The world ended in a flash of white.

  One moment, I was laughing, the warmth of the afternoon sun on my shoulders, my hand guiding Lyra’s as she painted a lopsided, endearing smile on a small wooden lion. The next, my husband’s voice was a roar of primal terror. “CYGNUS! PROTECT THEM!”

  The sky tore open. A living mountain of sapphire scales and azure lightning materialized above us, a titan answering a desperate prayer. Cygnus’s wings, vast enough to blot out the sun, spread wide, a shield against the heavens. I saw the beam of blinding, emerald-green light strike him, and I saw him stagger, a pained grimace twisting his draconic features.

  There was no time to scream. I moved, driven by an instinct older than kingdoms. I snatched Lyra into my arms, my body a fragile, trembling shield, her small form tucked against my chest. Kaelen’s huge frame moved to cover us both, his own magic flaring to life like a stormy grey shroud.

  Then, more light. Golden fire and crimson rage, lancing past Cygnus’s guard. I felt the pendants Alarion had made for us burn against our skin, one sky-blue, one jet-black, erupting into desperate, final spheres of defensive energy.

  And then… nothing. A silent, world-ending white that consumed everything.

  …

  A dull, thunderous roar echoed in the void, a sound that felt distant and intimately close at the same time. The white faded, replaced by a canvas of bleeding, indistinct colors. I was floating, lost in a dream of ash and fire. Where was I? The ground beneath my feet was cold, fractured. The air smelled of ozone and something old, like dust and sorrow.

  I tried to speak, to call for my husband, but no sound came. Why can't I speak? Panic, cold and sharp, began to prick at the edges of the fog in my mind.

  I felt a stirring in my arms. Lyra. She was safe. I clutched her tighter, a wave of profound, instinctual relief washing over me. But then she slipped from my grasp, a small, determined form wriggling free. She was running.

  Lyra, come back! It’s not safe! The words were a scream in my mind, but my lips wouldn't move. My legs felt like lead, my body a clumsy, disobedient vessel.

  She was running towards… what was that? A great, crimson shape stood in the distance, a bloody tear in the grey landscape. Behind it, a colossal, dark form shifted, a moving mountain of starlight and shadow. Why aren't my eyes clearing? The world was a painter’s nightmare, a smear of threatening shapes and terrifying, incomprehensible sounds.

  Then, as if a veil had been torn away, a sliver of clarity returned.

  The crimson shape was a figure. A man in armor, impossibly tall, its form radiating a power that made the very air tremble. He was walking towards us. No, not us. He was walking towards the heart of this ruined chamber.

  And then he fell to his knees.

  The sound of his armor crashing onto the shattered crystal floor was a thunderclap that seemed to clear the last of the fog from my senses. With a hiss of depressurizing seals, his helmet retracted, folding back into the crimson shell.

  It revealed a face.

  A face that was so painfully familiar and so terrifyingly alien at the same time. The silver hair, a perfect echo of my own. The sapphire eyes, a mirror of his father's. But they were set in the face of a stranger. A young man, his jaw hard and unyielding, his features carved with a weariness that belonged to a man a hundred years his senior. A jagged scar, pale and ugly, bisected his left eyebrow.

  Why was I seeing this face? Why did the sight of it send a profound, inexplicable guilt lancing through my heart? It was a face I felt I should have been protecting, a face I had somehow failed.

  Is that… is that my little Leo?

  The childish nickname was a whisper in my soul, a key turning in a lock I had forgotten existed. It couldn’t be. My son was a boy, a brilliant, beautiful fifteen-year-old boy, safe at his academy. This was a man. A warrior. A king.

  And he was crying.

  Tears, hot and silent, streamed down his face, carving clean paths through the grime of a battle I couldn’t comprehend. The sight of it, the raw, broken agony in those achingly familiar eyes, shattered me. The confusion, the fear, the apocalyptic war raging outside the broken walls of this palace—it all dissolved into an irrelevant, distant roar.

  My body moved on its own. Strength I didn't know I possessed surged through my limbs. The only thing in the universe that mattered was the weeping boy in the monster’s shell.

  “Brother!”

  Lyra’s cry, a sliver of pure, untainted joy, was the only sound that pierced the veil. She crashed into his chest plate, her tiny arms wrapping around his neck.

  I ran. I fell to my knees beside them, my arms wrapping around both of them, pulling my impossible, broken son and my precious, innocent daughter into a fierce, protective embrace that was the only home I had ever truly known. I could feel the cold, hard metal of his armor against my cheek, a stark, terrifying contrast to the memory of the soft, warm boy I had held in my arms. He was real. He was here.

