Chapter 1: The Last Feast

The smile on Princess Elinalise’s face was a practiced instrument, shaped by eighteen years of formal dinners. It rested lightly on her lips while the rest of her mind catalogued the room. She sat at the high table, naturally, her father’s empty throne a silent weight to her left. He was off dealing with some border dispute again, leaving her to host the Harvest’s End feast. A minor duty, honestly, but one that required a certain amount of political theater.

Below the dais, the great hall churned with light and sound. Long tables groaned under platters of roasted fowl and glazed roots, the steam mingling with the smoke from three massive hearths. Nobles in velvets and brocades laughed a little too loudly, their courtiers hovering just behind their chairs like anxious shadows. Elinalise’s gaze drifted over them, assigning names and recent favors. Lord Ferran was trying to get his son a commission in the Dragon Guard. Lady Yvaine wanted hunting rights in the western woods revoked for her private game park. Their requests buzzed around her ears all day, every day, until they blurred into a single drone of want.

She took a deliberate sip of honeyed wine, letting the sweetness coat her tongue. The taste was cloying. Everything about tonight was cloying—the perfumes, the compliments, the endless, subtle jockeying for position disguised as merrymaking. Her jaw was starting to ache from holding the expression. A princess must be gracious, her tutors had drilled into her. A princess must be approachable yet remote, kind yet authoritative. It was exhausting, mainly because she could never tell which version of herself anyone actually saw.

“The venison is exceptional this year, Your Highness.”

Lord Crell’s voice was a low murmur at her right elbow. She turned the smile on him, adjusting its warmth by a few degrees. For Crell, she allowed a hint of genuine ease. He’d been her father’s advisor since before she was born, a steady presence in the chaotic machinery of the court. His hair had gone fully grey now, but his eyes were still sharp, missing very little.

“It is,” Elinalise agreed, setting her goblet down. “Though I suspect Cook Brann is taking credit for the gamekeeper’s skill again.”

A faint smile touched Crell’s thin lips. “A time-honored tradition among cooks. Better to flatter the kitchen than the forest.”

He had a way of making even trivial observations sound like shared wisdom. It was part of why her father trusted him. Elinalise trusted him too, mostly because he’d never given her a reason not to. When her mother died, it was Crell who found her hiding in the stables, and instead of scolding her for running from the funeral rites, he’d simply sat with her in the hay for a while, saying nothing at all.

Down in the hall, a group of younger courtiers had started a rowdy drinking song. The melody was familiar, something about a dragon and a lost treasure. Their voices were off-key and slurred. One of the older lords shot them a disapproving glare, which only made them sing louder.

Elinalise felt a headache beginning to press at her temples. Just a few more hours. She could play her part for a few more hours, then retreat to her chambers where she could finally let her face relax. She was already planning the order of it: first the heavy diadem came off, then the layers of formal silks, then the silence.

The tremor started in the floor.

It was subtle at first, just a faint shudder that traveled up through the legs of her heavy chair. The crystal facets of her goblet shivered, ringing with a thin, high note. Conversations hiccupped. A servant carrying a tray of pastries froze mid-step, his eyes darting around.

Then the sound arrived.

It wasn’t loud, not here in the insulated heart of the castle. It was a deep, percussive whump that seemed to come through the stone itself, followed a heartbeat later by another, and another. Distant, but unmistakable. Explosions. They rolled in from the direction of the city walls, a series of dull punches against the night.

The drinking song died abruptly. All chatter ceased. For three full seconds, the only sounds were the crackle of the hearths and that fading, ominous thunder.

Elinalise’s polite smile vanished. Her body went rigid, her fingers curling around the edge of the table. Her mind scrabbled for sense. Fireworks? No, the festival wasn’t for weeks. Training exercises? At this hour? Unthinkable.

Her eyes found Crell’s. His expression had closed off completely, all traces of dry humor gone. He was already pushing back his chair.

“A minor disturbance at the walls, most likely,” he said, his voice low enough that only she could hear it over the rising murmur of alarm from the hall. “Some fool merchant’s wagon with unstable alchemical supplies. I will go and assess it.”

He said it with such calm authority that part of her wanted to believe him. It was the same tone he used to dismiss reports of bandits or tax disputes—a problem to be managed, not a crisis.

But wagons didn’t make the castle tremble.

“Should I—” she began, already thinking of protocols, of rallying the household guard stationed in the outer corridors.

“You should remain here,” Crell interrupted gently but firmly. He placed a cool, dry hand over hers on the table for just an instant. A gesture meant to be reassuring. “Keep everyone calm. Your presence is needed in this room.”

