A white-hot fist of heat and force slamd into her like God Himself had shoved. The sound was apocalyptic—tal shredding, fuel igniting, the universe screaming as it tore one more family apart and added an exclamation point of fla for cruelty’s sake.
She twisted mid-air.
Curled every inch of herself around Phei—arms locked, legs tucked, chin tucked over his head like a shield of flesh and bone.
They hit the ground rolling.
Her dislocated shoulder slamd asphalt first—fresh agony exploding white behind her eyes. Then her back, her ribs, her everything. Skin tore open on gravel;burns from flying embers seared through clothes.
But she took it all. Every impact. Every scrape. Every blistering wave of heat.
If the flas wanted him, they’d have to go through her first.
They skidded to a stop.
She looked up.
And watched her brother burn.
The fire roared taller now—greedy, triumphant—devouring the car, the bodies, the future that had been waiting just out of reach. The Christmases they’d never share. The birthdays she’d never watch him blow out candles with his son on his lap.
The quiet evenings where Phei would have grown up safe between two parents who loved him more than breath.
All of it.
Gone.
And with the flas went the purple—the impossible, living athyst that had always glowed in Phei’s eyes. Snuffed out like a candle pinched between fingers. Was it the pain of losing his parents that caused that? Or was it his way of mourning them? The last spark of it winked once in the smoke—then nothing.
Around them—around the burning wreckage and the child still screaming into her chest and the woman who had just lost half her soul—people gathered.
Paradise’s elite.
Silk ties and tailored suits. Designer heels clicking on cracked pavent. Expensive cars idling at a safe distance, headlights cutting pale beams through the smoke. Phones raised high—screens glowing, recording every second of the horror.
No one moved to assist her broken body and her safe Phei.
No one called out.
No one did a single fucking thing except watch a child lose his parents and a woman lose her brother while the fire ate what was left.
The sirens ca eventually.
Too late.
Always too late.
Present Day.
The tears were cold on her cheeks.
lissa stood in the walk-in closet of Phei’s penthouse—surrounded by the suits and designer clothes she’d chosen for him, the new stoke of shoes and everything else, the life she’d quietly constructed around him without ever being able to explain why.
Ten years.
Ten years of silence.
Ten years of watching him suffer—her brother’s son, her blood-sworn responsibility—while she played a long, lonely ga with rules written in smoke and fla.
She wiped her face with the back of a trembling hand.
Opened her palm.
And let herself see it.
It had co to her in the fire.
She’d never told anyone—not the doctors who’d scrubbed charred skin from her arms, not the therapists Harold had forced her to see, not the quiet investigators who’d asked what she rembered from those final seconds before the blast.
But as Seiryū burned, sothing had risen from his chest.
Pushed through fla and twisted steel and the laws of physics themselves.
Found her open, bleeding hand like it had always known the way and entered her body.
And never left.
It rested in her palm now.
Not quite a sphere.
Sothing more. Sothing alive.
It swirled with impossible colors—deep athyst threaded with molten gold, storms trapped in crystal, entire galaxies compressed into sothing no larger than her fist.
It was warm.
Always warm.
It pulsed—slow, steady, patient—like a heart that had waited ten years to beat again.
She couldn’t explain what it was.
Not in words.
Not in any tongue humans had invented.
But she understood it the way lungs understand air, the way bones understand gravity, the way a mother understands her child’s cry in a crowded room.
This was her brother.
What remained.
What he’d given her to give to his son.
She closed her eyes.
Pressed it against her chest.
And pushed.
The feeling defied language.
Not pain—never pain—but overwhelming intensity. Like swallowing starlight. Like the sun taking up residence behind her ribs, a second heartbeat that was his and hers and sothing older than both.
It slipped through skin.
Through bone.
Settled in the hollow beside her heart and stayed—warm, waiting, patient.
She’d carried it for ten years.
She’d carry it as long as she had to.
She opened her eyes.
Wiped the last tears away.
