Chapter Text
The city is burning and the world’s turning red.
Damen inhales, each breath a ragged hardship, a mouthful of grit coating his teeth. He peers around at the debris, his eyes watering. He pulls his blade from dust and turns to face the flames.
Heat and a relentless, creaking agony. That’s what he sees and feels.
The royal palace of Vere, catching alight.
Damen wipes a blend of sweat and someone else’s blood from his face, squinting through the ash for further signs of movement or resistance. He cut a man down moments ago, but no others followed in his wake. There’s nothing, no one else—only this. Only red.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. They were meant to welcome us.
Claim a prize, sheathe our blades, and walk away.
Damen used to visit Vere as a boy—yearly trips north with his father, when ties between Akielos and the Winter Islands were still strong. He remembers the crystalline flowers that seemed to eternally be in bloom, vines that grew like creeping hands over white marble walls. He played in the destroyed fountain he steps around now, cracked and crumbling. He skipped stones across its surface, long before it was stained red with blood.
Vere, the largest of the Winter Islands. Home to the capital city, the royal family and wealthy landowners that oversee the archipelagos and outlying spits of land, connected to the capital by a network of bridges that criss-cross like splintered veins.
Damen has been here many times before, and back then he always thought it beautiful. Vere’s natural beauty was the jewel in King Aleron’s crown. Damen can’t say the same now.
Vere is a shadow of what it was once. An echo, an ebbing tide.
In ruins, the city and the ashy forests surrounding it look like nothing. Damen tramples childhood memories with each step.
He scrapes char from his lips, entering the smouldering palace and starting through the maze of corridors that lead to the royal chambers. The White Halls, they were called back then. Summer days when Damen’s cheeks were red for reasons other than war, and he ran through lavish rooms with a yellow-haired prince.
Auguste, when did we stop running towards each other?
When did our fathers first tell us to turn our backs and run away?
Damen still remembers the route to the library—he slips between two statues, then turns left at the peeling portrait of Queen Hennike, as golden as her children. As doomed as Auguste. The curtains hanging above the painting are on fire, bodies splayed at unnatural angles beneath it. The dead Queen will stand for a few minutes before, and then she’ll be ashes, too.
“Exalted!”
Three of Damen’s Royal Guard run past, shouting the news. He flinches at his father's title, out of place on his shoulders.
“The city is ours! Vere has fallen. The dragonguard is dead!”
Damen has sufficient energy left to nod but little else, instructing his men to gather in the courtyard near the ruined fountain. “Any Veretians you find alive are to be spared. No one else is to be harmed tonight.”
They’ll follow his word. They always do—his handpicked guards are a demonstration in obeisance. Damen has trained them himself; he trusts them with his life.
In turn, his country has entrusted him with this—to journey to the Winter Islands and retrieve its promised prince. To end a war before it might begin, bring magic back, and save the people of Akielos from a fate much like this one—one of endless orange, and red, and smoke.
But why did they fight? Damen thinks as he goes, twisting down another corridor knit from memory. I was told the prince would be prepared to depart. I was told they would not resist—they would open the gates, escort us to his rooms in ceremony.
Damen slips through a scorched doorway, the heat growing oppressive this far within the palace’s nested corridors, the smoke a thick fog to toil through. In the antechamber outside the royal rooms he finds his general, his sword drawn against a closed door.
“Nikandros,” he says, “leave the palace before it crumbles. Gather the Guard in the courtyard—stop the fire from spreading to the city.”
Nikandros does not immediately move to obey. His long, dark hair is a knot at the back of his head—he pulls on it, then taps the point of his blade against cracked wood.
“Exalted—he's in here.”
Damen looks up at ornately carved doors. He knows what’s inside—a small library, and beyond that, a bed chamber. He knows all too well which boy used to hide within these walls whilst his older brother sought the sunshine.
“Is he alone?” he asks, swallowing the bitter past.
A curl of sulphur, a creak in the back of his throat.
Is there anyone else left alive?
“Yes,” Nikandros replies. “By your word, he has not been harmed.”
