Chapter 3: The Weight of Ash and Glass
The mist clung to the windowpane in fat, grey beads. Wren watched one trail a slow path downward, tracing the path of an old crack in the glass. Behind her ribs, the bonds were a tangled nest of muted strings. She’d done that. She’d taken the brilliant, noisy chords of connection and wrapped them in layers of worn linen until they were just dull pressure, a phantom limb that ached in bad weather.
She flexed her hand, the scar from Nyxari’s bonding a pale, raised line across her palm. Whole. The word felt hollow. You could be technically whole and still feel carved out.
A soft knock. The door hinges groaned a familiar protest.
Maren stood there, twelve years old and all elbows and anxious eyes. “Wren?”
“Yeah, Mare-bear?” The old nickname slipped out, surprising them both. Wren hadn’t used it in years.
“There are… dragons. Circling the lower fields. Earlier, too, at dawn.” Maren bit her lip. “They have riders. Is it… them?”
Them. The word hung between them, charged. Wren kept her expression still, a skill honed over years of not causing a fuss. “Probably just a patrol. The border’s restless.”
“They’re not wearing cavalry colors.” Maren’s voice dropped to a whisper. “One’s huge and black. The other’s sort of… iridescent.”
Tairn. Andarna.
A cold, sharp feeling—not quite panic, not quite relief—shot through Wren’s sternum. The linen-wrapped bonds gave a sudden, painful thrum. She turned back to the window, pretending to scan the mist. “Ignore them. They’ll leave.”
“They’re landing, Wren. In the old courtyard.”
Wren’s breath froze in her lungs. She leaned forward, her forehead almost touching the cold glass. The mist shifted, swirling like a curtain drawn aside.
Four dragons settled on the broken flagstones, their movements careful amidst the colonnade’s crumbling teeth. The damp air vibrated with the low rustle of scales and the hot, sighing exhalations of creatures too large for the space. Sgaeyl, obsidian and impatient, shook her head, a metallic chiming from her horns. And there, beside her, Nyxari. Her dragon. Nyxari’s storm-grey scales were dull, her powerful neck curved downward, her great head turned away from the other dragons, staring into the mist as if it held answers.
Wren’s heart cracked clean open.
Then she saw the riders dismounting. Liam, landing lightly, already scanning for threats. Bodhi, rolling his shoulders, his face unreadable. Violet, her small frame straight, one hand resting on Tairn’s leg as if for balance.
And Xaden.
He swung down from Sgaeyl in one fluid motion, his boots hitting the wet stone with a finality that echoed in Wren’s bones. He didn’t brush himself off. He didn’t speak to the others. He just stood there, his onyx hair dark with mist, and looked up. His amber gaze swept the façade, window by window, a searchlight piercing the gloom. It stopped on hers.
The distance was too great to see his expression. But she felt it. The thread—the one she’d tried to smother—pulled taut, vibrating with a raw, desperate frequency that was entirely his. No strategy, no command. Just a single, focused signal: Here. I am here.
Her palm pressed flat against the glass. The cold seeped into her scar.
“You’re too late,” she whispered, her voice gravel in her throat.
But her fingers trembled. A fine, betraying shake she couldn’t stop. The lie curdled in the air between the pane and her lips.
Footsteps pounded up the main staircase, too heavy and hurried to be her sisters’. Her younger brother Rowan appeared in her doorway, breathing hard. At seventeen, he was all their father’s height and their mother’s worried eyes. “Wren. They’re here. The… your people.”
“They’re not my people,” she said automatically, the old defense.
Rowan just looked at her, his head tilted. He’d grown up while she was away. He saw more. “Okay. Fine. Four marked riders and their dragons are in our courtyard, and Dad is having a quiet panic in the library, and Mum is trying to decide between offering tea or grabbing a pike. What do you want to do?”
She wanted the mist to swallow the world. She wanted the stone to swallow her. She wanted the thread in her chest to stop screaming.
“Wren?” Rowan’s voice softened. “You don’t have to see them. I can tell them to leave. Me and Caelan. We can make them.”
He could try. The thought of Xaden being made to do anything by her terrified family was almost funny. A dry, hollow sound escaped her. It might have been a laugh.
“No,” she said, pushing away from the window. The numbness was retreating, burned away by the acid spread of feeling. Dread. Anger. A stupid, stubborn hope. “No. I’ll go down.”
“You sure?”
