Ember and Oath
The binding-song has held the dragons for a generation. In the Ashwood, where amber light bleeds through the canopy and the trees remember older names, that song finally cracks. Elara Voss hears the fracture inside her skull the moment Kaelthorn's silver wing-bone splits along the grain. Pale sap wells from the break as the last wyrm begins to change , leg twisting to fluted birch, flesh becoming wood, the line between beast and forest blurring. Across the realm, fifty-nine unbound dragons shiver in the silence, and Seraphine hardens into a black-glass tree that cannot weep, cannot speak, cannot follow. The war beyond the Ashwood offers no refuge. Cael Ashford carries orders from King Aldric , letters written by a dying hand , while General Sorelle tightens the crown's grip and Thorne walks a darker road than his oath once allowed. Vex leads the Grey Hounds through the spaces between armies, hunting the truth of a wound called Vethra, a sickness that eats magic from the world. And in every shadow, the Hollow King stirs , a thing that was once a man, now a scroll-bound curse that promises to swallow the bound and the unbound alike. For sixty dragons, the oath is breaking. For Elara, the choice is simple, and merciless: keep the binding and watch everything she loves turn to glass and root, or break the song and unleash the Hollow King.