Page 59 of The Reckoning of Starlight

Jassyn stretched his awareness outward, delving through the tangle Blossom had torn from the ground. He wove root and vine over the fractured marble, lashing a narrow path across the split threshold. The earth held under his boots as he crossed into the broken mouth of the entry hall.

The first wave of servants poured toward him in blind panic, nearly trampling him as they fled the shaking walls. Cracks raced through the marble, stone splintering underfoot.

Jassyn braced, Essence coiling toward coercion.

Then the first of them saw Blossom behind him.

The stampede reversed. Bodies collided, turned, clawed past one another to veer down a side corridor—anywhere that wasn’t the dragon blocking the door.

Blossom drove her snout into the opening.

Roots punched through, cinched around splintered pillars, and pulled. Stone screeched against stone as the archway widened around her skull, walls splitting and folding back. Vines raced after the fracture, ribbing the ceiling, shouldering the weight of the floors above.

The walls shook as Blossom forced herself through the widened archway behind him. Jassyn cut down a corridor, his pace quickening as vines buckled the floor in uneven jolts. He tried to follow the directions he’d ripped from the guard, but the estate bent wrong around him. He lost his way once, then again, before snagging a fleeing servant by the arm.

His control lanced into her with surgical force, stripping out the knowledge he needed.

The Starvault sanctum. Deeper in the estate.

He released her. The servant blinked, dazed, her eyes landing on the dragon. Then her knees gave out, dropping her hard to the floor, pulse fluttering at the hollow of her throat.

Blossom’s jaw unhinged a fraction, sap glistening between her fangs.

Jassyn stepped away from the servant’s crumpled form and met Blossom with a sharp shake of his head.

Nostrils flaring, she chuffed. Vines tightened around the broken stone, creeping toward the servant.

“She’s not a threat,” Jassyn murmured. “Some of them just live here. That doesn’t mean they had a choice in this life.”

The floor caved in Blossom’s wake, marble breaking open to packed soil. Behind her, walls buckled, pillars bowed, and archways split, everything built to endure remembering the earth.

She prowled forward to follow him, her hunger insistent.

Denied, not forgotten.

Jassyn pushed deeper into the estate, through rooms where ruin kept changing shape. One chamber had drowned in plaster powdering from the ceiling, furniture dissolving into mold. A ballroom gaped open, overtaken by fungus, its long tables split down the grain, their legs already swallowed by the ground.

Silence thickened, broken only by the groan of settling stone, the scrape of Jassyn’s boots on what remained of the marble, and the slow grind of Blossom’s claws through the broken floor.

Farine should’ve sent guards by now. Or yanked on his leash. But Jassyn felt no pull, no thread of coercion cinching tight around him.

Maybe silence had explanations. Servants had fled. Guards would be regrouping. Kyansari reinforcements had yet to arrive.

Still, his beastblood shivered to the surface, prickling along the nape of his neck.

Marble gave way to a narrowing tunnel, damp growth racing ahead along its walls. At the far end, sunlight gleamed.

The passage opened into a vast circular chamber. Above, a vaulted dome of seamless crystal curved like a looking glass aimed at the sky. Light poured through and fractured as it fell, casting a thousand shards of color across the polished floor.

Jassyn went still as he took in the Starvault, where the Vallendes hoarded evidence of their dominion. No soldiers had lined the way to the chamber. The memory he’d ripped from the first guard had shown ranks of them, armed and stationed along the walls.

Behind him, Blossom released a low grunt. Her crystalline eyes roved the chamber as her head lowered, nostrils flaring against the polished floor. She pressed the sensation into his mind—the scent of steel and sweat.

Every hair lifted along Jassyn’s arms.

Guards had been here. But where were they now?

Silver shelves rose in concentric tiers along the edges of the chamber, spiraling upward toward the dome. Jassyn felt the pressure of power before he understood it—thousands of vials in disciplined rows, glass stoppered and sealed, each containing measured Essence. Refined and bound, enough to fuel wars if the elves ever faced true resistance.