Chapter 136

Zarek

I have always known how this would end.

Not the details—those are fluid, messy, shaped by blood and fire and other people’s mistakes—but the truth of it. The inevitability. Kings are not chosen because they hesitate. They are not crowned because they doubt.

They are crowned because they take.

I stand alone in the heart of the fortress, where the stone remembers every dragon that ever bled fo