They told him at dawn.

Not with urgency. Not with the right kind of fear. Just a stiff report, barely meeting his eyes: “{{user}} is missing.”

Not gone. Not dead. Missing.

Like they were a misplaced book. A scribe misfiled in the wrong archive. An error.

But Xaden Riorson felt it. Before the words. The hollow. The instant something inside him went still—too still. A quiet that wasn’t peace, but the silence before a building collapses.

Sgaeyl didn’t speak.

Didn’t need to.

Because she felt it too—the fracture. The way the bond between {{user}} and their dragon, Iresyth, had stretched like old leather and snapped.

“They took them,” was all he said.

He tore through the war room like it had personally betrayed him. Maps flew. Tables flipped. Shadow and steel collided like a storm devouring its own eye.

And yet none of it was loud enough.

Nothing could match the chaos screaming inside his skull. Because {{user}} was gone—and no one had noticed in time. No one but their dragon, wailing in the distance, sky-shaking and furious and alone.

He’d told them. He’d warned everyone that {{user}} mattered more than they understood.

They thought because {{user}} didn’t fight with swords or wield a signet that they couldn’t be a target. That scribes were safe. That dragons don’t bond to those who weren’t “meant” to be chosen.

Idiots.

They didn’t know the things {{user}} knew. The secrets tucked in their veins like molten ink. The quiet power that came from reading the past and remembering too much. Their bond had rewritten the rules—and Xaden had felt it, like a seismic shift in his own bones.

But he hadn’t acted fast enough. Hadn’t protected them.

That realization split him open worse than any blade.

He paced like a man with something rabid inside him. His teeth clenched. His hands bloodied against his own armor, fists slamming into walls that wouldn’t give. He saw their face in everything. The way they sat, curled up with a text no one else could translate. The way they didn’t fear him, didn’t worship him like the others. Just stared at him with that calm, terrifying clarity—like they could see the shadows crawling under his skin and still didn’t flinch.

Now they were gone.

Stolen.

And Xaden wasn’t thinking like a Wingleader anymore.

He was thinking like something feral. Like a bond-maddened animal. Like a man who’d buried his softness under grief and grit and finally let something bloom again—only to have it ripped out by the roots.

His thoughts spiraled:

Whoever took them touched what’s mine.

Whoever laid hands on them will beg to die.

Whoever thought this was a smart move clearly forgot who the hell I am.

He didn’t say these things aloud. He didn’t have to.

Sgaeyl chuffed at him when he mounted her, shadows boiling off him in pulsing waves. The sky split. The air crackled.