Chapter 2 Chapter Two: A Dragon's Claim
The night broke open with fire.
One moment, Serenity knelt in the ruined temple, trembling beneath Lucian’s golden gaze. The next, heat surged around her, licking at the stones, blazing into the air. The crowd’s cries faded into a dull roar as flames curled along the temple walls, not burning the ivy or stone, but burning the fear into every soul present.
Lucian did not move as a man would. His presence unfolded. Shadows bent to him, flames bowed, the air thickened until it was hard to breathe. Serenity’s body screamed at her to run, yet she could not. Her limbs locked, her heart hammered, her breath caught shallow in her chest.
“You will not stay here,” Lucian said, his voice a command that left no room for refusal. “This altar is not your grave. It is your threshold.”
Before she could answer, before she could think, fire burst from his outstretched hand. It coiled around her, warm but unburning, weaving like ribbons of light. The cords that had bound her wrists were gone, but this was worse. This was binding without touch, a claim no priest had spoken, no god had blessed.
Her people scattered, shrieking into the night. The high priest fell to the ground, striking his forehead against the stone. “Mercy, O Flame-Lord! Spare us!”
Lucian’s gaze did not waver. “I take only what was promised.”
Promised? Serenity’s mind reeled. She had not promised herself. She had not chosen this fate. Yet his words carried the weight of inevitability, as though her life had been written in fire before she was born.
The fire tightened around her, then lifted. She gasped as her body rose from the altar, her feet leaving the cold stone. Her gown swirled in the heated wind, her hair whipped against her cheeks, and still she could not fight the pull.
“No!” she cried, thrashing against the unseen force. “I belong to my people—”
“They abandoned you the moment they tied your wrists,” Lucian cut in, his voice sharp as a blade. “Do not mistake their fear for love.”
His words sliced deeper than the cords had. She had seen her mother’s eyes among the crowd, wet with tears but unmoving, had heard her father’s silence as the chants began. They had watched her kneel. They had not stopped it.
The truth stung like smoke in her lungs.
She looked down as the temple shrank beneath her. The people were already fleeing into the forest, their torches bobbing like fireflies. The priest remained, forehead pressed to stone, muttering prayers that rose no higher than dust.
Her chest tightened. I am alone.
The wind roared louder. The fire around her expanded, blazing into vast wings that unfolded on either side of Lucian. His form shifted, twisting, breaking, expanding. The man she had seen blurred, his body stretching, bones groaning, skin rippling as scales of molten gold and obsidian emerged. His eyes remained—those terrible, burning eyes—but now they belonged to something greater.
A dragon.
Her breath caught. The stories had not been exaggerations. His body unfurled across the sky, vast enough to eclipse the moonlight, wings spanning wider than the temple itself. Flames licked between his scales, fire seething from his throat with every exhale.
And she—Serenity, daughter of Eryndor, sacrifice to forgotten gods—was cradled in the coils of his fire, a fragile mortal held in the grasp of a being older than her world.
He rose.
The temple crumbled beneath the gust of his wings, stones tumbling as the roof caved inward. The last holy place of her people, shattered in an instant, as though it had never mattered.
The forest fell away, fields stretched like patchwork in the dark, rivers glimmered silver in the moonlight. Higher and higher he carried her, until the cries of her people were gone, until the only sound was the thunder of his wings and the roar of wind.
Serenity clutched her arms around herself, her gown snapping in the gale. She forced her voice past the scream rising in her throat.
“Where are you taking me?”
Lucian’s answer came not as a shout but as a voice inside her mind, resonant and unshakable.
“To my palace,” he said. “To the seat of flame. You will not kneel to crumbling stone again. You will kneel only to me.”
Her heart lurched. Palace? Seat of flame? She had imagined death, not captivity. Her fate was not sacrifice but possession.
“I will not kneel,” she hissed, fury breaking through her terror. “I am not yours.”
A low rumble rolled from his chest, half laughter, half warning. The fire around her tightened, not burning, but reminding.
“You are bold,” Lucian murmured. “It will serve you well. But do not mistake boldness for freedom. Your defiance amuses me… for now.”
The words chilled her even as heat pressed against her skin. For now.
The journey stretched long, the night endless. The land below blurred—forests, mountains, rivers, all insignificant beneath the vast wings that carried her. At last, the horizon split with a glow brighter than dawn.
A mountain rose from the earth, jagged and crowned in flame. Lava coursed down its sides in glowing rivers, yet the stone around it did not crumble. Black spires jutted upward, towers forged of obsidian and fire, forming a fortress that seemed carved from the bones of the earth itself.
His palace.
The dragon descended, fire curling in his wake. As his body coiled around the mountain, his form shifted again, shrinking, bones reshaping, scales dissolving into flesh. When he touched the obsidian platform at the mountain’s peak, he was a man once more—tall, terrible, with golden eyes that pierced her.
The fire around her vanished, and she stumbled forward onto the platform. The stone was hot beneath her bare feet, searing enough to sting, but she held her head high, refusing to let him see her flinch.
Lucian approached, every step deliberate. “Serenity,” he said, her name curling from his lips like a spell. “This is where you belong.”
She swallowed hard, her heart hammering. “I will never belong here.”
He stopped inches from her, close enough that the heat of him threatened to smother her. His gaze bore into hers, not cruel, not gentle, but inevitable.
“You will,” Lucian said softly. “Because destiny does not ask for your permission.”
The wind howled around the mountain, carrying embers into the night sky. Serenity’s hands balled into fists. She wanted to scream, to strike him, to demand her freedom. But the truth pressed heavy on her chest.
She was no longer a sacrifice. She was a claim.
And the dragon would not let her go.
