Of Blood & Banes

Marge⁵ leads Kat¹ into the forest at midnight for her first lesson in manipulating magic. She instructs Kat¹ to kneel, remove her gloves, and press her palms into the cold earth. Closing her eyes, Kat¹ senses a deep humming beneath the ground: the ley lines, rivers of raw magical energy flowing through the realm.

Marge⁵ explains that the Blood Ring acts as a bucket drawing from a well, and Kat¹ must learn to control how much magic she pulls and how quickly. On her first attempt, Kat¹ pulls too hard. Pain sears up her arms like liquid fire, and she slips into The White, the afterlife dimension.

There, she sees her dead brother Aiden's silhouette, his back turned. He calls her childhood nickname but refuses to face her, and she wakes freezing in Cole³'s arms, Marge⁵ warning that touching anyone in The White could resurrect them, a forbidden and dangerous act.

Late one night, Cole³ guards Kat¹'s door and confesses a secret Marge⁵ made him promise to keep. The ring he gave Kat,¹ his mother's heirloom, is the Blood Ring, one of two ancient god-relics. It links the wearer's life to King Aaric,¹⁴ who wears the Bone Ring. If Kat¹ dies, the King¹⁴ dies too. This explains why her wound healed overnight: the King¹⁴ must have healed himself with magic, and the link transferred the effect.

It also means that the longer Kat¹ wears the ring and channels magic through it, the more it seals to her, until she cannot remove it without dying. Cole³ admits he kept this from her because he feared she would make a rash decision, perhaps sacrificing herself to take down the King¹⁴ and end the war instantly.

Kat¹ proposes a deal: Darian⁴ will train her to fight in exchange for smuggled whiskey each night. He agrees with characteristic arrogance, first mocking her technique, then correcting it with brutal precision. He discovers she fights with her right hand but is naturally left-handed, a simple observation that transforms her effectiveness with a blade.

During sessions, he pins her against walls and floors, each takedown a mixture of instruction and provocation. He tells her she leads with her emotions, that her anger makes her predictable.

When she lands a rare slap across his face, he freezes, something dark flickering behind his eyes before he resumes his taunting. Their sessions blur the line between combat and foreplay, each physical domination charged with a current neither acknowledges aloud. Kat¹ increasingly relies on these nights to exhaust the fury she cannot otherwise express.

Sethan⁶ flies Kat¹ on A'nala⁹ to a valley holding the blackened ruins of Wynnban, a town torched by King Aaric¹⁴'s orders years ago. He confesses that he was once second in command to Jurrock, Darian⁴'s father, in the King¹⁴'s Close Circle.

When ordered to bar doors and burn families alive, he could not comply. He rescued one household and fled north. He describes watching the King¹⁴ pour a liquid that looked like blood onto his hand, then control the fire as if it were alive.

The destroyed town, he explains, is what happens every time Aaric¹⁴'s forces reach a rebel settlement. Kat¹ realizes the sword she took from a rebel in Hornwood bears the King¹⁴'s Close Circle symbol, meaning the King¹⁴'s men, not rebels, burned that town and killed the little girl she failed to save.

Wild fire dragons attack Vathstone, a coastal city, raining flame onto rooftops and sending citizens scrambling for an overcrowded bunker. Kat¹ helps a mother and infant reach safety, then faces a massive red dragon in the street.

Daeja² intercepts the beast, absorbing a full blast of fire to her chest without injury, and drives it off after silently communicating with it. But the flames still consume the city. Acting on instinct, Kat¹ kneels in the cobblestone square, presses her palms to the ground, and pulls. She spins in slow circles, arms outstretched, gathering the dragonfire into a roaring cyclone around her body.

With a scream, she slams the flames down into the ley lines, extinguishing them. When she collapses, Cole³ catches her. The dragon riders kneel before her, their dragons bowing. For the first time, Kat¹ has saved lives on a scale that justifies the prophecy.

After Vathstone's fire, Corvin¹¹ reports he could not free Darian⁴ from Kat¹'s room. She races back and finds him unconscious, barely breathing, overcome by smoke. His pulse fades. Desperate, Kat¹ retrieves the necklace Marge⁵ gave her, a vial of earth dragon's breath intended for dire emergencies, and breathes its contents into Darian⁴'s mouth.

His eyes flutter open. He asks what she did, and she deflects, unwilling to admit she sacrificed something Marge⁵ explicitly commanded her to keep for herself.

When she later presses him for information about the King,¹⁴ he tells her the King¹⁴ can also pull magic, then deflects further questions. The next day, Melaina⁸ catches Kat¹ emerging from her room flustered after sharing a bed with a shackled Darian,⁴ correctly guessing what happened between them the night he nearly died.

Traveling through the Forbidden Forest, Archie⁷ mistakes a clutch of earth dragon eggs for emeralds, provoking a swarm of small jade-green dragons. Corvin¹¹ is bitten, and poison races through his bloodstream.

Kat¹ kneels beside him, presses a hand to his face, and pulls the shimmering black poison from his veins into her own palm, then hurls it away. But too much poison absorbed through her skin sends her into cardiac arrest. As she hovers near death in a white void, a voice offers to help.

She accepts and wakes to find an enormous green dragon, its scales draped in moss and vines, breathing warm air over her face. The creature's dragon's breath neutralized the poison. The earth dragon then orders the group to leave the forest and never return. Corvin¹¹ is dead.

After observing a charged look between Kat¹ and Cole,³ Archie⁷ demands the truth. Daeja² spreads her wings to shield them from the group, and Kat¹ confesses everything: Cole³ is not her brother but her former fiancé, the man she loved before his secret engagement to Celeste destroyed her trust. She admits she slept with Darian⁴ in Arterias and again more recently.

