Onyx banked south, and Asher looked back.

The white marble was burning. The golden lions that had guarded the staircases since before his grandfather’s grandfather were buried under rubble. The reflecting pools were black with ash. The colonnade where he and Ronan had sprinted with a stolen crown and a rogue goat was gone, swallowed by stone and fire and the crawling things beneath.

Everything he had ever known was collapsing into itself, and Asher watched it happen with Natalia unconscious against his chest and Ronan’s body cooling under his hand.

He had lost his brother, his kingdom, and his home in the span of an hour. The sky offered nothing. The ground offered less.

Onyx set them down on a ridge overlooking a coastline neither of them recognized. Foreign trees. Foreign soil. A continent that had no name because no one Asher knew had ever stood on it.

Asher pulled Natalia from the dragon’s back and laid her on the grass. Then he turned to Ronan.

Onyx lowered his massive head and pressed his snout against Ronan’s chest. A low sound rumbled through the dragon, not a roar, something older, something that came from the place where a bonded dragon keeps the heartbeat of its human.

The heartbeat wasn’t there anymore.

Onyx lifted Ronan’s body with a gentleness that should have been impossible for a creature his size. His jaws cradled him the way he’d been cradled as a hatchling in Ronan’s arms, and his gold eyes found Asher’s one last time.

Asher pressed his forehead against the dragon’s jaw. "Take care of him."

Onyx launched. His wings beat hard, carrying Ronan into the clouds, and Asher stood on a ridge in a land with no name and watched the last piece of his brother disappear into a sky that was already forgetting the kingdom they’d come from.

He would never see Onyx again. He knew it the way you know things that are too heavy to argue with. Bonded dragons don’t outlive the people they’re bonded to. They go somewhere quiet, somewhere high, and they rest. Together.

✦✦✦

Two days passed. Asher hadn’t slept. He’d built a shelter from driftwood and palm fronds and whatever else the coastline offered, and he’d carried Natalia inside.

A healer from the survivors’ camp pressed her hand to Natalia’s sternum and pulled it back like she’d been burned.

"The matebond severance is killing her. Her body is shutting down. Without a new bond to anchor her, she won’t survive another day."

Asher stood. Every person in the tent looked at him.

"Leave us."

No one moved.

"I said leave."

They left.

He walked to Natalia. She was barely breathing, her skin grey, her white hair matted with sweat and dust and blood that wasn’t hers. She looked like she was already halfway to wherever Ronan had gone, and Asher refused to let her finish the journey.

He knelt beside her. Pulled her upright against his chest. Her head lolled against his shoulder, and he cupped the back of her skull and tilted her neck.

He didn’t ask. There was no one to ask. The woman he loved was dying in his arms, and the man she loved was dead, and the only thing standing between her and a grave in foreign soil was an instinct from a man she hadn’t chosen.

His fangs extended. He sank them into the junction of her neck and shoulder, and her body seized against him, back arching, a gasp escaping from lungs that had been too weak to breathe on their own ten seconds ago.

He felt the matebond take hold, felt it root into both of them like a tree sinking into new ground, and he pulled her onto his chest and wrapped both arms around her and held on.

"You don’t get to die." His voice broke against her hair. "You hear me, Nat? Ronan is gone. The kingdom is gone. Everything I’ve ever had is gone. You are the only thing left, and I cannot lose you too. I won’t. So you are going to live. You are going to live because I need you beside me to rebuild whatever the hell comes next, and because Ronan’s son needs a mother, and because I am telling you to live and you have never once in your life done what I’ve asked but I am begging you to start now."

He pressed his mouth against the top of her head and cried. For the first time since the temple. For Ronan. For the kingdom. For the golden lions and the reflecting pools and the marble corridors where two boys had run with a stolen crown, laughing so hard they couldn’t breathe.

He cried until there was nothing left, and then he held her tighter and waited for her heartbeat to decide.

✦✦✦

Her eyes opened at dawn. Green. Glassy. Confused. She blinked at the canvas above her, at the light filtering through palm fronds, at the unfamiliar sounds of a coast she’d never heard before.

