A Queen Raised by Dragons
I was raised by dragons no one else could touch, worked a job no one else would take, and owed a debt I would never finish paying.
I was nobody. I had made my peace with that.
Then the seal on my palm shattered, my magic turned a stone wall to ash, and a shadow prince stepped out of the dark and told me he had been watching me for three years.
He had a file on me. Thick. Detailed. Written in his own handwriting.
He had come to use me. I knew that from the moment I read his objective in a dark records room while he stood across the space and watched my face and said absolutely nothing.
Here is what I also know.
He burned through three layers of Dawncourt security with his bare hands to reach me. He went in without caution, without conservation, without any of the cold precision that made entire courts afraid of his silence. He went in like a man who had stopped calculating.
I have spent my whole life being left behind. Abandoned at a sanctuary as an infant. No name given with me. No explanation. Just a scar on my palm that the man who raised me told me meant nothing, and a debt on a ledger that grew faster than I could pay it, and dragons that everyone else was afraid of watching me from both eyes open while they watched everyone else with one.
I was used to being overlooked.
I was not prepared to be seen.
Now there is a prophecy carved into the stone beneath the entire world that says we either save the realm together or watch it burn. There is an ancient hunger in the Forbidden Meridian that has been patient for three hundred years and has decided to stop being patient. There is a Shadow Queen who knows her son completely and knows exactly which wounds to press to pull us apart, and she is precise and she is brilliant and she is coming.
There are two courts and a dying rider order and a crown that the prophecy says I have to build rather than receive, from documents and dragon bonds and the systematic dismantling of every structure that tried to erase my mother and then me.
And there is him.
Daevon Noctaris. Second Prince of the Shadowcourt. The most controlled person in every room and somehow, underneath all of it, the most feeling one. A man who performed so long he forgot there was a person underneath the performance until I was too close for the performance to work and he ran out of it entirely in a clearing in a woodland with burned hands and nothing left to manage.
He came looking for someone to use.
He found me instead.
I know what the prophecy requires. A genuine choice. Willing. Conscious. With full knowledge of everything and every reason to walk away.
I have read the file.
I know every reason.
I am still here.
My name is Kaera Ashvyne. I was raised by dragons, overlooked by courts, sealed from my own power before I was old enough to know I had it, and left behind by a world that found me inconvenient.
The world is about to find out what happens when the thing it left behind stops waiting.
