Chapter 11
In his left hand, he held not his wooden staff, but an ancient, blood-inscribed parchment scroll—a scroll already unfurled, its dark runes smoking with foul, violet fire.
“Strike her!” Julian screamed, his voice cracking like a whip across the vast hall. “Drive the venom into her throat, Sariyah! Now!”
“Julian...” I wept, my voice breaking as I clutched the burning collar at my neck. “She isn't fighting. She’s... she called me her child...”
“She is an animal!” Julian roared, closing the distance between us with shocking, athletic agility. His boots skidded across the quartz as he came to a halt five paces away. His hand reached toward a secondary scroll at his belt with unnatural, terrifying fluidness—the muscle memory of a veteran handler, not an ink-stained archivist.
“You do not listen to it!” he snarled, his face twisted into an ugly, sneering mask of pure panic. “You are the blade of Valerius! You exist to cleanse this filth from the earth! Draw the dagger and kill it!”
I scrambled to my feet, my chest heaving, and placed myself directly between Julian and the weeping Matriarch.
“I won't!” I yelled, my voice ringing off the crystal walls. “Julian, look at her! She’s dying! She surrendered! The war is over! We can leave—we can go to the valley—”
“There is no valley!”
The words tore from Julian’s throat with venomous, unchecked fury.
The world seemed to stop spinning.
I stared at him.
The sweet, fragile man who had kissed my forehead by the campfire, who had promised me clover fields and glass windows, was gone. Standing before me was a stranger with eyes like cold slate and a mouth twisted with frantic disgust.
“There is only the Empire!” Julian hissed, his breathing shallow, his knuckles white around the smoking scroll. “There is only the reclamation of our world! You think I spent years dragging you across the ash-wastes so you could plant turnip greens with me? You are a weapon, Sariyah! You exist to finish what was started!”
Every word struck like a hammer blow, cracking the fragile foundation of everything I had believed.
“Julian...” I whispered, horror pooling in my stomach. “What are you saying? What am I to you?”
“You are mine to steer!” he shouted, stepping forward, his eyes darting frantically to the dying Matriarch, whose golden eye watched him with mournful sorrow. “And you will obey me!”
In a flash of desperate defiance, my hand whipped to my belt, drawing the dead-black sealing dagger from its sheath.
I didn't turn toward the dragon.
I leveled the venomous blade directly at Julian’s chest, the tip trembling between us.
“Stay back,” I warned, my voice shaking with grief and rising thunder. “Tell me the truth, Julian. What am I? What did you put around my neck?”
Julian didn't cower before the blade.
Seeing the steel pointed at his own breast, the last vestige of the helpless scholar dissolved into dust.
Standing before the dying queen and her lost daughter, Julian drew himself up to his full height. His posture became rigid, martial, arrogant—the terrifying silhouette of an imperial high beast-tamer who had realized his prize was slipping through his fingers. He raised the smoking parchment scroll toward the vaulted ceiling, his face contorting with absolute, tyrannical authority.
And from his throat tore an ancient, guttural high-imperial command word—a leash-spell forged solely to break the minds of beasts.
*“VOK-ZUR-DRAKOTH!”* Julian screamed, the command vibrating through the cavern with the force of an avalanche. *“SLAY YOUR DAM, BEAST! DRINK HER HEART!”*
The command crashed into my skull like a lightning strike.
My thoughts were instantly snuffed out. An invisible, iron-tight harness seized every tendon, every nerve in my flesh.
My body violently rebelled against my own will. Under the irresistible, puppeteering force of the spell, my hips pivoted, my boots scraping across the quartz as my entire frame was wrenched away from Julian and forced back toward the dais.
My sword arm, locked in rigid agony, was dragged upward by an unseen cable. The spell forced my shoulders forward, driving the black venomous dagger down toward the weeping Matriarch’s pulsing throat-cleft.
*No!* my soul screamed into the dark. *No!*
Every sinew in my body strained until the veins bulged black against my arms. With raw, desperate agony, I fought the magic inch by inch, forcing my locked muscles into rebellion.
The descent of the blade shuddered to a halt.
Poised with my blade over the weeping dragon matriarch’s throat, I felt the silver torc burn searingly hot against my skin. The tip of the sealing blade hovered an inch from the exposed golden scale, trembling violently between the master’s leash and my soul’s refusal.
The Matriarch closed her golden eye, letting out a final, shuddering sigh of surrender.
Julian’s face twisted in frantic disbelief as he saw my hand freeze.
The purple runes on the collar flared with blinding, toxic fury, pouring white-hot punishment into my collarbone to force the strike home.
And in that frozen, agonizing heartbeat, pushed beyond the limits of mortal endurance, a sound broke through the roaring silence of the Sanctum.
*SNAP.*
At the nape of my neck, beneath the unbearable, incandescent fury of my true blood, the silver torc hairline-fractured.
