Page 13 of Silver Claws, Crimson Tears
Two days later, everything changed. A royal messenger arrived bearing the King’s seal—a summons demanding answers about Rhealyn’s disappearance. King Craven Stonefall himself had taken interest in the case.
The Commander called me back that afternoon, her face grim.
“His Majesty is... unusually concerned about Skysinger Wyndward’s disappearance.” She drummed her fingers on her desk. “He read the official report and now wishes to know more. But there isn’t more.” She sighed heavily, then handed me a sealed document. “Tell Breezehart she has her authorization. The King commands we pursue every lead, however fanciful. He wants her found. Dead or alive.”
Thus began the steady stream of ancient books arriving with our supply shipments, piling higher in Fort Ashmire’s study hall with each passing week.
And now this. More books, and still no answers, the shadow of hope Breezehart stirred in me a year ago already dimmed to nearly nothing.
I shake my head at the mess and turn away. We can’t delay our departure any longer, or there’ll be hells to pay with the Commander. I stride through the corridor toward the library, my boots echoing against stone. If she’s lost track of time buried in those ancient texts again, I’ll have to remind her ofher duties to the Sky Order. The war waits for no one, especially not Skysingers with a penchant for scholarship.
Rounding the corner, I nearly collide with a blur of red hair and parchment. Breezehart staggers backward.
“High Prime!” Her green eyes are enormous, bright with a fervor I’ve never seen from her. Her face flushes with excitement, pale skin now nearly matching her hair. “I found it,” she whispers, then louder, “I found it, High Prime. I found what we’ve been looking for.”
6
Zephyros
The nightmare comes again, as it has a thousand times since she vanished.
Zephyros sees Rhealyn standing at the edge of the plateau, her dark hair whipping in the wind. She turns to look at him, those hazel eyes wide with terror. Then she falls, plummeting through empty air. His wings snap open, and he dives, talons outstretched toward his rider—his little one—but she slips through his grasp like smoke.
Her body strikes the ground below. The earth trembles, splits, and consumes her.
Gone.
Zephyros crashes into the unyielding stone, digging his obsidian claws into soil that suddenly feels like granite. He roars in anguish, tearing at the earth, but it heals faster than he can break it. The ground mocks him with its solidity, as if Rhealyn had never existed at all.
Give her back!His mental cry echoes into emptiness.
Zephyros wakes with a violent start, scales scrapingagainst the stone walls of his lair. The hollow within Sky’s Edge feels too small suddenly, too confining.
The pain of separation burns through him like poison. Millennia of existence, and he’s never felt a bond go completely silent yet remain somehow intact. She lives. He knows this with absolute certainty, feels her presence like a phantom limb, tantalizingly close yet impossible to reach.
Zephyros unfurls his wings in the darkness of his cave. The scar over his right eye throbs with remembered pain. What use is all his power if he’s never able to protect those who matter?
Sleep will not return now. It never does after the nightmare. He slumps back onto his bed of worn stone, eyes fixed on the cave entrance where the first hint of dawn light creeps in. Another day without her. Another day of waiting, searching the skies for any sign, testing the strange link between them that still remains.
The memories of Hearthdale still haunt him. For six long months, Zephyros perched atop the Flametop Mountains, a vigilant statue against the changing sky. His talons carved new notches into ancient stone as he watched the endless procession of riders and their dragons searching the cave systems.
Fools. All of them.
He watched their methodical explorations with contempt burning in his ancient gaze. They plumbed every dark recess with torches and instruments, mapped every winding tunnel with their careful measurements, documented every hollow chamber with their endless charts and diagrams—as if Rhealyn might be found simply napping peacefully in some forgotten corner of the caverns. As if the power that had claimed her, that had swallowed her whole, was something so mundane, so ordinary that it could possibly be tracked by their primitive human means. Their ignorance of the ancient forces at work was pitiable.
Yet Vaylen, with his relentless determination, earned a grudging measure of respect from Zephyros. The High Prime drove himself beyond exhaustion, pushing deeper into the mountain than any other, refusing to abandon the search even when others faltered. Zephyros had to acknowledge, however reluctantly, that the human male truly cared for Rhealyn. His desperation mirrored Zephyros’s own, though filtered through the limited understanding of a creature whose life was but a blink compared to a dragon’s existence.
The riders tried, but their dragons understood better, casting sorrowful glances toward him as he maintained his lonely vigil. Only they could comprehend the torment of feeling a bond that still pulsed with life yet led nowhere.
When winter came, blanketing the landscape in snow and ice, Zephyros remained. The frozen winds that would have killed any human merely reminded him of colder ages he had survived. But as spring thawed the land and summer burned the valleys green, his restlessness grew unbearable.
One night, as the stars wheeled overhead, Zephyros unfurled his wings and left the mountains behind. Not because hope had abandoned him—but because something deep within called him back to Sky’s Edge. Perhaps in the place where their bond first formed, he might feel closer to her.
Now, the familiar plateau surrounds him, the same winds caress his scales, but the emptiness remains. Distance, he has learned, means nothing. Whether perched on that peak or lying in his lair, the bond connecting him to Rhealyn remains equally tangible and equally unreachable.
—Wherever you are,he thinks toward that ghostly bond,know that I have not forgotten. I will never forget.
Suddenly, a cry splinters through Zephyros like lightning striking a barren tree—raw, unexpected, excruciating.