“They flew here. They’ll keep flying here, or circling, or camping in the bloody fields until I do.” She walked past him, her spine straight. It was the walk she used for the parapet, for facing down a new cadet, for pretending she wasn’t scared. “Might as well get it over with.”
The main hall was a cathedral of decay. Her parents were there, a united front of tension. Her mother, Mara, stood rigid by the dead fireplace, her hands clasped so tightly her knuckles were white. Her father, Gareth, had positioned himself slightly in front of her, a habit from a more dangerous time. Caelan, her mother’s bonded partner, leaned against the grand staircase newel post, his arms crossed, his expression cool and assessing. He’d always been the practical one. The soldier.
“Elowen,” her father said, the formal name a shield. “You don’t have to do this. We can handle it.”
“Handle marked riders? And their dragons?” Wren shook her head, moving toward the towering oak doors. “This is my problem. I brought it to your doorstep. I’ll deal with it.”
“It’s not a problem, it’s your life,” Mara said, the words bursting from her. “And we failed you in it once. We won’t just… stand by.”
Wren paused, her hand on the iron latch. It was ice-cold. “You’re not standing by. You’re letting me face my own choices. That’s what I needed then, too.”
She pulled the door open before her mother could reply.
The mist wrapped around her like a shroud, dampening sound. The dragons were monstrous shadows in the grey. The riders had formed a loose line before the steps. Xaden stood at the center.
Seeing him from ten feet away was different. The dawn flight and the mist had left a sheen on his skin. His jaw was set, but there was no arrogance in his posture, only a terrible, focused stillness. His eyes found hers, and she saw the storm there—not of anger, but of something shattered.
For a long moment, no one spoke. The only sounds were the drip of water from stone and the low, rumbling breath of dragons.
It was Liam who broke the silence. He took one step forward, his hands open at his sides. “Wren,” he said, and his voice, usually so easy, was rough. “We just… we needed to see you.”
Bodhi nodded once, a sharp jerk of his chin. Violet’s eyes were shining with unshed tears, but she stayed quiet, her gaze locked on Wren’s face.
Xaden said nothing. He just looked at her, letting the weight of his silence, of their shared silence, say everything.
Wren folded her arms, a barrier against the cold and the raw openness on their faces. “You saw me. I’m here. I’m fine. You can go.”
“You’re not fine,” Violet said softly, the words carrying in the damp air. “And it’s our fault.”
The admission, direct and unvarnished, hit Wren in a place she’d thought was safely numb. She flinched.
“We were idiots,” Bodhi said. “Blind, self-absorbed idiots. We used your steadiness like a chair. We never asked if you were tired of holding us up.”
“We took you for granted,” Liam added. “Every day. In every way. And I am so sorry, Wren. From the marrow out, I am sorry.”
They were saying the words. The exact words she’d ached to hear in the lonely watches of the night. But now that they were here, they felt too big, too loud. They couldn’t fit inside the hollow space their absence had carved.
Her eyes shifted to Xaden. He held her gaze, and when he finally spoke, his voice was stripped bare, quieter than the mist.
“I failed you.” No explanation. No justification. Just the stark, terrible truth. “I was so busy leading, so busy carrying the weight, I never saw the weight I was letting you carry. I built a family and then forgot to care for one of its pillars.” He took a single step forward, a fragment of the space between them. “The silence is… it’s killing me, Wren. But I deserve it. We all do. We’re not here to ask for forgiveness. We’re here to say we see it now. We see you. And if you never let the bond ring loud again, I’ll still feel it. I’ll still feel you. And I’ll spend every day of this war, and every day after if we live, knowing I was the reason it went quiet.”
Her breath hitched. The linen wrappings around her bonds weren’t just fraying; they were burning away, consumed by the raw honesty of his words. She could feel them all—Liam’s earnest regret, Bodhi’s frustrated guilt, Violet’s compassionate sorrow. And Xaden’s… his was a vast, desolate landscape of shame.
From the colonnade, Nyxari lifted her great head and turned. Her luminous, silver-blue eyes fixed on Wren. A single, resonant thought flowed down the bond, not muted, not quiet, but clear as a bell.
Enough, the dragon sent. The silence hurts us both. Hear them.
A tear escaped, hot against her cold cheek. She didn’t wipe it away.
“You hurt me,” she said, and her voice wavered. “You didn’t mean to. But you did. You made me feel invisible in my own family.”
Xaden’s head dropped for a second, a nod of absolute acceptance. “I know.”