Asher was across the tent in two strides. He dropped to his knees and pulled her against him so hard she gasped.

"You’re alive." He said it into her hair, her neck, her shoulder, anywhere his mouth could reach. "You’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive."

She didn’t speak. Her arms came up slowly, fingers curling into his shirt, and then she was holding him back, and then the sound started, low and broken, building in her chest until it cracked through her throat.

"Ronan." His name came out shattered. "Asher, where is Ronan?"

Asher’s arms tightened. His jaw locked against her temple. She knew. She could feel the absence of the matebond the way you feel a missing limb. The place where Ronan had been was empty, not severed, not blocked, empty, and the emptiness was its own answer.

She sobbed against his chest until she couldn’t breathe, and he held her through all of it, every convulsion, every sound, every wave of grief that tore through her body, and he didn’t say it was going to be okay because he was the only person who had ever respected her enough to know she’d see through it.

✦✦✦

A week passed. Then two.

The camp became a settlement. Survivors arrived in clusters, ragged and disoriented, carrying nothing but the clothes on their backs and the trauma in their eyes. Asher organized them with the efficiency of a man who had been trained to lead since he could walk and now had nothing left to lead except the wreckage.

Tents became structures. Structures became rows. Rows became streets. A kingdom was being born in the mud, one decision at a time, and Asher made every decision because no one else could and because stopping meant thinking and thinking meant remembering and remembering meant the temple and the temple meant Ronan.

✦✦✦

Natalia was sitting outside their tent in the evening light, her hand on her stomach, her eyes on the horizon. The mate mark on her neck was still raw, still healing, still tender to the touch.

Asher wrung out a cloth in cool water and pressed it gently against her neck. She flinched, then settled. His thumb held the cloth in place while his other hand rested on her back.

"I want to give you my name," he said. Not asked. Said. "I want to marry you. Properly. Before the settlement grows large enough to need a queen, I want you to already be one."

She didn’t look at him. Her hand stayed on her stomach.

"Asher... I’m carrying Ronan’s son."

"I heard." He didn’t let her finish. Didn’t let the sentence go where she was taking it. "I was there, Natalia. I held you on the dragon while he died. I will raise his son as mine because any child of Ronan’s is a child of mine. That was true when we were boys and it is true now and it will be true until I am dead and probably after."

His voice was steady. His eyes were not.

"Ronan was my brother. His blood is my blood. His son is my son. Don’t finish that sentence. Don’t ever finish that sentence."

✦✦✦

Natalia looked at him for a long time. The evening light caught her white hair and turned it gold, the way it always did, the way it had the first time she walked through a door and his world ended and began in the same breath.

"He would have wanted you to have us," she said quietly. "He told me once, if anything ever happened to him, the only man he’d trust was you."

Asher’s jaw trembled. He pressed the cloth tighter against her neck and said nothing because there was nothing left to say that wouldn’t break him.

She leaned into him. He let her weight settle against his chest. His chin found the top of her head.

They sat in the last light and watched the settlement grow around them.

✦✦✦

The memory accelerated.

Stone walls rising from cleared ground. A great hall taking shape, column by column, built from the grey rock of the coastline because the white marble of Valerion existed only in memory now.

Asher directing builders, soldiers, civilians, his voice carrying across the building site with the authority of a man who had lost everything and decided to replace it through force of will.

Natalia beside him, stomach growing, hand resting on the plans he’d drawn, correcting his measurements the way she’d corrected his grammar on treaty drafts in a library that didn’t exist anymore.

A boy born in a half-finished castle. Dark-haired. Strong-lunged. Named for his father.

Asher holding him for the first time, studying the infant’s face for traces of Ronan, and finding them, and smiling, and crying, and pressing his lips to his son’s forehead and whispering a promise that the boy would never understand but would feel for the rest of his life.

The castle grew. The settlement became a city. The city became a kingdom.

And above the gates, carved in stone that would outlast every man who built it, a name that Dexmon recognized with a jolt that nearly pulled him from the memory entirely.

DRAKENFELL