Damen closes this lingering distance, soles clicking on charred marble, one of his greaves digging into his shin. He steps over a sea of fallen blades and broken shields. There's a trail of red where he walks—the last of the dragonguard, outnumbered and cut down. Protecting their prince until their last moments were cut from grasping fingertips.
Spilt blood, Damen thinks as he pushes through the door into darkness. He crunches over shattered glass. Red on the walls, red like the fire outside.
He dips his head to Nikandros and enters the library, the metal door handle far too hot to touch. Inside, the room is dark—there’s a smashed window high in the wall, the sky beyond a blaze of crimson.
There’s a person in here, though they’re not trying to escape.
You. I came to find you. I came to gather you—to bring you south, as once was promised.
To bring you home.
Damen doesn’t remember the library in detail, from those long summers lost in Vere. He would race around the palace after Auguste, chipping the walls and tripping on handwoven carpets, but their misadventures rarely brought them this far. He would glimpse these bookshelves only when the younger prince would retire to bed, shuffling through the doors with an armful of stories, too distracted to say goodnight.
Damen reached his thirteenth summer, and his father named him Crown Prince of Akielos, ahead of his older brother. Something changed that year—he was not allowed to visit the Winter Islands again.
Auguste. Auguste changed, too.
Vere’s first prince was older than Damen by several years, a delicate circlet of gold ever-present around his pale head. He was a Crown Prince, too. He used to shine.
Damen clings to scattered memories, each one a blowaway seed thrown to the wind.
Thirteen summers. I was a boy when I left this land behind.
He stares up at the shelves, remembering.
Back before I knew what blood tasted like, before I took my first life. Before Auguste went missing.
He looks around at stacked scrolls, a dead fireplace, empty chairs. Leather-bound books stretch from floor to ceiling, empty candlesticks marking where a tired mind might curl up to read before sleep. Everything is covered in ash, and beneath that, dust.
This room has not been loved in recent times as once it was.
The second prince—that’s who he’s here for. Who he has marched through fire and death to find. Not Auguste; he’s long gone. It’s the younger prince Damen must meet with, the one who’d trail them in their games like a shy shadow. Damen has not forgotten him—golden hair in his face, quiet words and laced-up sleeves. There were years between them, and though Auguste would try to coax him from his corners, the boy would never join in their fun.
Damen tries to remember his face. There had been a scattering of dragonscale on one cheek, which Auguste said would spread—He is special, Damianos. The prophecy, reborn. Do you still speak of the prophecy in your country? When he’s grown, he’ll come south to your lands, to the Kingsmeet—he’ll wake the dragons up from their long rest. When magic flows again, they’ll return. It’s what he was born to do.
Dragons. A prophecy. Yellow hair and a faded smile.
Damen swallows, his throat dry and scratched. He was raised to believe in dragons more than he believed in himself, though who could say now if they had ever been real? They were once said to spiral above the skies of Vere and the northernmost edge of the continent, where Delpha stands today. After the old wars ended, magic died out and they vanished—gone across the Thin Sea to sleep, until there was born one to rouse them. To reawaken magic, and with it, stitch the dragons back together.
There were words. A children’s bedtime rhyme. Damen still remembers how it began.
The dragons returned from shores unknown
when the prince was born to call them home;
in halls of white while winter sings,
his heart a blaze of ash and wings,
he did awake such monstrous things
in the skies, where myth once roamed.
Wings. Ash. Monstrous things.
It sounds fanciful now, like something ripped from one of the old books lining these walls. Damen remembers his teacher scratching it onto parchment in the schoolroom in Ios, Kastor yawning beside him.
“And we know that the prophecy has been born, at long last,” his teacher said, pointing to maps pinned to the wall. “Here, in the palace of Vere. White walls—have you memorised the rhyme? A second son was born to the king and queen, and he has a red-scaled face. When he comes of age, he’ll travel south to the Kingsmeet to pray.”
“Pray for what?”
“For magic, Prince Damianos. For the dragons.”
