Page 71 of The Reckoning of Starlight

Galaeryn tilted his head. “I intended for you to be the first vessel. Where Elashor has only ever been a blunt instrument, you were forged for divinity, shaped to bear what would break lesser bodies.” He studied Lykor, his attention a scalpel drawn over every scar. “But refinement requires time. More than I granted you.”

Refinement.

That was what Galaeryn had called the marble slab. The spikes. The channels carved through Lykor’s skull until obedience lived in his marrow.

Lykor’s lip curled. The prisons split open behind his eyes. The endless cycle of it. Elf to wraith and back to elf. His magic ravaged and rebuilt each time the king wanted to test how much more the vessel could hold.

He shoved the memory back to where it belonged.

“The wraith escaped before your refinement was finished.” Lykor watched the king’s face. “And you never came looking.”

“I knew you’d serve your purpose.” One corner of Galaeryn’s mouth lifted by the smallest fraction. “You woke the first dragon.”

His purpose.

The floor seemed to tilt under Lykor’s boots.

Cinderax, freed from his chains. The raids that had bolstered the wraith into more than scattered survivors. The armies that had never gathered to crush his people before they learned how to strike back. The dungeons he’d believed he escaped because the king had failed to break him.

Every freedom Lykor had mistaken for defiance shifted beneath him, spoiled by the shape of the king’s design.

Lykor kept his voice level. Barely. “You can’t tell me you planned that.”

“I planned you.” Galaeryn nodded toward the talents Lykor had siphoned, still orbiting like moons with nowhere else to go. “What disappoints me is that you haven’t claimed that power. You could return to what you were. An arch elf. Whole.”

Lykor didn’t bother pretending the thought hadn’t crossed his mind. But not for the reasons that motivated the king. “I am what I choose to be.”

Galaeryn lifted his brows. “How I made you, then.”

Lykor’s talons sank deeper into his palm. Blood warmed the inside of his fist, but the pain never reached him. Rage devoured it first.

The king stepped closer, silver eyes too bright. “Did you ever wonder why I left you with the strongest talents? Power to portal away from the dungeons. Rending and force and shielding to survive the wilds.”

Lykor’s jaw ached from the pressure of keeping it shut. He had wondered for years. Obsessively.

“It’s almost sentimental,” Galaeryn murmured, “the way you insist on being less than what you could become.”

“Perhaps refusing your version of greatness seems small beside your conquest of the stars.” Lykor met the king’s gaze, unflinching. “But the refusal is mine.”

“Then it’s time to remind you of the purpose you were made to serve.”

Lykor went still.

His purpose—to fit the king’s twisted image.

Every second he stayed gave Galaeryn another chance to drive coercion back through his skull.

He had to go. Now.

Survive. Find Jassyn.

No time for strategy. No version of this ended with Galaeryn dead and Lykor standing over him. If Lykor fought, he died. No, worse—he lived long enough to be taken.

Lykor reached for the Essence orbiting above him. Every stolen talent he and Vesryn had ripped from the palace had whispered all night to be claimed as his.

He seized them all at once.

Then drove the unstable hoard into Galaeryn’s chest. Power burst between them in a blinding flare, buckling the air and bleaching the atrium white.