Chapter Text
I am going to kill Xaden Riorson when I get my hands on him.
How dare he make me fall hopelessly in love with his stupid self and then leave me in the name of protecting me.
Stupid men.
Stupid Husband.
Mark my words, I will find him, cure him, and then strangle him to death with my own bare hands for leaving me to deal with all this shit.
- Recovered correspondences from Duchess of Tyrrendor; Violet Sorrengail-Riorson to Lieutenant Mira Sorrengail
I wake to darkness.
Not the suffocating darkness of unconsciousness, but something wider. Quieter. The kind of stillness that exists only when the world has stopped needing you.
For a moment, I think I am still falling.
Then I realize I am lying on something soft, warm earth beneath my palms instead of stone or scorched ground. The air feels endless. Empty. When I open my eyes, there is no ceiling above me. No sky either. Just a vast expanse of shadow scattered with distant points of light, like stars seen through water.
Someone kneels beside me.
“Dad?” The word leaves my mouth before I can stop it.
He smiles the way he used to when I stayed up too late studying, when he brought me tea and told me knowledge was its own kind of armor. His face is unchanged by time or death. Gentle. Familiar.
Then understanding settles slowly, heavily, into my chest.
My father is dead.
“You figured it out quickly,” he says softly.
My throat tightens. “This means I didn’t make it. As expected. But, did we win?”
“You did,” he replies. “Just not in the way you hoped.”
The space around him hums with something ancient and vast. I can feel it now. The absence where my bonds should be. The silence where Tairn’s strength and Andarna’s light once lived.
“What- are you?” I ask.
He reaches out, fingers warm against my cheek. Real.
“I am Malek,” he says. “And I am your father.”
Reality lands like lightning.
And then the memories come rushing back.
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After the truth came out about Xaden, about what he had become, about how many others had lived among us unnoticed, Basgiath did not survive.
Not truly.
The stone towers still rose against the sky, but inside them trust rotted overnight. Riders whispered accusations in hallways that once rang with laughter. Dragons circled overhead and refused to land, their fury shaking the air. We learned that corruption had been closer than anyone wanted to believe. Instructors. Officers. Riders who had trained beside us for years.
Venin were not just enemies across borders.
They had been among us.
So we left.
Aretia opened its gates not as a sanctuary, but as a reckoning.
We came in waves. Riders first. The wounded. Civilians who had nowhere else to go. Dragons filled the skies for days as they escorted us, their shadows stretching across the valley like a warning to the world.
I stood on the walls and watched it happen.
Eight months ago, I had been a cadet. Now I was Duchess of Tyrrendor, wearing a title that still felt too heavy, standing where Xaden should have been. Leading people who looked at me with equal parts hope and fear.
He had married me.
Then he had left.
Not because he stopped loving me.
Because he loved me too much to stay.
I broke quietly.
There were nights when I could not breathe, when the bond’s silence pressed so hard against my chest I thought it would crush me. Nights when I reached for Xaden out of habit and remembered all over again that he was gone. That he had married me and then vanished without saying goodbye.
Brennan found me once, sitting on the floor of my chambers, armor still on, staring at nothing. He did not ask questions. He simply sat beside me until the shaking stopped.
Mira and Imogen teamed up to train me harder than ever before shortly after Xaden's departure. She did not let me hide. They did not let me fall apart, become weak. When I collapsed, Imogen dragged me back to my feet.
“You don’t get to disappear,” Mira told me. “Not when everyone needs you.”
So I didn’t.
I stood in council chambers filled with doubt and proved them wrong one decision at a time. I negotiated alliances that should have been impossible. I led battles that should have been lost.
I became the Duchess of Tyrrendor.
I learned quickly that being Duchess did not mean ruling from a throne. It meant earning every scrap of loyalty with action. I took Xaden’s place not by imitating him, but by becoming something different. Where he ruled with shadow and precision, I ruled with knowledge and inevitability.
Brennan rebuilt our medical corps until death itself seemed reluctant to linger. Mira trained soldiers and civilians alike, her presence steady and unyielding, never once questioning my authority. Dain organized intelligence and patrols with brutal efficiency, his loyalty no longer blind but earned.