“Why here?” Kastor asked. The stories bored him greatly. “Why would a Veretian prince find dragons in Ios, of all places?”
The teacher had frowned at them. Damen can still remember the deep lines around his eyes, stretching out like spiderwebs.
“Our lands were one, my princes, before the old wars came and went. It would not have been strange for one from the Winter Islands to journey south, and meet with his neighbours. The Kingsmeet may be mere stone and statues today, but back then it was home to greater things.”
Dragons and magic. Etchings and tall tales; Damen knows it to be false.
They’re stories stitched from stories, fantasies he has lived without for long enough. He hadn’t believed in the prophecy then, at his brother’s side in a sun-choked schoolroom, and believes in it less as a man.
A boy who grew up coddled and kept from the world, a prince of books and solitude... no, if anything, Auguste was the one who knew dragons. Every smile a spark in summer. Magic disappeared centuries ago, but Damen believes the last shred of it withered away on the day Vere’s Crown Prince did. Into the woods and never seen again.
Twenty-one summers. That was the prophecy, the crux of the agreement the two kingdoms reached. When he reached his majority, the second prince of Vere would travel willingly to the Kingsmeet. King Aleron had his perfect Crown Prince to rule one day in his stead, and through his second son, a legacy like no other—the skies, come alive once again.
But then the king died unexpectedly, and Auguste was gone. Aleron’s brother stepped in to rule as regent.
Talk of dragons turned to talk of violence, unending whispers of treachery that wrapped the Winter Islands in a shroud of distrust. They cut themselves off from Akielos, and letters once shared between kings shrivelled to dust. The treaties were broken, a prophecy slipped into despair.
And now, Damen thinks, years later, we are here.
There was never anything in the sky but lies.
“Laurent,” Damen says, the name a desert on his parched lips. Laurent of Vere, a land of cool summers and sweet spring water and long-lost friends.
He approaches the figure standing perfectly still in the corner of the library. Unmoving, unarmed, unable to flee.
You don’t look like a prophecy, he thinks, eyes stinging. You look like the past.
He can make out the shape of him—his back rests against the books, chest heaving. He’s not dressed for war. He’s dressed for sleep.
Laurent is staring back at him with hatred. He’s wearing a white nightshirt, loose and unlaced, a plain band of silver touching his forehead. His hair falls on his neck, fine gold smudged with soot. He’s lovely—Auguste was, too. As beautiful as their mother.
Damen camped with his Guard on Vere’s outskirts, cloaked by the thick cover of woods bordering the southern shore. They observed no unusual movement within the palace—all was as it should be. The Regent had assured him that when he rode north, he would be welcomed with open arms.
“Veretians are as eager as any to see the prophecy fulfilled, and repair ties between our countries.”
He thinks about that now.
Why do we want to bring magic back? After all these years, all this time. Do we need it?
But he knows that crops don't grow like they used to. Harvests fail, and sickness seeps into once strong bloodlines. The superstitious amongst them say the land hasn't been the same since magic left. To reverse their slow decline... it's worth a prayer. It's worth this faintest hope.
Damen also has a silent, selfish reason to try—a reason that kept him upright on the endless journey north. He pushes it to the back of his mind now, as he did earlier when darkness fell and they approached the city gates. He ordered Nikandros to survey the surrounding streets while he took his Guard to the palace.
There was no sort of welcome, no parade or diplomatic gathering. Vere was a half-empty ruin, a wound long left to bleed-out.
When they reached the palace doors, they finally met with resistance—Laurent’s personal dragonguard, disorganised and rusted over with age. Damen is unsure what or who started the blaze that accompanied the brief, one-sided battle, but he sorely regrets that the White Halls will burn.
I didn’t want this.
I’d ask for the past back, if I could.
He understands, as he looks at Laurent in his bed clothes, that the prince had not been forewarned of Damen’s arrival. The palace, the city, the smaller islands surrounding Vere—no one had known they would come.
But the Regent travelled miles to find us. He petitioned us for help.