  But why did he look like this? Why did his eyes hold so much grief? What had they done to him? What had happened to my sweet, innocent boy?

  “My cream pie,” I breathed, the name a ghost from a life I thought was lost forever, my own voice a raw, broken whisper. “What happened to you? What did they do?”

  He buried his face in my shoulder, and a sob, a ragged, ugly sound of a pain so deep it had no words, tore itself from his chest. It was the sound of a soul that had been holding itself together for an eternity and had finally, finally let go.

  I held him tighter, my own tears now falling freely, trying to pour all the love, all the years I had lost, all the comfort I possessed into this single, desperate embrace.

  From behind us, a vast, warm presence enveloped us all. A massive, starlit head, its scales shimmering with the light of captured nebulae, gently nudged my back. Its eyes were twin dying stars, burning with an ancient power and a fresh, unbearable grief. Is this Kaelus? When did he hatch?

  The moment was a fragile, impossible bubble of peace in a sea of war.

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  And then the sky screamed.

  A sound, a high-pitched, tearing shriek that was not of this world, ripped through the air above us. A squadron of black, angled, bird-like things tore through the sky, their engines leaving trails of blue-white fire. They were not birds. They were not dragons. They were something else. Something alien and terrifying.

  The sound was a physical blow, and it shattered the spell. Alarion, my son, my broken boy, tore himself from my embrace. The weeping child was gone. In his place, the Warlord in the crimson armor stood, his face a mask of cold, hard purpose. He looked at the colossal, wounded form of Cygnus, who had been watching us with a weary, protective gaze.

  His voice, when he spoke, was not the voice of the boy I remembered. It was deeper, rougher, honed by years of command and pain. “Cygnus. Can you carry my parents? We need to leave. Now.”

  The ancient dragon king simply nodded, a slow, deliberate movement of his massive head.

  Alarion turned to us. “Mother. Father. We will talk when we are safe. This is a battleground. Get on Cygnus. I’ll take Lyra and ride on Kaelus.”

  As he spoke, Cygnus and the smaller, cosmic dragon—Kaelus—exchanged a look. It was not the glance of a king and a hatchling. It was a nod of mutual respect between two sovereigns, two titans who understood a language of power I could no longer comprehend. My world, and my son, had changed in ways I was only just beginning to grasp.

  . . .

  Did I fail them?

  The question was a shard of ice in the core of my being. The memory was a searing, eternal loop: the emerald beam, the golden fire, the crimson rage. I had raised my shield, poured every ounce of my will and my draconic heritage into a final, desperate fortress of magic. But the energy… it had been too vast, too absolute. It was the power of titans, and I was merely a king of men. I had felt my own magic shatter. I had felt the world dissolve into a final, agonizing whiteness.

  And in that white void, I had failed them. My wife. My daughter. My son, far away and alone. My house. All of it, ash.

  “Snap out of it, little king.”

  The voice was not a sound, but a thought, a deep, resonant rumble that echoed in the hollows of my skull. It was ancient, weary, and utterly familiar. Cygnus.

  “Your son is trying to speak with you.”

  The dragon’s mental prod was a splash of cold water, breaking me from the stupor. The hibernation—that last, desperate gambit—had taken a toll. The sheer act of manifesting that much defensive power had drained me. I would need years to return to my peak form.

  My vision, which had been a blurry smear of light and shadow, finally sharpened. I saw a man, a warrior in crimson armor, holding my wife and my daughter. He was… familiar. Terribly, impossibly familiar. He called out to me, called me ‘Father’.

  Wait. Is that… Alarion?

  The name was a thunderclap in my mind. It couldn’t be. My son was a boy of fifteen. This was a man, his frame hard and unyielding, his eyes holding a cold, weary depth that spoke of battles fought and worlds conquered. And yet… the silver hair, the sapphire eyes… it was him. But how? The hibernation wasn’t supposed to last longer than a few minutes.

  “The damage was too great, Kaelen,” Cygnus’s voice echoed in my mind again, a sad, weary explanation. “Your crystal was failing. I had to initiate my own hibernation to stabilize the structure. It has been several years.”

  Several years. The words struck me with the force of a physical blow. Several years my son had been alone in the world. The guilt was a fresh, hot agony. I had failed him. As a father, I had failed him utterly.

