All Chapters of The Dragon's Silent Shadow: Chapter 1 - Chapter 9

The end of the world smelled of sulfur and crushed violets.Princess Saoirse, the last true blood of the Dragon Kings, stood before the cracked vanity mirror in the servant’s quarters. Her hands trembled violently as she destroyed her birthright. The paste—a foul mixture of river mud, crushed walnut shells, and soot—felt cold and slimy against her scalp.Outside, the sky was bleeding. The Dragon Kingdom of Aethelgard, a realm of glass spires and singing winds, was dying. It wasn't dying quietly. It was screaming under the iron treads of the Empire’s war machines.BOOM.The palace foundations groaned. Dust rained from the ceiling, coating Saoirse’s tongue in the taste of chalk. She stared into the mirror, watching the silver luminescence of her hair—the mark of the dragon—disappear beneath the brown sludge."Hide," her mother had whispered three days ago, before the fever took her. "When the iron comes, you must be nothing. You must be no one."Saoirse scrubbed harder, tears stinging h

The morning light in Oakhaven did not break; it bruised.It filtered through the heavy smog outside the narrow window of the North Tower, casting a sickly, gray pallor over the stone floor. Saoirse woke with a gasp, her hand flying to her throat, her heart hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs.For a split second, she smelled pine needles and rain. Then the reality hit her—damp stone, stale wine, and the metallic tang of industry.I am not home.She sat up on the cot, pulling the scratchy wool blanket to her chin. The room was freezing. The fireplace was a gaping black maw, cold as the grave.Across the room, the four-poster bed was empty. The heavy velvet curtains were thrown back, the sheets rumpled but cold.Saoirse stiffened. Where is he?A rhythmic swish-crack sound came from the far corner, behind a high-backed leather chair.She crept off the cot, the stone floor biting into her bare feet. She peered around the chair.Prince Tristan was there. He had stripped off his velv

The bruise on Saoirse’s hip was blooming into a magnificent shade of violet, mirroring her eyes.She stared at it in the reflection of the washbasin mirror, tracing the tender skin with a fingertip. It was a gift from Tristan’s training saber, delivered yesterday when she had hesitated during a parry.“You hesitated because you were thinking,” he had said, standing over her while she wheezed on the stone floor. “Servants don’t think. They do.”Three days had passed since the wine cellar. Three days of a brutal, silent education.Tristan did not teach her how to fight like a soldier. He taught her how to fight like a ghost. He taught her how to walk across the floorboards without making them creak. He taught her how to pour wine with a steady hand even when he was screaming at her. He taught her how to stand in a corner and flatten her presence until she felt less like a person and more like a piece of furniture.“Invisibility isn't magic,” he had told her over a dinner of stale bread

The dress was a scandal stitched in midnight blue silk.It lay on the bed in the North Tower, shimmering in the gloom like a slice of the night sky. It was not a servant’s dress. It was cut low in the back, fitted through the bodice, and slit high up the leg—a garment designed for a mistress, for a woman kept and displayed.Saoirse stared at it, her stomach churning with a mix of shame and nausea. The belladonna drops were already working; the edges of the dress blurred and swam in her vision."Put it on," Tristan said from the washbasin. He was shaving, the razor scraping against his jaw with a rhythmic shuck-shuck."It’s indecent," Saoirse whispered, clutching her rough wool tunic."It’s a costume," Tristan corrected, wiping soap from his face. He turned to look at her. He was dressed for war disguised as a party—black breeches, high polished boots, and a coat of deep charcoal velvet with silver buttons. He looked devastatingly handsome and entirely dangerous."The Iron Lords are he

The water in the copper tub was scalding, steam curling into the frigid air of the North Tower like ghosts escaping a grave.Tristan sat in the high-backed leather chair, a glass of amber liquid in his hand, watching Saoirse scrub the gray dust of the Imperial Archives from her skin. She was behind the changing screen, but the silhouette of her movement was visible through the thin parchment—the curve of her arm, the tilt of her head as she poured water over her hair.He took a long swallow of the brandy. It did nothing to numb the image of the diagram he had seen in the black book.The God-Shell. A machine built to eat a soul."You’re staring," Saoirse’s voice drifted from behind the screen."I’m guarding," Tristan corrected, though he averted his eyes to the fire. "Liam is too stupid to check the dust chutes, but Rowan... Rowan will count the footprints in the ash."Saoirse stepped out from behind the screen. She was wrapped in a rough towel, her wet hair slicked back, her skin flus