“The prince refuses to journey south for his birthday,” the man had said. “And so we come alone. I haven’t the strength to tame him.”
Damen wipes sweat from his face and steps closer. Laurent curls his fingers into the books behind him, but does not move. His face is a mask of false composure.
“Prince Laurent,” Damen says, voice hoarse. He draws his sword and touches the blade to a throat threaded with dragonscale. It has spread, he realises, in the years since they’ve last seen each other: down one side of his face and neck, into his nightshirt. Damen lets his eyes wander—it’s there, on the back of his right hand. Down his leg, a pattern on the top of his foot.
Only half-dragon. An incomplete myth.
Damen wonders if he’s come here to do the right thing or perhaps the very worst, doubt curling question marks within his chest.
But he’s committed. He will follow orders.
“My nephew has lost his mind,” said the Regent of Vere, arriving a fortnight ago with a tattered and bedraggled contingent. It was all that remained of Laurent’s ceremonial escort, he said—the prince had refused to travel, casting out his only living relative. “He will not honour the agreement between his father and yours, Prince Damianos. He would rather destroy his ancestral home and everything south of it than see things through—in the name of my brother the king, I ask you to help us. Go north in my place, and bring him here. Vere will welcome you.”
Aleron isn’t king anymore; he died years ago, unexpectedly in his sleep. Upon his birthday, Laurent should by law inherit the throne.
The Regent cast doubt upon that, too.
He
is
not
fit
to
rule.
Damen swallows his rising anxiety, picturing his father’s pale and sickly face on the day they’d departed.
“End this before it turns to war, my son. Bring the prince to Ios.”
Damen can’t see Laurent’s eyes in the dark, but he remembers that Auguste’s were blue. He knows this man was once a boy who loved to read books and ride horses, who paid no attention to the niggling matters of keeping a kingdom. Who cared not that he was a prophecy. That was the first prince’s worry, the king’s concern—Laurent had greater things to attend to, worlds to escape to through pages.
They look at each other as somewhere outside, something collapses. There’s the sound of tumbling stone and shouts of victory.
“Your dragonguard is dead.” Damen watches as Laurent’s eyes flicker, though he says nothing. “We sought fair entry to the palace and they refused. I claim you as a prisoner of Akielos—you will return with me to Ios to pray at the Kingsmeet, as was agreed upon your birth.”
He speaks stiffly. The words are a hollow formality in his mouth.
“Upon my birth,” Laurent echoes in Akielon, barely more than a whisper. “And after that?”
After…
Damen doesn’t think Laurent’s uncle has placed much weight on a return journey.
“Laurent would see the people starved,” the Regent had said. Damen found him an uncomfortable presence at their council meetings, but Kastor insisted he be treated as a royal guest. “He has spent his spoiled youth plotting mindless invasions across the sea that will never come to fruition. I have tried to reason with him but he is lost. He insists that the prophecy is a lie, his life is a lie. I do what I can to rule, but he is disruptive.”
The Akielon council were outraged—a scattering of Kyroi called for an immediate trial. Since communications with Vere were severed, no one had known how desperate things had become. King Theomedes, too weak to travel himself, pressed his sons to act on his behalf. Kastor would stay behind to rule, as Damen ventured north with his Guard.
“Theomedes is wise,” the Regent had droned at dinner that night. “Laurent is almost at his majority, when I would no longer be able to assuage his temper. I fear Vere would be beyond salvation.”
They had no reason not to trust him; Akielos and the Winter Islands had once been great allies. The pact made at Laurent’s birth had only shown its first signs of faltering after Auguste’s disappearance. The Regent had worked as a diplomat in the years since, seeking to repair what was undone.
But, Damen thinks, going over what he’s seen tonight. What he sees right now. There is no proof of warfare, madness, treachery. There's no—
“You claim me as a prisoner.”
Laurent’s voice breaks his reverie, a quiet intrusion. Damen finds it difficult to look at him; there’s so much of Auguste there, worn into his face. His scales shine in the fire light, red and darkest grey.