“I can’t just… turn it back on. The trust. It’s not a faucet.”
“We know,” Violet whispered.
“Then what do you want?” The question burst from Wren, edged with the frustration of weeks of silence. “What is this?”
Xaden looked up, and his amber eyes held hers, fierce and uncompromising. “A start. Just a start. Tell us to leave, we leave. Tell us to never come back, we won’t. But let us… let us stand here in the mess we made. Let us wear it for a minute in front of you. That’s all.”
She stood on the top step, shivering, the ghosts of her old family behind her in the hall, the broken fragments of her chosen family standing in the ruin of her past. The mist began to thin, a pale, weak sun struggling through.
Somewhere deep in the estate, a pot clanged in the kitchen. Life, stubbornly continuing.
Wren unfolded her arms. Her palms were cold. Her scar itched.
“You can stay for tea,” she heard herself say, the words foreign on her tongue. “One cup. In the courtyard. The floor inside… it can’t take the weight of all this.”
It wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t reconciliation. It was a thread, frail and new, spun across a canyon.
But it was a start.
Xaden’s eyes closed briefly. When they opened, the despair in them had shifted, just a fraction, into something else. Something like a desperate, fragile hope.
“One cup,” he agreed, his voice thick. “We can do that.”
“We can do that.”
The words hung between them, a fragile treaty written on mist. Wren turned without another word and went back inside, leaving the doors open behind her. An invitation, however grudging.
Her family still stood in the hall, a frozen portrait of concern. “Tea,” Wren announced, her voice strangely flat. “We’re having it outside. Rowan, can you help me with the old wrought-iron set? The one from the sunroom.”
Her brother nodded, slipping past their parents with a relieved look. At least it was a task.
Mara’s hands unclenched slightly. “I’ll bring the tea things.”
“Just the pot, Mum. I’ll do the rest.” Wren met her mother’s gaze, a silent plea for no fuss, no intervention. After a beat, Mara conceded with a tight nod.
In the courtyard, the riders hadn’t moved. They stood like statues weathered by guilt and damp. Their dragons were unnaturally still, a perimeter of scaled sentinels. Only Nyxari’s tail gave a slow, restless sweep across the flagstones, scraping away moss.
Wren and Rowan hauled the heavy table and chairs out from under a mildewed canvas. The iron was bitingly cold. They arranged it in a patch of weak, struggling sunlight, the legs grating on stone. It was a ridiculous, domestic ritual in the midst of the monumental.
Maren appeared with a thick wool blanket, which Wren draped over one chair. For her. A small fortress against the chill.
Violet moved first, breaking the riders’ line. She walked to the table and pulled out a chair, not sitting, just waiting. Her eyes were still too bright. Liam and Bodhi followed, taking seats opposite where Wren would sit. Xaden remained standing a moment longer, his gaze tracking Wren’s every movement as she took the pot from her mother at the doorway.
She carried it out herself, setting it on the table with a solid thunk. The scent of bergamot and black tea steamed into the damp air. She sat, wrapping the blanket around her shoulders like armor.
For a full minute, the only sound was the gentle pour of tea into five mismatched cups. Wren’s hands were steady. That surprised her.
Xaden finally took the last seat, to her left. Violet was on her right. They were too close. The space hummed with their nearness.
“So,” Bodhi said, stirring his tea pointlessly. “Your brother’s got a mean glare. Almost as good as Liam’s.”
“He’s protective,” Wren said, not looking up.
“Good,” Liam said, his voice quiet. “Someone should have been.”
The directness of it made her flinch. Her cup rattled on its saucer. Immediately, Violet’s hand covered hers, warm and firm. On her other side, Xaden’s fingers brushed the back of her wrist, the touch so light it was almost imagined. They weren’t restraining. They were grounding. An anchor in the sudden, storm-tossed feeling of being seen.
Her traitorous heart gave a hard, painful thump against her ribs. She hated it. She craved it.
She didn’t pull her hands away.
“This is what I have,” she said, the words measured and slow, forced out past the tightness in her throat. “I have this place. These stones. My family, who finally sees me now that I’m broken. And I have a thread.” She looked at Xaden, then Violet, then across at Liam and Bodhi. “A thin, fucked-up thread where a bridge used to be.”
Xaden’s fingers pressed a fraction more against her skin. A silent acknowledgment.
