Novels by Gallina Brindamour

Chapter 20 — Vaelrion The Dragon King AwakensFirst, there was fire—no flicker, no timid glow, but a cataclysm reborn, tearing through the emptiness within him like a newborn sun’s wrath. It was ancient hunger, merciless and unbound, roaring through his veins, coiling around bone and sinew, igniting every rune etched into his soul. His magic—silent, dormant across the ages—erupted in a deafening roar as though shattered chains fell away at once.Vaelrion’s lids split open. Darkness splintered. The hush of centuries shattered like glass, and the world slammed into him in a furious collision of memory and destiny, breath and longing. For one suspended heartbeat he lay still, crushed by the weight of his own return: centuries of dreamless sleep, the cruel oppression of that binding curse, the ache of endless time pressing against his chest.Then—the bond ignited.It did not whisper its power. It blasted through him, a supernova blazing in his core, flooding him with the truth denied for

Lyra — Age 20 Boston, MassachusettsFour Months Before Her Twenty- First BirthdayLyra lay awake beneath the thin wash of moonlight spilling through her curtains, tracing pale patterns across her quilt. The flat of her mattress pressed into her back, the sheets cool under her fingertips, yet sleep slipped through her grasp. Not for lack of exhaustion—she felt the weight of each day in her bones—but because something inside her throbbed with restless life. It wasn’t fear; fear struck like lightning and then vanished. This was a low, insistent pulse, like a second heartbeat that didn’t belong to her body yet stirred in her chest.She stared at the gouged plaster of the ceiling, imagining cracks branching away from a single point of impact. Her fingers curled around the blanket’s edge as she listened to Boston’s nighttime symphony—distant cars humming over pavement, laughter spilling from a late-running bar down the block, wind sighing between narrow alleyways. All of it sounded muted, a

Lyra — Age 21Boston, MassachusettsHer Birthday — Before MidnightLyra didn’t sleep. She lay on her back in the dim bedroom, the pale glow of streetlights leaking through half-closed blinds, casting thin stripes across her bare sheets. The air carried the faint scent of rain on asphalt, cool and electric, and she listened to the hush as though it might whisper some hidden truth. It didn’t. There was nothing left to discover—only something waiting to unfold.Her heart pounded in slow, thunderous beats, each throb deeper than the last, as if something beneath her own heartbeat had begun to mark time. Not separate. Not distant. Just… there. Patiently waiting.Lyra’s breath shuddered out between her lips. “I can feel you now,” she whispered to the darkness.No words answered—only a ripple, a low, feminine pulse that vibrated through her bones. Eloise. The name rose in Lyra’s mind like a prayer.Her fingers clenched the sheets, white-knuckled. “You’ve been here this whole time.” Another h

Lyra — Age 19Boston, MassachusettsAt nineteen, Lyra Blackwood moved between her two lives with the practiced grace of someone born to inhabit parallel worlds.The first life was all daylight and deadlines. Mornings at Harvard began before sunrise, when the sky was still bruised purple and the wind whispered promises of winter. She hurried across icy sidewalks, the cold biting through her wool coat, to lectures where professors paced like caged hawks. Her backpack sagged with thick tomes on constitutional law; highlighted pages threatened to spill free. In libraries, the air was laced with the sharp tang of paper and the warm musk of old bindings. She sipped coffee so fiercely hot it burned her tongue, then let it sit until it cooled into something bearable, dark, and strong. Phone calls with Mira, Talia, and Bradley were a lifeline—rare windows of laughter in a schedule that bent every hour to scholastic sacrifice. Rain drummed at the windows of the lecture halls; snow came later, c

Lyra — Age 18 Boston, MassachusettsWeeks dissolved into months like morning mist burned off by dawn. At first, Boston felt temporary— a pit stop on her journey— but by October its cobblestone streets and brick façades seemed to pulse in time with her own heartbeat. Each worn granite slab of sidewalk imprinted her stride; lamp-lit quads around campus shone like beacons guiding her back to routines she’d come to cherish. Lyra no longer summoned maps on her phone. She knew exactly which corner led to Widener Library’s arched entrance, which elm-shaded alley provided a shortcut to the student center. Even the corner café, its windows beaded with steam and the pale light of daybreak, anticipated her double- shot latte— oat milk, two sugars— before she spoke her order.Her first-year courses, once sheer academic cliffs she feared she might tumble down, now lay before her like summits begging for her flag. She reveled in midnight hushes at the library, casebooks stacked in fortress-high pil

Lyra — Age 18Boston, MassachusettsBoston did not smell like home. That was the first thing Lyra noticed. There was no resinous pine in the air, no sharp tang of snow melting against stone, no comforting plume of woodsmoke curling toward the sky. Instead, the city exhaled heat off dark pavement, the rich bitterness of ground coffee drifting from crowded cafés, oil-sharp exhaust from idling cars, and a briny hint of salt carried inland on the harbor breeze. Thousands of feet hurried across sidewalks too narrow for so many bodies; the city pulsed with urgency. It should have been claustrophobic. Instead, it felt like the first deep breath she’d ever truly taken.She sat in the back of the black SUV, its leather seats warmed by the sun, fingertips wrapped tight around her canvas bag strap. Through the window, she watched brick façades blur into gleaming glass towers, iron railings wreathed in late-summer ivy, and narrow lanes alive with the clang of trolleys and the murmur of strangers.