“You should not have fought,” Damen says quietly.
Laurent pulls at the laces of his nightshirt as if to say, am I dressed for war?
Damen looks over his shoulder—through the thickening smoke he sees the outline of a body. An old man who fell easily to a sword.
“Why did the dragonguard attack us?”
Laurent tips his head back. The scales on his cheek twist between red and black. “You come here in the night to drag me from my bed. I gave an order, and my home burns for it.”
Damen closes his eyes against the stinging heat. He can’t afford to fall into the past again; he must remember why he’s here. Why this is the right thing to do.
“By order of King Theomedes, you will travel to Ios. It will be easier if you make this a voluntary journey.”
Laurent doesn’t move. His arms hang limp at his sides, hair in his face. Damen notices something red staining the sleeve of his shirt—he’s injured, blood running from his shoulder in a line along his arm. Damen watches it drip from his hand to the stones.
He recalls Nikandros, sword against the door: By your word, he has not been harmed.
“Who did this?” Damen asks, reaching out. Laurent presses himself against the shelves, arms crossing his chest.
“I couldn’t say,” he says calmly, as if the library isn’t kindling waiting to be lit. “One of your dogs dragged me from my room. I didn’t pause to take stock of his appearance.”
Damen frowns. The prophecy is not to be touched: that was foremost in the orders he gave. He expects better of his Guard.
He notices another fleck of red on Laurent’s forehead, above his eyes. He can see the colours, now—one is blue, the ice of the Winter Islands. The other is veined with red, a map to nowhere.
“Tell me, Damianos,” Laurent murmurs, as smoke creeps through the open door. “What are my crimes?”
They’re running short on time. Damen remembers the Regent’s words, clear and concise:
The prince will not come to Ios.
Bring him, willingly or otherwise.
“Go there,” Theomedes said from his bed. Three days he’d slept, in sweat and fever. “My son, you must retrieve him. If magic is waiting to wake, we must undo the rot to bring it back.”
Rot. Smoke and ash. Flames licking at windows.
The books will burn first.
Damen’s hand closes around Laurent’s wrist; he pulls him roughly away from the shelves. Laurent struggles, but Damen bends to reach behind his bare legs, lifting him over a shoulder. The protests fade—he’s a lighter load to bear, feathers against Damen’s armour. He carries him through the door into the smoke-filled corridor, flames crawling across fine silks.
He steps over broken glass and bodies and passes beneath an archway made of twisted iron, seeking the moon at every turn. He finds her eventually, a light in the sky. Damen breathes deeply of cleaner air, lowering his cargo to the scorched stones of the courtyard.
His soldiers are where he expects them to be, dampening flames at the walls. Palace staff crouch together in a cluster, wide-eyed and bewildered. All of them are dressed for bed.
Where are the people? Damen wonders. Why weren’t they waiting?
Why did no one know we were coming?
“Exalted,” Nikandros calls, coming immediately to his side. He glances down at Laurent, taking a step back. His dark eyes catch on dragonscale, then trip to where blood pools on the marble steps. Damen can be sure, at least, that his general was not the one who cut the prince. “We’ve contained the fire—only the west wing of the palace is lost. We depart on your word.”
They stand on the steps, looking up at the flowers as they burn. Damen watches red reflected in Laurent’s eyes, tears trapped as star-shine.
“Good. Ready them,” he says. Nikandros nods, tapping the hilt of his sword to his breastplate. “The Royal Guard will escort us across Arles Bridge to the first camp. Station soldiers here to offer aid to anyone in the city who requires it.” He hesitates, tasting smoke on his lips. “Nikandros, do not call me Exalted again tonight. Please.”
His general smirks. “You are king while we're on the road, Damen.”
He rolls his eyes. “It doesn't feel like it."
A single question burning through his mind:
What
has
happened
to
Vere?
“It will be done,” Nikandros is saying, gesturing to the waiting Guard. “And the other islands?”
Damen looks at the blood drying on his general’s blade.