“You want to mend it? You can’t mend a thread. You have to spin new fiber. Slowly.” She took a shaky breath. “Nyxari can fly to Aretia. For drills, for briefings. She can… commute. And I will stay here. For a bit. Maybe for a long bit.”
Violet’s thumb stroked the side of her hand. “However long you need.”
“And we come here,” Liam said, not asking, just understanding. “When you’ll have us. For tea. Or just to sit. To spin that fiber.”
Bodhi nodded, a grim half-smile on his face. “I’m good at sitting quietly. Surprisingly.”
“I’m not,” Xaden said, his voice low. “But I’ll learn.”
Wren looked down at their hands. Violet’s, slim and scarred, over hers. Xaden’s, calloused and marked, beneath her wrist. The physical connection was a circuit completing, and she felt the muted bonds in her chest flare, just for a second, with a forgotten warmth. It wasn’t the old bond. It was a new signal, faint and full of static, but undeniably there.
“We can try,” she whispered, conceding to the hope, to the traitorous beat of her own heart. “We can try to build it again. Brick by stupid brick.”
Across the courtyard, Nyxari lifted her head and released a plume of warm, silver-tinted smoke into the mist. It was not a roar of triumph. It was a sigh of profound, weary relief.
The thread pulsed, once, clear and strong.
Begin, the dragon whispered into her soul.
And for the first time in weeks, Wren believed they might.
And for the first time in weeks, Wren believed they might.
The tea cooled in its pot. The silence around the table wasn’t the heavy, suffocating kind from before. It was porous, letting in the sound of dripping water and distant dragon breath. Wren kept her hands where they were, anchored by Violet’s and Xaden’s touch. The physical contact was a live wire, buzzing with everything unsaid.
“This is weird,” Bodhi announced, breaking the quiet. He leaned back, the wrought-iron chair groaning. “Good weird. But definitely weird.”
A faint, almost-smile touched Wren’s lips. “You’re telling me.”
“So, the commute,” Liam said, shifting the topic to something practical, something safe. “Nyxari comes to Aretia for formations. You stay here. We… visit. How does that work logistically? The flight path skirts Gryphon territory.”
“She knows the hidden passes,” Wren said, her thumb tracing the rim of her cup. “Better than any of you. She taught them to me.”
Xaden’s fingers tensed slightly against her wrist. A silent acknowledgment of another thing he’d never asked about. Another skill he’d taken for granted.
“We’ll need those maps,” Violet said, her strategist’s mind engaging. “If Nyxari’s flying it regularly, we should all know it. For extraction protocols.”
Wren shook her head. “No. That’s her route. Mine. You get the tactical summaries, not my personal roads.” The refusal was quiet, automatic. A boundary, newly built and immediately tested.
Violet blinked, then nodded. “Okay. Fair.”
“It’s more than fair,” Xaden said, his voice a low rumble. He finally withdrew his hand from her wrist, the loss of contact making her skin feel cold. He braced his arms on the table, looking at the others. “It’s her terms. All of it. We follow them.”
“Even if the terms are objectively terrible?” Bodhi asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Especially then.”
Wren watched him. This was the Xaden who commanded wings, who made hard calls that left shadows in his eyes. Yet he was applying that same unwavering focus to capitulation. To her. It was unnerving.
“Why?” The question slipped out before she could cage it.
He turned his head, those amber eyes pinning her. “Because the alternative is a world where you’re not in it. And that’s not a world I’m interested in fighting for.”
The raw honesty of it stole the air from her lungs. Liam looked down at his hands. Bodhi let out a slow, controlled breath. Violet’s gaze was distant, fixed on the mist, and Wren knew she was thinking of her own complicated place in their world, the only one without a rebellion relic etched into her skin. The only one who hadn’t been marked by that specific history of hate.
“Don’t,” Wren whispered, a sudden, sharp fear cutting through her. “Don’t put that on me. Your purpose can’t be me. That’s just another cage.”
“It’s not my purpose,” Xaden corrected, his intensity softening at the edges. “It’s my condition. There’s a difference. The purpose is still keeping everyone alive. The condition is that ‘everyone’ includes you. Actively. Not as an assumption.”
From the colonnade, Sgaeyl snorted, a jet of dark smoke billowing. She butted her massive head against Nyxari’s shoulder, a gesture that was shockingly… affectionate. Nyxari, after a moment’s stiff resistance, leaned into the pressure. A low, harmonic hum vibrated from the two of them, a sound Wren felt in her teeth.