Jesenia cataloged everything we brought with us. Every surviving record. Every fractured text. Every scrap of history that might hold answers we might need in the future. She worked through the nights, ink stained fingers moving faster than exhaustion could stop them.
The other professors and Aaric helped reshape training itself. They stripped away ceremony and left only survival. Lessons became drills. Drills became battles. If a rider could not fight half asleep and bleeding, they did not fight at all.
We rebuilt the war college in Aretia’s shadow.
Not as Basgiath had been.
Harder. Sharper. Honest.
There were no quadrants anymore. Riders trained beside griffin fliers, dragonfire and the chaotic environment of venin magic until they moved as one. Cat flew patrols through the valleys, her sharp commands carrying cleanly through the air. Maren and the others followed without hesitation. Borders meant nothing anymore.
Only survival.
And in the quiet hours, when no one was watching, I studied.
And that's when I found it.
The journal was hidden so well it felt intentional, buried beneath collapsed shelves in Aretia’s oldest archive. Jesenia helped me recover it without knowing what it contained, her careful hands piecing history back together one fragile page at a time.
The first lightning wielder wrote like a man racing death.
He believed venin corruption was not permanent. That it was a tether, not a transformation. A shared binding that could be shattered if struck with power strong enough to overwhelm every thread at once.
Lightning was the key.
But the cost was absolute.
My life for everyone else.
I read the journal until the words carved themselves into my memory. Then I locked it away.
I told no one.
Not my squad. Not the council. Not Brennan or Mira.
Not my dragons.
Blocking them out was the hardest thing I have ever done. I dulled my thoughts deliberately, sealed parts of my intent away where even Tairn and Andarna could not reach them. The distance hurt. It felt like betrayal.
But, by the time the Venin marched on Aretia, my decision had already been made and there was no going back.
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Aretia is under attack.
Only this time, our fate relies on me.
The sky fractures above the city, corrupted magic crawling through the clouds like veins beneath bruised skin. Venin flood the valley in numbers I have never seen before. Wyvern scream as they dive. Riders shout commands. Griffins wheel through the chaos with lethal grace.
Lightning hums beneath my skin.
Tairn banks sharply beneath me, his massive wings beating hard, uneven.
"Steady, Silver One", he rumbles.
Andarna flies close, her scales shifting color with her fear, rippling like living light.
"They are connected", she whispers. "All of them."
"I know."
The battlefield moves like a living creature. Rhiannon’s voice cuts through the chaos, calm and commanding as I strike lightning at her call. Dain holds the inner line near the walls, intercepting attacks meant for civilians. Sawyer lands hard, his prosthetic leg striking sparks before he launches back into the air, grinning like pain does not exist. Ridoc laughs as he hurls magic, wild and bright. Garrick and Bodhi dive together, synchronized as ever.
Below us, griffin fliers surge forward in unison, wind magic lifting dragonfire higher, carrying it farther. Cat’s voice carries sharply over the din as she coordinates with Maren and the others, their formations tight and unyielding.
And then I feel him.
Xaden stands at the edge of the battlefield, shadows curling around him, eyes glowing red.
Instinctively, I reached for the bond.
There is nothing.
"Do not", Tairn warns. "He is not safe."
"I know."
As I watched the battle field play out, I finally understood why the first lightning wielder never acted.
Because the price is everything.
I rise higher, lightning coiling around me, power humming with clarity. Below me, my people fight, believing this is just another battle.
They do not know it is the last.
“I love you,” I whisper to my dragons, my squad, and my one true love.
Then I channel with everything in me, directing my hands to the sky.
I feel the stares of those around me as I continue to create a bright ball of lightening.
I feel my mind slip, just like I knew it would happen.
I heard the screams of my squad, the roar of my dragons, and a cry from-Xaden?
But it's already too late.
I focus all my remaining strength into the sky.
And then, I release.
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The darkness returns.
Malek watches me with quiet pride.
“You changed the world in eight months,” he says. “You became what they needed.”
“And Xaden? My squad? The Venin?” I ask.
His gaze softens. “That story is not finished, not yet. Neither is yours, my child"
And then, with another flash, the ground before my feet disappears as I fall.
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