“Leave them. Close the bridges and instruct your captains to await further word from Ios.”
Damen dismisses his oldest friend, already looking forward to when they will be able to remove their armour and rest, such stifling formalities dismissed. He has never enjoyed being called exalted by one he once ran through the fields with, one he considers a brother above anything else. As he watches the Royal Guard receive his word, he unwinds a strip of thick leather from his arm, kneeling to bind Laurent’s wrists behind his back.
He doesn’t struggle. No clever words, no cutting remarks. Damen’s frown deepens.
What was it the Regent spoke of, warned him of as the Akielons departed?
“My nephew’s rages are ugly, Damianos. His temper is a coiled snake. His words are whips that lash out at will—do not listen to his poison as it pours.”
If there was a time for poison, Damen thinks, it’s now. Dragged from your bed and hauled from your home. Trussed up and taken across the sea as a prize, a priceless glittering trinket.
Laurent doesn’t say a word, and he does not struggle as Damen tests his bindings, pulling on the knot. He finds nothing in the younger man’s face—only the reflection of fire as it dances, split between blue and red.
“Stand,” Damen says, not unkindly. “You will be treated respectfully while we’re travelling. We leave for the border immediately.” A question curls on his tongue. “Am I to anticipate an ambush? If there’s more of your dragonguard...”
Laurent stares up at him, but not to beg. “Those slaughtered here were all that remained. My sincerest congratulations for killing old men and boys—it was terribly efficient of you.”
Damen has nothing to say to that.
All that remained...
Laurent’s wrists are twisted together uncomfortably, his nightshirt stained with burgundy. The wound on his shoulder seems to have closed; Damen hopes it wasn’t deep. When they reach the first camp, he'll send for a healer.
“If the Crown Prince of Akielos is a gentleman, he will kill me where he stands.”
Laurent speaks the words plainly, as if he’s talking of the weather or something equally inconsequential, and not his own death. Damen blinks. The prophecy does not flinch.
“You will be taken to Ios—your uncle is there waiting. You must bring the magic back.”
“Truly?” Laurent spits, choking back a laugh. He looks at the burning palace, cheeks red in the glow of the blaze. He casts his eyes over the masses of foreign soldiers. A broken shield that once belonged to one of his own guards, faces he’d known his whole life. “Surely you don’t believe that.”
It isn’t a question.
Damen hesitates. “I—I don’t know that it’s true, but it must be done. It was promised.”
Laurent hums. The scales on his neck shift along his throat in a slow ripple.
“I didn’t promise anything. I never had the choice.”
“That’s because you’re—”
“— the prophecy, yes, I’m faintly aware. And if you are half the man your kingdom claims, then you’ll know it isn't real.” Laurent looks up at Damen, face open for the bleakest moment. He's desperate, bitter. “I cannot do it. Do you understand that? I cannot summon magic or dragons. My uncle knows it—he's passed twenty long summers in anticipation of this failure. It's the only reason I'm alive.”
Damen doesn’t reply. He has nothing to say to this.
He thinks, we shouldn’t have come here—but then, quieter: what if he’s lying?
What if he can? What if...
Damen bends down to lift Laurent, murmuring in his ear:
“Do I need to carry you to Ios?”
Laurent struggles out of his grip, glaring up at him. The silver band is gone from his forehead, lost to the fire.
“Do not touch me again.”
Nikandros calls above the crackle of destruction, commanding the Royal Guard to open the city gates. There are no Veretian knights with starbursts on their shields, waiting to cut them down—there’s nothing but mud-churned streets, crooked hovels and abandoned houses.
Damen escorts a stolen prince down marble steps and away from what he knows, doubts crushed underfoot with each wary step.
The Regent was right, he tells himself: left to his own devices, Laurent might have destroyed what little is left. Safe in his unburnt palace as the islands rotted around him.
This. This is the way it must be.
The sky above them chokes with smoke as they depart. There are no dragons descending to rescue a prince, no twist of fate or long-dead magic.
There’s only ash, heat, and endings.
Only embers, where once there was gold.