The dragons were already mending their bridge. The simpler creatures.
“I need air that isn’t this table,” Wren said abruptly, standing. The blanket slid from her shoulders. “Walk with me. Just… a walk.”
They all stood, a synchronized movement that felt both comforting and stifling. “All of us?” Liam asked.
“Yes.” She needed to see them move, to see how they fit now in the ruins of her home. She led them away from the courtyard, onto a overgrown gravel path that wound towards the family cemetery.
The mist was thinning to a haze. The gravel crunched under their boots, a rhythm section to the tense quiet.
“This place is… bleak,” Bodhi observed, glancing at a collapsed greenhouse, its iron skeleton snarled with brambles.
“It’s home,” Wren said, not defensive, just stating a fact.
“It’s a ruin,” Xaden said, matching her tone.
“Same thing.”
They reached the low stone wall of the cemetery. Her ancestors’ markers were tilting slabs, names worn smooth by wind and rain. Wren stopped, her back to them, facing the rows of the dead. “You asked what I have. This is part of it. All this weight. All this silence.”
Violet came to stand beside her, not touching, just present. “You carried our weight, too. And our noise.”
“I know,” Wren said. The admission was a relief. “I let myself become the quiet one. I made that choice, too. Because it was easier than demanding to be heard.” She finally turned to look at them, at Xaden who watched her with hunted focus, at Liam and Bodhi whose faces were etched with a guilt she realized she needed to absolve them of, if only a little. “So spin new fiber with me. But spin it out loud. Even if it’s stupid. Even if it’s inconvenient.”
“What does that look like, right now?” Liam asked, shoving his hands in his pockets.
Wren thought for a second. The highland wind cut through her sweater. “Ask me a question. A real one. Not about tactics or dragon migratory patterns.”
The three men glanced at each other. Violet smiled, a small, private thing.
Bodhi shrugged. “Fine. What’s the first thing you’re going to do when we leave today?”
“Go upstairs and scream into a pillow for about five minutes.” The answer was instant, unvarnished.
A startled laugh burst from Liam. “Okay. Honest.”
“My turn,” Wren said, her eyes finding Xaden. “The guilt. Is it just about me, or is it about failing as a leader?”
He didn’t flinch. “It’s the same thing. I failed the group by failing you. The leader and the man… they’re not separate people, Wren. The fracture is in both.”
She held his gaze, saw no artifice there, only the brutal geography of his regret. It was enough. For now.
“Your turn,” she said to Violet.
Violet didn’t hesitate. “What do you need from me? Specifically. Not from them. From me.”
Wren considered her friend, the only one who hadn’t borne the rebellion’s marks but who carried burdens just as heavy. “Stop looking at me like I’m glass. I’m not going to shatter. I’m just… recalibrating. Treat me like you did before. Just listen a little harder when I do speak.”
Violet’s eyes welled up, but she grinned, a fierce, wobbly thing. “I can do that. I might suck at it sometimes, but I’ll do it.”
The tension in Wren’s shoulders, held for weeks, began a slow, almost painful unraveling. It wasn’t fixed. It was a direction. A path through the mist.
A shadow passed over them, accompanied by the great, sweeping downdraft of massive wings. Nyxari circled once, then landed in the field beyond the cemetery wall, crushing heather under her talons. She lowered her head, her snout coming to rest just over the wall, her silver-blue eye level with Wren.
Come, the dragon’s thought was clear, an impulse, not a command. Show them.
Wren understood. She walked to the wall and put her hand on Nyxari’s scaled muzzle. The connection flared, warm and vibrant and whole. She looked back at the four riders watching her. “She wants to show you something. A reason she loves these mountains.”
“We’ll follow,” Xaden said simply.
Wren swung onto Nyxari’s offered leg and climbed to the saddle in a few practiced moves. The others turned, jogging back toward the courtyard and their own dragons. As Nyxari gathered herself to leap into the sky, Wren looked down at the crumbling estate, at the family no longer hiding in the doorway but standing openly on the steps, watching.
Her mother lifted a hand in farewell.
Wren lifted her own in return. Then she leaned low over Nyxari’s neck. “Let’s go,” she whispered.
The dragon leaped, and the world fell away beneath them, the ruins shrinking into a patchwork of stone and memory. And for the first time, the thread in her chest didn’t feel like a tether to something broken. It felt like a lifeline, thrown across a void, with four strong hands finally holding the other end.