He had a point. Panic in a hall full of tipsy, entitled nobles could cause its own kind of disaster. She gave a short, tight nod.

Crell offered a shallow bow before turning away from the high table. She watched him move along the edge of the dais, his grey robes blending with the stone as he headed for the servants’ entrance behind a large tapestry depicting the First Dragonflight. It was quicker than navigating the crowded main floor. He disappeared through it without a backward glance.

The moment he was gone, the noise in the hall swelled into a confused babble. Questions flew back and forth with no answers.

“What in hells was that?” “Are we under attack?” “Nonsense! Who would dare?”

Elinalise stood up. The movement drew every eye in the room. She kept her shoulders straight, her chin level. “Please,” she said, and her voice carried better than she’d hoped, cutting through the din. “Remain seated. Lord Crell is investigating. It is likely an accident in the artisans’ quarter.” She repeated his lie smoothly, hoping it would stick.

Some people settled back down, mollified by her display of control. Others continued to whisper nervously, their eyes darting toward the high arched windows as if they could see through stone to the city beyond.

Elinalise resumed her seat, but every muscle in her body was coiled tight. The practiced smile was impossible to summon now. She stared at the spot where Crell had vanished, counting heartbeats. How long did it take to reach the western battlement? Five minutes? Ten? He should have sent a runner back by now if it were nothing.

A new sound began to filter in, replacing the strange silence left by the explosions. It was a muffled clamor of shouts and ringing metal, still distant but growing clearer. It came not from outside, but from deeper within the castle—from the direction of the main gatehouse and the inner courtyards.

Her personal guards, four men in dragon-crested armor who had been standing like statues against the wall behind her, shifted their stances almost imperceptibly. Their hands went to their sword hilts.

Before anyone in the hall could fully process this new development, before Elinalise could even give an order, the main doors of the throne room exploded inward.

They didn’t just open. They burst apart in a shower of splintered oak and twisted iron hinges, slammed open by some immense force from the corridor outside. The boom echoed through the hall, drowning out every other sound.

Framed in the wreckage stood not the gold-and-crimson cloaks of the Dragon Kingdom guards, but a wall of unfamiliar armor—dull steel plates etched with a angular, brutal sigil Elinalise recognized with a cold plunge of dread: a black wolf’s head on a field of blood red. The sigil of House Grenville, their most powerful rival from across the northern mountains.

Armored mercenaries flooded into the room, weapons drawn and glinting in the firelight. They moved with a terrifying efficiency, fanning out to flank the crowded tables without a word spoken. Their faces were hard and anonymous behind helmet grills.

The festive air curdled into pure terror. A woman screamed. A lord stumbled backward, overturning his chair with a crash. The smell of spilled wine and fear soured the air.

Elinalise was on her feet again, this time with no thought of calm or control. Her heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird. This wasn’t an accident at the walls. This wasn’t an assessment.

This was inside the keep.

As she stared at the sea of hostile steel filling her home’s heart, one thought screamed above all others in her mind. Where is Crell?

The mercenaries didn’t rush forward. They simply held the perimeter, a grim and silent barrier blocking every exit except the one they’d shattered. Their discipline was worse than any chaotic charge. It spoke of a plan already in motion. Elinalise’s guards closed ranks around her chair, their swords drawn with a clean metallic hiss that seemed terribly small in the vast room.

Then a figure walked through the broken doorway.

It was Lord Crell.

He stepped over the wreckage of the door as calmly as if he were entering his own study. His grey robes were undisturbed, but he wasn’t alone. Two Grenville soldiers flanked him, their hands resting on their weapons, their posture not of captors escorting a prisoner, but of an honor guard for a dignitary.

The sight punched the air from Elinalise’s lungs. For a dizzying second, she thought he must have been captured on his way to the walls, forced to lead them here at sword-point. But his stride was unhurried, his face composed. He didn’t look at the frightened nobles huddled at their tables. His eyes found hers immediately and held them as he walked down the central aisle the mercenaries had cleared.

The hall was utterly silent now, save for the crackle of the fires and the ragged sound of Elinalise’s own breathing.

Crell stopped a dozen paces from the dais. He didn’t bow. He looked up at her, and the familiar, kind lines of his face seemed like a mask she’d never properly seen before.

“Princess Elinalise,” he said. His voice, usually so measured, carried through the stillness with an awful clarity. It wasn’t loud. It was just… final. “The Dragon King is dead.”

A collective gasp rippled through the room. Someone sobbed.

