Ashwing

A grief no Shape can mend. A sickness with no name. A mountain that finally learns to stay.A year into her bond with

Threnody, Wren Calder has finally stopped bracing for the Aerie to take it back - until a rescue mission goes wrong in a way no one walks away from clean. Cadet Renn Ostler doesn't come home, and the dragon he leaves behind starts wasting from the inside out. He isn't the only one. Across the mountain, bonded dragons are dulling toward gray for reasons no healer or Council record can explain, and Wren's own untrained Will picks the worst possible chamber to finally slip its leash.

The answer doesn't come from the Council. It comes from a defector with nothing left to gain by telling the truth, a healer-in-training too stubborn to stop asking, and words carved into a sealed vault three centuries ago by someone who understood, long before anyone had a name for the sickness, exactly what a bond is for. Wren is done waiting for permission to be the one who stays - and she's about to find out how far that refusal to look away can actually carry her.

Not treasure. Not weapon. Trust. The fist that takes what was offered freely deserves nothing it grasps.