Looked around the closet—at the tailored suits, the polished shoes, the small acts of devotion he would never recognize as love because she could never tell him the truth.
Not yet.
But soon.
"He’ll be ready," she whispered.
To the warmth in her chest.
To the brother who had trusted her with everything.
To the empty room and the silent penthouse and the decade of waiting that was finally—finally—ending.
"Very soon, Seiryū. He’ll be ready."
The Maxton Mansion. The Sa Mont.
The safe of his desk closed with a sound like a coffin lid sliding ho—final, heavy, irreversible.
Harold Maxton smiled.
It was not the warm, paternal smile he wore in boardrooms or at charity galas. This one was thinner, sharper, the smile of a man who had spent a decade cultivating patience the way other n cultivated wine: slowly, deliberately, savoring the rot beneath the surface.
His hands trembled against the cold steel—not from fear. Never from fear. Harold Maxton had long since burned fear out of himself like a tumor.
No, this was anticipation:electric, nauseating, the kind of thrill that made his stomach clench and his pulse throb in his temples. The feeling of standing on the edge of a cliff you had spent years building, knowing the drop was coming and that you would be the one to push.
He moved and opened sothing.
A vault that was concealed behind a false wall in a study few people had ever been permitted to enter. The room itself slled of old leather, aged paper, and the faint tallic tang of secrets.
The wall panel had no visible seams, no handles, no telltale lines. It responded only to a sequence of pressures—three taps high left, two low right, one palm-flat center—delivered in the exact rhythm Harold had drilled into muscle mory over ten endless years.
He tapped and it opened.
Inside the safe: black velvet the color of a starless midnight.
And on that velvet, inside a box whose surface was not tal but scales—living scales that shifted lazily from azure to sapphire to the abyssal indigo of ocean trenches where light had never reached—sothing slept.
Sothing pulsed.
Not with ordinary light. Not with heat or electricity. A soft, liquid blue radiance leaked from the seams of the box like breath fogging glass. It rose and fell in slow, dreaming cycles—inhale, exhale, inhale—like lungs that had forgotten how to surface.
The glow cast faint shadows across Harold’s face, turning his sharp cheekbones into blades, his eyes into hollows.
Seiryū Tiamat. TheUnawakenedAzure Dragon.
Not the man who had died screaming in a burning car. Not the brother, the husband, the father.
This was what had remained when the flesh burned away.
Harold stared at the closed safe as though he could see through steel and scale to the thing inside.
Ten years.
Ten years of careful husbandry. Ten years of keeping the boy alive—feeding him, clothing him, educating him, letting him hate just enough to stay sharp but not enough to break. Ten years of watching the signs: the occasional flicker of unnatural violet in Phei’s eyes during his rage monts, the way firelight seed to bend around him instead of touching him.
The dreams lissa thought she hid where he spoke in tongues older than Sur.
And now—finally—the signs were no longer subtle.
The boy was ripening.
The dragon was stirring.
"Soon," Harold murmured.
The word tasted like copper on his tongue.
It was not a promise.
It was a threat wrapped in velvet.
He turned away from the vault.
The study lights dimd automatically as he passed—motion sensors, or perhaps sothing older recognizing their master. He paused at the tall window overlooking the manicured grounds of the Maxton estate: fountains silent in the night, marble statues frozen in eternal poise, security lights cutting pale arcs across perfect grass.
Sowhere out there—in a glass tower that stabbed the sky like a needle—lissa was whispering the sa word to an empty closet.
She ant love, devotion and salvation.
She ant protection.
She ant the end of waiting.
Harold ant harvest.
He ant reclamation.
He ant the mont when the boy’s blood finally woke and rembered who—and what—he truly was.
Then he’ll harvest!
Neither of them knew the other was speaking at that exact instant.
Neither knew how close the other stood to the sa precipice.
But both were waiting for the sa boy.
Both had spent a decade shaping him in the dark.
One with hidden love that cut like knives.
One with evil and ancient ambition that devoured worlds.
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