INICIAR SESIÓNGILDEON
“My Lord, this was all part of their plan. The sylphs.”
“It’s time to wake up now, Commander Araheen.”
“Thanks to you, the strongest commander of the salamander army is no longer a threat to us.”
“Sleep, Gildeon the Dragon. We are taking you back with us to Shamibar.”
Those voices circled the dark like a pack of predators, tearing into whatever
GILDEON“My Lord, this was all part of their plan. The sylphs.”“It’s time to wake up now, Commander Araheen.”“Thanks to you, the strongest commander of the salamander army is no longer a threat to us.”“Sleep, Gildeon the Dragon. We are taking you back with us to Shamibar.”Those voices circled the dark like a pack of predators, tearing into whatever was left of his consciousness. They hammered the inside of his skull, one line after another, until the last command ripped through the void and snapped something loose in him.One name burst out of his chest.“Arah!” His eyes flew open.Air tore into his lungs in jagged pulls, as if he’d been drowning for hours and someone had dragged him up just long enough to watch him choke.Every muscle burned. Every joint felt like it had been ground against st
ARAHEENThe world held its breath.Her body went rigid, left hand lifting of its own accord, palm open to meet the incoming blade. She understood, on some deep, buried instinct, that Feviel’s owl-sword was never meant to pierce her body. Its edge was aimed at the sigil branded into her skin.Not to hurt her, but to wake her.Steel kissed the glowing mark, and the sigil flared.A hard breath tore out of her chest, sharp enough to hurt, and then the flood began.Memories crashed through her like a tide swallowing a small, fragile island. Arah’s borrowed life, her human days on Earthland, was shattered and rearranged around something older and colder version of herself.Araheen.Her full name settled into her bones like a returning crown. Sylph power surged through her veins with a rush of euphoria. The wind whispered to her. She could hear noise and order at once—every whimper, every heartbeat,
GILDEONHis eyes sharpened as the sylph warriors cut through the chaos in a deadly rhythm. Blades flashed in clean arcs, cleaving through salamander flesh as if they were nothing but shadows.Every scream, every spray of blood hit a part of him trained to jump in, to protect his own. Old instincts, carved into him by years of command and war, twitched through his muscles, urging him to lunge into the fray on his people’s side.He almost did.But then his gaze snapped to Arah, still locked in Spior’s spiked black tail, her body wrenched and pinned, jaw clamped shut by bone and scale. Pain burned through her aura like cracks in glass. That sight nailed him in place harder than any weapon.He could stand there and let the sylphs finish what he had started. Let them wipe out the former comrades who had just tried to kill him and take Arah. It would’ve been easy.But watching the sylphs butcher salamanders while he did nothing tw
GILDEONHis heart hammered harder, faster, every beat slamming power into the walls of whatever cage Haemos’s weapon had built inside him. The siphoning pull of the spear met a rising, furious tide pushing back from the opposite direction.He was not done. He would not let them take her.Heat roared through his veins, different from the usual burn of his fire. This was sharper, heavier, threaded with the same power that had once poured out of Arah and into his core now rose like a storm from within.The metal impaling him began to glow.Scales broke through his skin in jagged lines, black and gold flaring across his shoulders, chest, and arms in a pattern he’d never worn before. Bones shifted, thickening, reinforcing. His silhouette swelled, became something larger, more dangerous, like the outline of a form he hadn’t fully grown into yet finally forcing its way out.With a sound halfway between a growl and
GILDEONHis senses cut out before the rest of Haemos’s words could register.Everything collapsed into a heavy, smothering silence. Then, feeling bled away from his body, leaving him hanging on the edge of nothing with only one clear sensation: something hooked deep into his core and started dragging his spirit out of him.Was he dying?No. He refused. He hadn’t clawed his way through centuries of war just to let it end like this, pinned on some cursed weapon while Arah was still out there. She needed him. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t give her up to anyone.But wanting to fight and being able to fight were two different things.Seconds slipped by. Pain had flattened into a distant, throbbing awareness somewhere below his ribs, where the three-tined spear had run him through, but it felt far away, like it belonged to someone else.Then a voice cut through the dark.“My Lord?”Roselia.The name
GILDEONEverything Drusden’s memory fragments had carved open for him slammed back into place at once.His father, Daego, and his wife, Ragina. The clash with the Greater Beasts. His father stumbling home with an infant in his arms. The Dark Plane yawning open like a wound.“You’re the one who lied to me,” Gildeon growled. “About who my parents were. About how my father—General Daego—died.”Haemos’s salamander eyes narrowed to burning slits. “How did you know about that?” he demanded.Heat flickered harder around the commander’s scaled face as he shook his head. “Kohina wouldn’t dare. She swore a seer’s vow.”“It doesn’t matter how I knew,” Gildeon said. “Tell me why you’re calling my father selfish. He sacrificed himself to save the salamanders.”“He doomed us,” Haemos snarled, “by bringing you back with him after his disappearance.”Gildeon froze.“Your father was given a choice,” Old Man went on, flam







