: Elowen Voss
: Wings Of Obsidian Flame A Possessive Dragon Shifter Romantasy
: Publishdrive
: 9781105444890
: 1
: CHF 4.70
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 290
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

She did not expect the dragon to decide she was his.


Solvaine Tal has spent nine years making herself invisible - translating the empire's stolen secrets in a vault no one watches closely, keeping her forbidden bloodline quiet, surviving by being useful and nothing more. She is exceptionally good at surviving. She is considerably less good at the thing she does on an otherwise ordinary cataloguing evening: reading a three-hundred-year-old release incantation aloud and shattering the chains of the most dangerous creature alive.


Now Vraethan - Lord of Obsidian Fire, last of the ancient dragon lords, six centuries of power and three centuries of fury finally given form - is free. And the ancient magic of a dead civilization has done precisely what it was built to do. It has bonded them. Soul to anchor. Fire to seal.


She is the only thing keeping his power from burning the empire to glass. He is the only thing standing between her and every soldier the empire will send to reclaim what it considers its property. To dissolve the bond permanently - to truly free him and survive - they must cross three weeks of impassable volcanic wasteland to the ruins of his destroyed civilization, while the empire's most dangerous engineer hunts them with a weapon built from the original chains.


She has a map she copied in secret. He has three centuries of patience. Neither of them was prepared for the other.


A slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers dragon shifter romantasy with forced proximity, a possessive ancient MMC, hidden power, and a love story built in the ruins of everything the world tried to erase. Standalone. Complete HEA.


The fire is his. The choice is hers. Read Wings of Obsidian Flame today.

PROLOGUE


The day Vraethan last flew free, the sky above Vrakaen was the colour of hammered bronze.

He remembered this afterward — the particular quality of that light, the way it struck the obsidian towers of his city and made them appear, briefly, almost ordinary. Almost gold. Almost the kind of thing a person might see without feeling the specific and ancient pressure of power held in check by the elegant machinery of covenant and care. The thermal currents rising from the volcanic plains below the outer courts were warm and deliberate, and he rode them without effort in the way he had ridden them for two centuries — the way he had intended to ride them for a thousand more, if the world remained the kind of place that deserved a thousand more years of order.

On that morning, the world was in order.

He could feel it through the fire-sense — that vast and living web of the Ashfire Compact, each thread a bond between a Vrakar lord and their Tala keeper, vibrating at its specific frequency the way a chord vibrates when all its notes are present and correctly pitched. Forty-three threads. Forty-three pairs. The oldest of the bonds had been sustained for centuries; the youngest was barely fifty years deep, still new enough that its keeper occasionally broadcast surprise at the weight of what she'd taken on. Vraethan had thought, when that bond formed, that he ought to give the girl a few years before she stopped being startled by the scale of it.

He would not, as it turned out, have a few years.

His own thread — the bond to Elaythe — ran north-northeast, toward the Tala chapter house in the upper courts where she was almost certainly doing something precise and administrative and would want him to know about later in more detail than he was prepared to receive. One hundred and forty years of partnership had established a rhythm: she managed the correspondence, the covenant documentation, the lengthy and apparently vital negotiations between chapter houses about the proper sequencing of anchor-renewal ceremonies; he flew, governed, and signed the letters she placed before him without reading them. She had once pointed out that this was a catastrophic practice from a strategic standpoint. He had agreed with her, signed the letter she was holding, and not changed his behaviour. She had been fond of him anyway, which was, he had concluded, simply her nature.

The chord held. The sky was bronze. The world was whole.

Elaythe's thread went cold at the third hour.

Not gradually. Not with warning. Not the way a thing fades when it is worn down by time or distance. One moment it was there — old and precise and as familiar as the weight of his own wings — and the next it was not. A silence where sound had always been. An absence so complete and so sudden that his fire-sense recoiled from it the way a body recoils from a wound, before thought has caught up with sensation.

He had time for one word.

No.

Then the second thread went cold. Somewhere to the south. A Tala keeper named Orvem, forty years bonded to one of Vraethan's kin who flew the southern courts. Gone. Then a third — the young one, barely fifty years in, whose bond had always broadcast surprise. Then a fourth. A fifth. The Compact's web shuddering the way a structure shudders when the walls that carry its weight are removed, not all at once but in sequence, each loss compounding the next, the whole architecture beginning to tilt toward a collapse that was never supposed to be possible because the Compact was not supposed to be something that could be deliberately taken apart.

He understood what was happening before the first sound reached him from below.

They are being killed. All at once. Someone planned this.

Without their Tala keepers, the Vrakar began to destabilize. He felt them through the fracturing web — his kin, the forty-two others, their fires flooding upward without anchor, their consciousnesses fracturing at the edges under the vast and uncontained weight of power that had never been designed to run alone. The Compact was not a constraint. It had never been a cage or a collar or a limitation on what the Vrakar were. It w