Elinalise felt the words like physical blows. They couldn’t be true. Her father was at the border. He was…

“The line of the Dragon Kingdom is ended,” Crell continued, his gaze never wavering from hers. There was no triumph in his expression, no gloating. Just a cold, administrative certainty, as if he were reading out a verdict from a ledger. “Your reign, such as it was destined to be, is over. The city has fallen. The keep is secured. Lay down your arms and you will not be harmed.”

He was lying. He had to be lying. This was some terrible mistake, a nightmare from which she would wake. But the armored men standing placidly beside him, the wrecked door, the distant sounds of fighting that had now reached even here—they wove together into a truth she could no longer deny.

Betrayal wasn’t a hot rush of anger. For Elinalise, in that moment, it was a freezing void that opened in her chest. This man had taught her statecraft. He had brought her honey cakes when she was ill. He had sat with her in the hay.

“Traitor,” she whispered. The word was too small, too pathetic.

It was all she had.

Her guards understood before she could give an order. They moved as one unit, shifting to form a tight circle around her, their backs to her, their blades pointed outward. A last ring of steel.

Crell sighed, a faint sound of disappointment. He gave a slight nod.

The Grenville captain near the door barked a command.

Mercenaries surged forward from the flanks. They didn’t yell. They just advanced with a brutal, practiced efficiency. The hall erupted into chaos as nobles scrambled away from the tables, tripping over benches and each other in their panic.

Elinalise’s guards fought. They were good, trained from childhood in the royal style. One parried a downward chop and gutted his attacker with a swift return thrust. Another caught a sword on his shield and slammed the rim into a mercenary’s helmet.

But there were too many. A guard on her left cried out as a spearpoint found the gap under his arm. He staggered, and two more soldiers were on him, dragging him down into a frenzy of stabs. The man on her right was trying to hold off three attackers at once when an axe took him in the side of the neck. He fell without another sound.

It was over in less than a minute.

Four bodies lay at the foot of the dais, their crimson cloaks darkening with blood. The polished marble was slick with it. The remaining mercenaries stepped over them without a glance.

Elinalise stood frozen amidst the wreckage of her protection. She was weaponless, dressed in silks meant for feasting, not fighting. The cold void inside her was filling now with a sharp, animal terror that screamed at her to run, but her feet were rooted to the spot.

A different soldier approached her. This one wore a captain’s insignia on his wolf-crested pauldron—a single silver spike. He wasn’t as heavily built as the others, and his movements were quick, his eyes scanning the chaotic hall rather than fixed solely on her. In his hands was not a weapon, but a bundle of coarse brown cloth.

He didn’t bow either. He just thrust the bundle into her hands.

It was a servant’s cloak, rough-spun and smelling of smoke and kitchens.

“Go,” the captain said, his voice low and urgent beneath the din of screams and clashing steel from elsewhere in the castle. He jerked his head toward the rear wall of the dais, to the left of her father’s empty throne. “The tapestry of the First Flight. There’s a catch behind the dragon’s left foreclaw. Press it and run. Don’t stop.”

Elinalise stared at him, her mind blank. Why? Why would one of them help her?

His eyes met hers for a fractured second—hard eyes in a scarred face—and she saw no pity there. Only a fierce, impatient calculation. “Now!” he hissed, turning his body slightly to block the view of anyone else on the dais.

The command broke her paralysis. Her fingers closed on the rough wool.

She turned and ran for the back wall, clutching the cloak to her chest like a shield. The massive tapestry loomed before her, woven in threads of gold and deep blue, depicting the legendary dragon Aurelion soaring over mountain peaks. Her heart hammered against her ribs so violently she thought it might crack them.

Left foreclaw. The dragon’s immense scaled limb was outstretched in the weave. She dropped the cloak on a side table and pressed her trembling fingers against the heavy fabric where the claws would be. Nothing. She pushed harder, panicking. A section of the stone wall behind the tapestry gave way with a soft click, swinging inward an inch—a hidden door so perfectly fitted it was invisible when closed.

She grabbed the cloak again, shoved at the door with her shoulder, and slipped through into darkness.

The door sighed shut behind her, cutting off the light and noise of the throne room as if it had never existed.

She was in a narrow, pitch-black corridor that smelled of dust and cold stone. For several heartbeats she just stood there, blind and panting, listening to the frantic drum of her own blood. Then she fumbled with the servant’s cloak, pulling it over her silken gown. The fabric was scratchy against her skin.

A muffled roar echoed through the stone—the sound of the hall dissolving further into violence. It propelled her forward. She moved one hand along the rough wall to guide herself, stumbling through the absolute dark. Her slippers were useless on the uneven floor. After what felt like an age, a faint grey light appeared ahead—a slit window high up in an exterior wall, letting in moonlight. It illuminated a stark service corridor: bare stone walls streaked with damp, low ceilings hung with cobwebs. This was the castle’s hidden anatomy, the veins through which servants and supplies moved unseen by nobles in their bright halls.