She removes her glove to show Archie⁷ the Blood Ring and explains it links her to the King.¹⁴ Her voice breaks as she describes how she is losing her grip on who she is and what she wants. Archie⁷ listens without judgment, then pulls her into a tight embrace, calling her his best and worst best friend. He asks only that she help fulfill Melaina⁸'s dream of riding a dragon as recompense.

After the execution of the traitor Nolan,¹⁰ grief and exhaustion lower Kat¹'s defenses. Darian⁴ finds her at a cliff's edge overlooking the river, and for the first time, they speak without armor. He admits he knew the man who nearly killed Archie,⁷ and killing someone familiar reopened the wound of his mother's death.

When a shooting star streaks across the sky, he recoils, the sign his little sister once called their mother's love now impossible to dismiss. Kat¹ follows him back to her room, and they make love face to face, his eyes locked on hers, his usual control dissolved.

He whispers her full name with something like reverence. By morning, he is gone, leaving pennyroyal flowers. When she confronts him, he eviscerates her with calculated cruelty, calling her a tool he used and a shoddy partner he settled for, then walks out.

Inside Vitalis castle, Kat¹ discovers a hidden mechanism in the throne room that lowers the floor to reveal a spiral staircase. The group descends into the hatching grounds beneath the mountain, where they find Vue, the legendary sun dragon, suspended by dragonblade hooks.

Kat¹ frees him, and he speaks before dissolving into light, telling her secrets never die. In the royal crypt, Kat¹ places the Blood Ring into a groove on Queen Elara¹⁵'s sarcophagus, opening it.

She touches the skeleton and is pulled into Elara¹⁵'s memories: the queen's illness, her brother Aaric¹⁴'s marriage to a commoner, the accidental death of Aaric¹⁴'s toddler daughter by dragonfire, and finally, Aaric¹⁴'s wife Avice murdering Elara¹⁵ with a dragonblade while demanding justice. Elara¹⁵ died pregnant, her final words begging Aaric¹⁴ to save the baby.

The group flees the crypt as towering stone statues, the Stone Gods of the temple, animate and pursue them across the bridge suspended over an abyss. Kat¹ drags Marge⁵ by the arm, but Marge⁵'s staff flies from her grip and she stumbles. The bridge sways under the statues' weight.

As the others reach safety, Marge⁵ hooks a chain under Kat¹'s corset, slices her own palm with her dragonblade sword, and whispers words in the ancient language. Her blade flares blue. She tells Kat¹ to hold on, then swings her sword through the bridge between them. The bridge splits.

Kat¹ catches Marge⁵'s wrist and clings to her, dangling, but the weight is too great. Marge⁵ smiles, says Kat¹ has never let her down, and lets go, falling into the mist. Kat¹ screams herself raw as the woman who trained her, protected her, and loved her disappears into the void.

After Kat¹ and Darian⁴ share an unprecedentedly intimate night, during which he looks her in the eyes, whispers her full name, and does not spin her away from him, he is gone by morning, leaving only pennyroyal blooms. When she finds him gathering his belongings, having been granted separate quarters by Melaina,⁸ Kat¹ confronts him.

He turns cold and vicious, telling her he never felt anything, that she was nothing but a tool for escaping torture and securing liquor, a shoddy partner he settled for in the absence of better options. She slaps him. He spits at her feet and says good before slamming the door. Kat¹ is left shaking, the whiplash from tenderness to venom leaving her unsure which version of him is real.

In Nightfort, the group is attacked by masked soldiers wielding dragonblades. During the battle, A'nala⁹ is stabbed in the throat with a poisoned blade. Sethan,⁶ whose life is magically linked to his dragon, collapses mid-command.

Melaina⁸ cradles her father as he chokes on blood, his final words an apology for leaving her and a wish for her happiness. Kat¹ cannot save him. After the battle, Melaina⁸ orders everyone detained for questioning. Kat¹ submits to arrest in solidarity.

Melaina⁸'s soldiers discover correspondence between Nolan¹⁰ and the King¹⁴'s Close Circle hidden in his belongings. In the community hall, Melaina⁸ sentences Nolan¹⁰ to death and beheads him with her father's sword. The Arterian squad reels from the revelation that one of their own betrayed them all.

Desperate for answers, Kat¹ presses her hands to the earth and wills herself into The White. There, she meets her father, Leland, for the first time. He tells her she is beautiful and that her mother named her Katerina because it means pure. He explains how dragonblood saved her mother's life but destroyed her sanity.

Before fading, he urges Kat¹ to return to his journal, insisting she has missed something crucial. Back in the living world, Kat¹ reexamines the prophecy text alongside a page from Queen Elara¹⁵'s journal. She realizes the ancient language has been mistranslated for generations.

Son should be sun. Maid should be made. Air should be heir. Night should be knight. The true chosen one, restored by heir and knight to end all strife, is not Kat¹ at all. It is Cole,³ a hybrid born of fire dragon blood, who can channel magic directly without a ring.

Cole,³ having received a letter from King Aaric¹⁴ threatening to execute his sisters if Cole³ does not return with the ring, slips away before dawn. Daeja,² complicit in his departure, admits she prioritized Kat¹'s safety over Kat¹'s heart. Kat¹ flies after him for a full day but finds no trace.

At the river, in the rain, she presses a dagger to her chest, intending to kill herself and, through the Blood Ring's link, the King.¹⁴ Darian⁴ tackles her, wrenching the blade away and pinning her to the ground, his hands bleeding. He apologizes, truly, for the first time, for his cruel words.

Then he proposes a plan: if Kat¹ accompanies him to Arterias posing as his consort, his wife, the King¹⁴ will grant her access to the castle, where they can rescue Cole³'s sisters and confront Aaric¹⁴ together. Kat¹ stares at him, the word wife echoing between them like a dare.