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Archer Lynch

Severyn once asked me if we truly find ourselves when we become a Serpent.

I wish I had all the answers for her. Most days, I wish it had been Klaus who survived.

I once heard a story about Gemini dragons and the strange, hidden words spoken by a golden-eyed man.

He claimed they were a curse. He said our bloodlines are bound by this curse—doomed to merge as either flame or shadow.

Klaus was not Naraic’s first rider, nor the first of his bloodline. Another had ridden him before—a flame wielder whose eyes haunted more than the dust in my family home.

This bond between Severyn and me feels like every bond between Ciaran and Naraic. Every friendship, every burst of laughter. We were meant to find each other, just as Klaus and I had been meant to. And every single rider of Naraic’s has died. It would be me next… I would make sure of it.

I miss Klaus. I grieve in silence because I kept his last letter, the one he asked me to deliver to his father after his death. I held onto it even when she burned everything else he had written.

I made a promise to Klaus in those final weeks, when he would stay awake until the sunlight crept through his window, scribbling endlessly.

He wrote about everything and nothing, and I forced myself not to read any of it.

I didn’t want to know how it would end. I didn’t want to know how I’d find his sister, how my vow of protection would falter, or how hard the fall would be when I looked into her emerald eyes and felt pain, grief, and anger all at once.

I didn’t want to know how much I would hurt her.

I didn’t want it to be her. I didn’t want to hate and love the same person in the span of a few months .

I knew about our father’s barter. I knew I’d never truly have her.

But I also knew I couldn’t bear to lose something I would desperately yearn for.

I lived with her name in my mind for two years, waiting for the day she would learn mine.

Maybe keeping that lindworm was my way of protecting her.

Because when Klaus wrote that Damien would claim my father’s title, I knew I had no choice but to make her my heir so she would not become his .

It was my choice, and I accept the consequences.