Prologue

— The Shadow Wing Chose Her Last

ARIA

The basalt flight deck of Blackglass was unforgiving, but it was the ice that truly tore the skin.

Lake-effect snow whipped across the two-mile stretch of the aerial fortress, blinding in its ferocity. The wind screamed through the colossal iron rigging that kept the war college suspended above the frozen inland seas, sounding like a chorus of dying turbines. I tasted aviation fuel, ozone, and my own copper blood.

The impact threw me backward another ten yards. I hit the iced-over tarmac, my ward-magic flaring in a desperate attempt to cushion the blow. The kinetic energy transferred directly into my skeleton, sending a hairline fracture of agony shooting up my right radius. I clamped my teeth together, refusing to scream.

A hundred yards away, the twelfth dragon—a brutal, steel-scaled trench-wyvern—snorted a plume of superheated steam, completely indifferent to my survival. It turned its massive, armored head away, rejecting me.

Twelve dragons. Twelve rejections.

"Cadet North!" The voice of Tactical Instructor Vance crackled over the deck’s localized loudspeakers, cutting through the blizzard. "Your kinetic threshold is failing. Yield the circle."

I forced myself up onto my hands and knees, my breath pluming white in the freezing air. The hangar crews, dressed in high-visibility thermal gear, were already moving in with heavy repulsion poles to guide the wyvern back to the subterranean holds. Around the perimeter of the Bonding Dive circle, a dozen other cadets—bruised but unbroken, all already paired with their mounts—watched me with a mixture of pity and outright disdain.

I couldn’t yield. If I walked off this deck without a dragon, my commission as an independent ward engineer would be permanently revoked. More importantly, my clearance to the Blackglass classified archives would be wiped. I would never find the unredacted flight logs. I would never prove that the explosion that killed my sister, Soraya, wasn’t a training accident.

"I have one more attempt," I shouted, my voice raw, tapping the comm-link at my throat. I pushed myself to my feet, my joints screaming in protest, the ward-burns on my forearms glowing a faint, angry blue beneath my flight suit. "Protocol dictates thirteen attempts before washout."

There was a long, heavy silence over the comms, filled only by the relentless howl of the Great Lakes wind. Finally, Vance’s voice returned, flat and devoid of empathy.

"Bring up the final candidate. And bring up the prisoner. We’re clearing the deck."

I wiped a smear of blood from my frozen cheek, my chest heaving. The prisoner?

CASSIAN

The heavy iron cuffs bit into my wrists, cold enough to burn. It was a familiar pain, grounding me against the creeping, violent edge of my own magic. Shadows writhed at the toes of my boots, hungry and erratic, bleeding out from the core of my chest where my tether to the darkness usually lay dormant.

Four armed sentries flanked me as I was marched up the primary gangway toward the flight deck. They kept their distance, their assault rifles held at the ready, loaded with ward-piercing rounds. They were terrified of me. They should be.

Commandant Thorne waited for me at the edge of the storm-battered tarmac, his heavy trench coat snapping in the gale. He looked at me not as a man he had mentored for five years, but as a rabid dog that had outlived its usefulness.

"Halt," Thorne barked. The sentries shoved me forward, bringing me to a stop just outside the painted boundary of the Bonding Dive circle.

Thorne stepped into my personal space, smelling of stale cigars and polished brass. "This is your final hour as a commissioned officer, Veyr. You accept the demotion, you accept the cadet status, and you keep your mouth shut about the extraction coordinates. In exchange, I don’t execute you for treason right here on the ice."

"I saved the rest of that squad," I said, my voice dangerously soft, the shadows around my boots flaring upward like reaching fingers. Every time I touched the night-magic, it ate a piece of my memory. The smell of rain. The sound of a piano. Small things, so far. But the darkness was getting greedier. "You ordered them into a slaughter."

Thorne didn’t blink. He reached out and violently ripped the silver eagle insignia from the shoulder of my tactical jacket. The sound of tearing fabric was swallowed by the wind.

"You are nothing, Cassian. A stripped commander. A traitor. You will re-enter the academy as a relic-bond candidate, stripped of all rank, all authority, and all privilege. You have no squad. You command no one." Thorne sneered, tossing the silver eagles onto the snow. He gestured to a sentry, who stepped forward with a heavy iron key and unlocked my cuffs. They fell to the deck with a heavy clang. "Now get in the circle. Let’s see if a broken beast will take a broken man."

I rubbed my bruised wrists, feeling the shadows instantly rush up my arms, desperate to be unleashed. I forced them back, burying them deep beneath a wall of iron discipline. I turned my gaze to the center of the deck.

A girl was standing there, shivering, bleeding, her uniform scorched and torn. Cadet Aria North. I knew her file. I knew her face.

She was Soraya’s younger sister.

And she was glaring at me with a hatred so pure it momentarily cut through the freezing wind. She thought I was the monster who had left her sister to die. For the sake of the republic’s darkest secret, I had to let her believe it.

ARIA

The primary freight elevator groaned, the massive gears protesting as they hauled something gargantuan up from the lowest depths of Blackglass.

I kept my eyes locked on Cassian Veyr. Even stripped of his rank, standing there in a plain black tactical suit devoid of any insignia, he radiated a lethal, gravity-crushing presence. He was twenty-eight, five years my senior, a legendary shadow commander who could fold the night sky around his strike teams. Now, he was just a disgraced cadet, equal to me in status but infinitely more dangerous. The shadows seemed to bleed directly from his skin, twisting like living smoke in the blizzard.

The elevator locked into place with a thunderous metallic boom.

The hangar crews scrambled backward, raising their thermal shields. Out of the rising steam and snow stepped a creature of absolute, tragic majesty.