Page 4 of The Reckoning of Starlight

LYKOR

They were taken.

Cinderax’s words split through Lykor’s skull.

The dragon lay where he’d collapsed in Asharyn’s courtyard, smoke curling from his nostrils. Beside him, a Heart of Stars sat half-buried in the sand, fallen from his jaws.

But Jassyn hadn’t returned.

Neither had Fenn or Serenna.

Lykor shoved to his feet, wings snapping shut as he scanned the southern sky.

Empty.

He’d already known it would be.

Around him, Asharyn’s square writhed with the aftermath of the mountain prisons. The freed rushed into the arms of Daeryn’s shamans, parents reaching for children with shaking hands and broken cries.

The sound of their relief scraped against him while Kal’s blood dried along his jaw.

Lykor reached inward.

Aesar didn’t answer.

He’d gone silent after that final crunch in the Bramblemaw’s fangs, retreating so deep into their shared mind that even Lykor’s thoughts couldn’t reach him.

Kaedryn, leader of Asharyn’s druids, moved at the center of the knot closing around Cinderax. She scooped the fallen Heart of Stars from the sand while her people steadied the dragon, bringing water in clay bowls.

Lykor’s pulse battered his ribs, but when he spoke to Cinderax, his voice came out too calm. “Who took them?”

“There were ships,” Cinderax rasped in his mind. “I assume they were sent by the elf king you spoke of.”

Ships.

The Cerulean Sea. The Maelstrom. The route Jassyn, Serenna, Fenn, and Cinderax had taken to retrieve the Heart of Stars.

A direction to hunt.

Before Lykor could press for more—numbers, star bearings, anything—the crowd shifted around them.

“Lykor!”

Vesryn shoved through the square, his braid half-unraveled. He forced druids aside, draconic eyes emerald and wild.

“Something’s wrong. I can feel it through the bonds.” He clutched the shaved portion of his skull. “Serenna and Jassyn are hurt. They’re untethered. Moving. I can sense them. I—”

Jassyn was hurt.

That was all Lykor heard.

He seized the prince by the shoulders, talons biting through armor. Vesryn’s gaze flicked past him—to Cinderax returned alone, to the Heart of Stars cradled in Kaedryn’s claws, its crystalline surface bright and useless in the sun.

“A portal,” Lykor snarled, the words tearing out of him. “Open a fucking portal to them. Now.”

“I—” Vesryn’s breath punched out in a rush. His eyes glazed over, tracking paths only he could see. He turned west. Then south. “They’ve been split up. I can sense Serenna and Fenn…”

“And Jassyn?”