She ran. Her breath came in ragged gasps that scraped her throat raw. The sounds of fighting grew fainter behind her, replaced by other noises that filtered down through grates and air shafts: distant shouts from other courtyards; a scream that cut off abruptly; once, horrifyingly clear, the triumphant blast of a Grenville war horn from somewhere high above. They were inside everything.

She passed intersections where other dark passages branched off. She chose turns at random, driven only by the need to put distance between herself and that hall. Her mind was a fractured mirror showing only flashes: Crell’s calm face; the wet sound of steel finding flesh; her guards falling; that captain’s hard eyes. The Dragon King is dead.

She couldn’t grapple with it yet. If she stopped to think, she would shatter. So she just ran, her borrowed cloak flapping around her legs, until her lungs burned and her legs trembled. Finally she staggered to a halt in an unfamiliar stretch of corridor, leaning against the cold stone to suck in air. The silence here was profound and heavy. The screams and clash of steel from the main hall were gone. All she could hear now was her own desperate breathing and a faint, ominous crackling that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once—the sound of a city beginning to burn

The crackling grew louder, underscored now by a deep, rushing roar. Smoke began to seep into the corridor, a thin grey mist that stung her eyes and carried the unmistakable scent of burning wood and pitch. The castle was on fire. Of course it was. Conquest wasn't complete without purification by flame.

The service corridor ended at a small, plain door of aged oak. It wasn't hidden, just utilitarian. Elinalise pressed her ear against it, hearing nothing but the growing inferno outside. She turned the iron ring latch and pushed.

Fresh air, thick with smoke and cinders, hit her face. She stumbled out onto a narrow exterior balcony high on the keep's eastern flank. It was meant for archers, a stone ledge barely wider than her shoulders, overlooking the main central courtyard four stories below.

The sight that met her eyes drove the last vestiges of breath from her body.

The courtyard, usually a bustling expanse of packed earth where guards drilled and merchants set up temporary stalls, was a charnel house. Bodies lay scattered like broken dolls, most clad in the crimson of her house guard. Fires burned in braziers that had been overturned, licking at the wooden frames of storehouses along the walls. And in the very center, clear in the hellish orange light, lay a figure in dragon-emblazoned plate armor.

Her father.

The armor was familiar—the ornate pauldrons, the crest on the breastplate. One of his gauntlets was outstretched as if still reaching for his sword, which lay broken several feet away. Even from this height, she could see the dark, glistening pool around him.

Standing over the body was a man in deep indigo robes. He wasn't a soldier. His back was to her, his hood up, his arms raised as he moved them in slow, intricate patterns. From his fingers trailed faint filaments of violet light that wove together in the air above her father's corpse, forming a complex, rotating sigil that pulsed with a malevolent energy. A mage.

Elinalise's hands gripped the cold stone of the balcony ledge so hard her knuckles turned white. A sound tried to claw its way out of her throat—a scream, a denial—but it lodged there, choking her.

The mage completed his gesture with a final, sharp motion, bringing his palms together as if crushing something.

The violet sigil collapsed inward and then erupted outward in a silent wave of sickly purple energy.

It expanded in a perfect ring, passing through stone and wood and flesh as if they weren't even there. It washed up the wall of the keep. It hit Elinalise.

There was no impact, not physically. It was like being plunged into icy water that was somehow also boiling hot. Her skin prickled violently, every hair standing on end as a sensation of profound wrongness slithered over her. Then the cold vanished, replaced by a searing heat that ignited deep in her core, low in her abdomen.

It wasn't the heat of fever. It was sharper, more invasive, a coiling, hungry fire that made her gasp and double over, clutching her stomach. The heat pulsed in time with her frantic heartbeat, spreading tendrils of aching warmth through her limbs. For a dizzying moment, the world swam away, replaced by nothing but this strange, agonizing inner blaze.

When her vision cleared, gasping and trembling, the mage below was already turning away from her father's body, his work apparently done. Two Grenville officers approached him, speaking words she couldn't hear.

The curse. The thought was clear and terrible amidst the confusion of pain and grief. That had been a curse. And she had been caught in its edge.

The heat in her core settled into a persistent, feverish ache, a distracting throb that made it hard to think straight. But the sight of her father lying abandoned in the dirt cut through even that. A raw fury rose in her then, so potent it momentarily overshadowed the strange fire inside her.

She couldn't stay here. They would search every balcony, every corridor.