  I moved, my own body feeling stiff and unfamiliar, and helped Seraphine onto Cygnus’s broad, waiting back. I watched as Alarion—my son, this impossible man—lifted Lyra into his arms. The way he held her, with a fierce, desperate protectiveness, a gesture that was both infinitely strong and terrifyingly fragile, sent another pang of guilt through me. That should have been my role. But through the guilt, something else bloomed. A fierce, undeniable pride. My son had survived. He had more than survived. He had become… this.

  When we lifted off, exiting the ruined shell of the crystalline palace, the sight that greeted me sent another round of shock through my bones.

  This was not a skirmish. This was a massacre. A warzone.

  The sky was a canvas of impossible violence. Creatures of black metal, sleek and angled, tore through the heavens, their movements unnatural and terrifyingly precise. They didn’t fly with the graceful flap of wings; they burned, propelled by cones of blue-white fire, conquering the air rather than being carried by it. They were eviscerating the Hegemony’s finest Phoenix Knights, turning the immortal warriors into fleeting bursts of golden fire.

  On the ground below, it was even worse. Colossal golems of a design I had never seen waded through the Hegemony legions, their every step a ground-shaking tremor. Smaller, two-legged constructs marched in perfect, silent ranks, their plasma fire a relentless, chattering scythe that cut through armor and flesh with contemptuous ease. Their movements were devoid of the passion or fear of a living army. They were a tide of unfeeling, logical death.

  And the soldiers… why did they all remind me of my son’s armor?

  “Cygnus,” Alarion’s voice, amplified and clear even over the din of battle, cut through my stunned observation. “Tell the dragons to fall back. Retreat with us.”

  “Little one,” the great dragon rumbled, banking hard to avoid a stray blast of golden fire. “You would have them protect your retreat?”

  “No,” my son replied, his voice impossibly calm. “My Wyverns will handle that.”

  I heard Cygnus laugh, a sound like an avalanche. “A lesser lizard will aid my exit? How far the mighty Azure Sovereign has fallen.”

  “Not that kind of wyvern,” Alarion said. “Those kind.”

  He pointed. And then I saw them. The creatures of metal. Hundreds of them. They moved with a speed and agility that seemed to mock the very laws of nature. They were not just fighting; they were executing.

  Suddenly, a new, alarming sensation prickled at my senses. A series of subtle, almost invisible disturbances in the air around us.

  “We are surrounded!” Cygnus’s mental voice boomed, confirming my fears. “The enemy is using some form of cloaking magic! They are not visible!”

  “It’s okay, Father,” Alarion’s voice was a steady, reassuring presence beside me. “I’ll turn off the cloaking.” He spoke a single, quiet command into his helmet. “Tes, deactivate stealth protocols on the Phantom escorts. Redirect all power to the shields.”

  In response, a dozen new shapes simply… appeared. They had been there the entire time, flying in a silent, protective formation around us. They were black, broad-winged, and angular, their forms radiating a chilling, predatory aura. They were ghosts made solid.

  I would later learn that this was the first time our enemies had ever seen the Phantoms. This was the moment the legends of the “soulless assassins” were given a terrifying, mechanical face.

  How much has the world changed in the years I have been asleep?

  But my shock was not at its end. I followed Alarion’s gaze, looking towards our destination. My mind, still grappling with the impossible sight of my son’s army, simply refused to process what it was seeing.

  It was a flying mountain.

  A colossal, eleven-kilometer-wide island of black steel, flanked by two smaller, kilometer-long fortresses, hung in the sky, a new and terrible constellation that dwarfed the clouds themselves. And my son was leading us towards it. The metal flying things, the Wyverns and the Phantoms, were pouring from its vast hangars.

  We landed on a wide, open-air deck. The moment we touched down, hundreds of soldiers in sleek, dark armor snapped to attention. They were elves, their silver hair a stark contrast to their black shells. They raised their gauntleted fists and struck their chest plates, the sound a single, deafening THUMP of absolute loyalty.

  A massive automaton, the one that had first addressed us on the field, approached. Its helmet retracted, and I saw a face I knew. Young Bob, the son of my stablemaster, now a man grown hard and strong. I gave him a nod of appreciation, a silent promise of reward for taking care of my son.

  The great cosmic dragon, Kaelus, shrank in size with a shimmer of starlight, landing on Alarion’s pauldron. A shimmering, rectangular doorway of white light opened in the air before us.

  We stepped through, from the chaotic roar of the battlefield into the cold, sterile silence of a command bridge. And for the first time, I truly saw what my son had become. He was not just a warrior. He was a king, seated on a throne of logic, commanding a world of steel. The pride that swelled in my chest was a fierce, painful, and beautiful thing. I had failed him as a father, but he had become more than I could ever have dreamed.