs had been the first things the humans had hunted, because even the youngest human soldier understood that if you wanted to end a species, you didn't start with the warriors.
You started with the unborn.
Pyrran's gaze drifted to the mark on Sol's collarbone. The mating seal pulsed faintly in the dark—three dragons intertwined around a crescent moon.
It was still faint, but the natural soul mate was rising on her skin and would be visible soon.
Fire and ice bound together. How did your egg survive, little one?
There’d been talk by the elders that a Cryovareth egg could survive dormant for millennia if sealed within deep enough ice. The embryo would slow. The Aethercore would dim to nearly nothing—undetectable, even to the humans' cinderglass instruments. A faint pulse buried beneath miles of frozen silence.
The elders sent a team of different families to search for possible eggs, but none had ever been found.
Your mother hid yours very well before she was killed. Do you know how special you are?
Sol shifted in her sleep, and the sheet slipped down past her shoulder, exposing the faint mark.
Pyrran stopped breathing.
The mating seal caught the moonlight and glowed—soft, pulsing, alive. Three dragons intertwined around a crescent moon, etched into her dark brown skin like a brand placed there by something older than either of them.
His.
Theirs.
The heat consumed him molten and savage, clawing down his spine and pooling at his cock.
How will I ever be able to control myself around her?
His dragon surged beneath his ribs, roaring and demanding to get out.