(Lyra's POV)
I should've turned away.
That's what survival taught me—don't stop for strangers, don't bleed for the dying. Especially not for dragonkind.
But there was something about him.
Not the wounds torn through his ribs or the blood turning to glassy shards in the snow. Not the ruined wings sprawled beneath him like broken blades.
It was his face.
Young. Too young for a battlefield. Angled, sharp, with a mouth pressed tight against pain. His skin was pale—scaled in places—and marked with faint runes that pulsed like dying embers.
A dragon prince?
A soldier?
Or just another lost boy fed to the war machine?
I didn't know.
But I saw the twitch of his fingers—clawed, trembling—and I saw the faintest rise of his chest.
He was alive.
Barely.
I swallowed hard. My breath steamed the frozen air.
"Lyra, Leave him," Darran barked from behind me. "Not worth the trouble."
I didn't answer.
Didn't move.
Something stirred in my chest—a low hum, soft and dark, like a string plucked in my bones.
Melos.
The song magic slid up my throat before I could stop it. A single note, half-formed and shaking.
I reached out with trembling fingers, hovering inches from his skin.
My heartbeat thundered. My shadows curled at my feet, whispering, don't,run,this is madness.
But I sang.
A low, cracked note—a melody I didn't know I knew. It wasn't sweet. It wasn't soft.
It was raw.
The air trembled. The snow swirled, curling into slow, deliberate patterns around us.
Beneath my hand, the runes on his skin flickered. Bright. Burning.
His back arched, a sharp, breathless sound rasping from his lips. His eyes flew open.
And the world.
Stopped.
Eyes the color of molten ember locked onto mine.
No anger. No fear.
Just something ancient. Something… familiar.
Like we'd met before, on some battlefield neither of us remembered.
I didn't breathe. Couldn't.
My song cracked into a wordless hum, vibrating through the frost, through my bones, through him.
He gasped, chest heaving. His clawed hand twitched—reaching, maybe. His lips parted, a sound escaping that wasn't quite a word.
I pressed my palm to his collarbone.
The contact slammed through me like lightning shattering glass.
A rush of heat. Of pain. Of something deeper.
Magic roared between us—not like the soothing touch of Mother's lullabies or the sharp command of battle hymns.
This was wild. Unforgiving. A current of raw creation and destruction.
The ground cracked beneath him, runes spiraling outward in fire-bright lines. His wings flared—a half-motion, jerking against the snow.
I gasped, my voice breaking into the melody.
The world blurred.
I saw flashes—
A boy chained in fire.
A crown forged in blood.
A kingdom burning beneath twin moons.
His future.
My future.
Our future?
The bond snapped taut.
His eyes widened. His fingers closed over mine, tight and desperate.
I felt it then—something more than magic.
A tether. A spark. A promise the world wasn't ready for.
I pulled back with a gasp, stumbling to my feet. My heart hammered like a war drum. My shadows swirled close, folding around me.
He dropped back into the snow with a strangled breath. Alive. Barely.
I reached into my satchel, fingers shaking, and drew out a shard of clear crystal etched with faint song runes—a fragment of a songstone I'd carried since exile.
I pressed it into his hand.
He clutched it like a drowning man clutches air.
"I don't know your name," I whispered, voice hoarse. "But I know you'll live."
His ember eyes fluttered. His lips parted.
I didn't wait for his answer.
I turned.
And vanished into the snow.
(Kael's POV)
I wasn't supposed to survive.
Not the war.
Not the Bloodfall Fields.
Not the life I was born into.
My name wasn't even mine. It was the scream my mother made when she died giving birth to me on a battlefield thick with ash and broken bodies.
I never had a legacy. No noble blood. No dragon lord title.
Just war.
I was a lowborn hatchling thrown into the maw of a conflict older than memory — a boy fed to the Crystal War like firewood to a dying flame.
They told us it was about honor.
About protecting our kind.
They lied.
It was about power.
Control.
Who got to hold the blade and who was left bleeding beneath it.
I was conscripted at eleven. By thirteen, I'd seen more corpses than sunrises. I earned my first scar before I learned how to fly.
My first battle left me deaf in one ear.
My second left me buried under the bodies of my brothers.
By eighteen, they called me "cursed." The soldiers feared me. The commanders used me. And the Tyrant King — the bastard ruling over the dragonkin with a fist of iron and a heart of stone — saw me as a tool. Disposable.
The battle at Bloodfall Fields was supposed to be our victory.
A final push. An ambush against the elven lines.
We were told it would break the war.
Instead, it broke us.
The elves unleashed something on that field—song magic twisted with shadow, blades that sang in the dark and stole the fire from our veins.
My unit was slaughtered before the first sunrise.
I fought until I couldn't.
Until my wings snapped beneath me.
Until my fire drained to embers.
Until I collapsed in the snow, waiting for death like a loyal dog left in the cold.
I remember the cold first.
Not the pain. Not the fear.
Just the cold creeping into my bones, quiet and sharp, whispering, this is how it ends.
I wasn't afraid.
I was angry.
I'd bled. I'd fought. I'd obeyed. And in the end, I was nothing more than another corpse tossed on a cursed battlefield.
I would've died angry.
Except…
She found me.
At first, I thought I was hallucinating.
A girl in crimson kneeling beside me, her silver hair tangled in wind, her violet eyes burning in the frost.
She wasn't afraid.
She wasn't supposed to be there.
But gods… there she was.
She touched the ground beside me — fingertips grazing the ice like a secret—and sang.
I felt it before I heard it.
A low hum, wild and sharp, slicing through the numbness like a blade.
The snow shifted. Symbols I didn't know bled into the ground. My skin burned—runed veins lighting beneath my flesh.
I gasped. Arched. Reached—
And met her eyes.
For a moment, I thought she'd kill me.
Her magic didn't soothe. It was scorched. It ripped through me, forcing my bones to knit, my blood to surge, my heart to slam back into a rhythm I didn't know I still had.
She wasn't saving me.
She was commanding me.
Live.
I felt it in every pulse of my body, every flare of raw, untamed fire.
I remember reaching for her—claws twitching—afraid she'd vanish like smoke.
But she pressed something into my hand. A crystal shard, humming with her magic.
And then…
She was gone.
Vanished into the storm like a ghost called back to the void.
I don't remember how long I laid there, clutching that shard like a lifeline.
I don't remember crawling out of that grave of snow.
But I remember the fire that woke in me that day.
Not the fire of dragons. Not the fury of war.
Something deeper.
A hunger.
I need to find her again.
To know who she was.
Why did she save me?
And what the hell she unleashed inside me.
Because I swore then—on the blood of my brothers, on the grave of every lie I'd been told—
I wasn't going to die forgotten.
I was going to burn the world until it remembered my name.