Pushing herself upright against the persistent, unfamiliar ache, she retreated back through the door into the smoky service passage. She had to get out of the castle. The city was falling, but the city was vast. In the chaos, a girl in a servant's cloak might disappear.

She found a spiral staircase leading down—narrow steps worn smooth by generations of unseen feet. She took them two at a time, her body moving on instinct now. The lower she went, the thicker the smoke became. Alarms bells were clanging somewhere, a discordant, panicked sound.

She burst out through a cellar door into an alley behind the keep's kitchens. The world outside was an echo of the courtyard’s horror, but magnified a thousandfold.

The Dragon City was burning.

Timber-framed houses along the main avenues were towering pyres, painting the night sky an angry orange. Embers swirled on the hot wind like malignant snow. The air tasted of ash and cooked meat. Everywhere there was noise—the roar of flames, the crash of collapsing buildings, distant screams that were not of battle but of terror and agony.

Elinalise pulled the hood of her servant’s cloak low over her face and plunged into the streets.

It was a descent into madness. People ran in every direction, some carrying children or pathetic bundles of belongings, others just running blindly. Grenville soldiers moved in disciplined squads down the broader streets, breaking down doors and dragging people out into the open. She saw a man cut down for raising a fist. She saw a woman weeping over a body in a gutter.

She stuck to the shadows of narrower alleys, her silken slippers quickly soaking through with filth and water from overturned rain barrels. The strange heat inside her flared with every jolt of fear, every choked breath of smoky air. It was a constant reminder of the violet light, of the mage standing over her father. It mingled with her grief and terror until she couldn’t separate them.

She didn't know where she was going. The slum district, maybe. The Warrens. It was a place her father’s guards rarely patrolled, a tangled maze where the kingdom’s poorest lived stacked on top of each other. A place where royalty would never think to look.

Navigating by memory of city layouts studied on maps rather than firsthand knowledge, she turned away from the main thoroughfares and deeper into the city’s underbelly. The buildings here were closer together, leaning precariously over muddy lanes. The fires hadn't fully taken hold here yet; it was too damp, too crowded. But smoke still choked the air, and looters were already at work, smashing windows and fighting over scraps.

She stumbled past a public well where a group of hollow-eyed people were huddled, watching their world end. She tripped over something soft in the dark and looked down to see another body. She kept moving. The ache in her core was deepening into a relentless throb that seemed to sap her strength with every step. Her legs felt weak, uncoordinated. Her fine gown was torn and filthy beneath the cloak. Her mind kept circling back to Crell’s face. To the captain’s hard eyes. To her father on the stones. To the violet light.

Finally, her strength gave out entirely. Her foot caught on an uneven cobblestone and she went down hard onto hands and knees in a narrow alley that reeked of urine and rotting garbage. She tried to get up. Her arms trembled and failed. She crawled a few feet into the deeper shadow beside a stinking midden heap and collapsed onto her side, curling in on herself.

Here, the sounds of destruction were muted—a distant roar, occasional shouts. The ground was cold and wet. Soot stained everything. She lay there for what felt like hours, shivering despite the persistent internal heat that now felt less like fire and more like a sickness. A deep, feverish ache had taken root in her abdomen, pulsing with a rhythm all its own. It was an alien presence inside her, a violation that went beyond the loss of her home or title. It felt like something had been planted there by that violet light—something alive and hungry.

Tears finally came then. Hot and silent. They streaked through the grime on her face. She cried for her father. For her guards. For the servants who must be dead in the kitchens. For herself. For this new, horrible thing simmering in her veins.

As she lay there in the filth of an alley she would never have deigned to look at yesterday, a coldness began to seep through the tears and the feverish pain. It started in her mind—a sharpening focus that pushed back against despair. The faces returned. Crell’s calm betrayal. The mage weaving his spell. The Grenville wolf’s head on blood-red fields.

Her trembling hand pressed against her lower stomach where the curse pulsed its awful heat. Her fingers clenched in the rough wool of the servant’s cloak. She wasn’t dead. They had killed everything else, but they hadn’t killed her. They had done something worse instead.

Her lips moved, cracking on dry skin. The whisper that emerged was raw and quiet as rustling leaves. But it carried in it all the cold fury that had begun to crystallize inside her.

“I will see you bleed,” she breathed into the darkness. The vow wasn't shouted. It didn't need to be. “Every last one of you traitors.” She closed her eyes against the image of violet light. “I will see you all bleed.”

Around her, forgotten in a slum alley as dawn began to tinge the smothering smoke with grey light, Princess Elinalise Dragonheart clutched herself against an ancient pain and swore herself to vengeance on an empty world.