Loosing Shackles: Kingdom of Ashes Book 1

Prologue: Whispering of Scales The cavern breathes around me, warm and heavy with the weight of ages. Ember-dust floats in the thick air, catching what little light filters through the stone, each speck a memory I have carried for longer than these mountains have stood. I watch my children tumble across the floor — one pale as the moon on fresh snow, the other black as the space between stars — and I feel the prophecy stirring in my bones, ancient and insistent as the pulse of the earth itself. My scales ache with the knowing. Each one is etched with runes older than the kingdom humans call Ashvale, older than their language, older than their fear of us. The markings catch the glow from the molten river that cuts through the deepest part of my home, turning my hide into a map of fire and shadow. Five centuries of watching. Five centuries of waiting for this moment, when the pattern finally clarifies. The white one — my daughter — skids across the stone on her belly, her claws scrabbling for purchase, sending a spray of tiny ice crystals glittering into the air. She laughs, and the sound bounces off the cavern walls like bells in a storm, bright and reckless and utterly without fear. Her brother follows, a streak of darkness so complete he seems to swallow the light around him, leaving trails of perfect black in his wake. Where she is crystalline sharpness, he is the absence of everything — soft edges and fluid motion, disappearing and reappearing between the stalactites like a punchline the cave keeps forgetting. “Tag!” she shrieks, pouncing on his tail. “You’re it, shadow-boy!” “I am not it!” he protests, though his voice cracks mid-denial into a giggle that betrays him completely. “You cheated! You used your frost-breath!” “Did not!” “Did too! My tail is still cold!” I stir from the shadows where I have been watching, and the cavern shifts with me. Stone groans. Heat ripples. The twins pause, two sets of eyes blinking up at me — one gold as summer honey, one silver as a winter star — and for a heartbeat, they are still. “Five hundred winters will pass,” I murmur, and my voice fills the space between us, deep as thunder trapped under the mountain. “And the world will forget the sound of peace.” The white one tilts her head. A flake of ice dislodges from her brow ridge and spirals to the floor. “Forget?” The word comes out wrapped in a giggle, like she can’t quite believe anything so silly. “How can a world forget? That’s like forgetting to breathe!” I lower my massive head until we are eye to eye, close enough that my breath — hot enough to melt stone — warms the frost that patterns her scales. “By remembering only its wounds, little frost-heart. Humans are like that. They cling to pain because it feels solid. Peace...” I exhale, and the ember-dust swirls. “Peace is fragile. It requires trust. And trust requires memory.” My gaze drifts toward the cavern’s mouth, where the horizon burns faintly red through the narrow opening. Dawn, or dusk — from this deep inside the mountain, it hardly matters. Time moves differently here. Outside, the kingdoms shift and fracture. Borders change. Names are forgotten and rewritten. Here, the stone remembers everything. “Humans forget what isn’t written or told,” I continue. “They build their histories from words and ink, and when the ink fades, so does the truth. One day, a woman will sit in a chamber of stone and wood, and she will read a book that tells her only half the story. And she will believe it completely, because the other half was never written down.” The black one has rolled onto his back, his belly scales catching the molten light. His tail flicks lazily against the stone, sending little puffs of ash into the air. “That sounds boring,” he announces, with the devastating certainty of the very young. “Humans writing things. Humans reading things. Humans forgetting things. Can’t they just... not?” I feel the laugh rise in my chest before I can stop it — a rumble that shakes loose a cascade of pebbles from the ceiling. “If only, shadow-son. If only.” I curl my tail around them both, drawing them closer. Their scales feel cool and warm against mine, perfectly balanced, two halves of something whole. “One human will hunger for what she cannot claim. Her sister’s crown. Her sister’s flame.” The white one perks up. “Like when I tried to take his shiny rock?” “Exactly like that,” I say, “except the crown is not a rock, and the hunger does not fade.” I watch understanding flicker across her face — incomplete, but there. Children understand possession before they understand power. It is a start. “War will not break the earth, little ones. Not at first. War will break hearts. And those cracks...” I trace a claw along a fissure in the stone floor, following its jagged path. “Those cracks will hide beneath smiles and songs. They will run through families. Through blood. Through the very foundation of what should be unbreakable.” The black hatchling rolls onto his stomach, suddenly attentive. His silver eyes narrow. “What kind of cracks?” “The kind you cannot see until the ground gives way beneath you.” I let the silence sit for a moment, heavy with implication. Then, because they are children and children deserve hope even in prophecy: “But cracks can be mended. Even the deepest ones.” “Boring,” he declares again, but there is a new thoughtfulness beneath the word now. He flicks his tail twice, sharply, thinking. “Unless there’s fighting. Is there fighting?” “It will not be boring,” I say softly. “It will be beautiful — and terrible.” I unfurl my wings, and the cavern darkens as my shadow stretches across both of them, touching the white scales and the black with equal weight. “The most terrible things often are.” They are quiet now. I can feel the shift in the air between us — play receding, something older taking its place. Not quite understanding. Not quite fear. The space where curiosity lives when it first meets gravity. “When good falls and evil rises,” I continue, each word measured and precise, “your riders will be torn apart.” The white one’s head snaps up. “Our riders? But we haven’t chosen—“ “You will.” The certainty in my voice stops her question mid-flight. “A boy and a girl, born of the same blood, divided by the same night. Twins, like you. Bound to you, like you are bound to each other.” I watch their faces — confusion, wonder, the dawning realisation that I am speaking of people who do not yet exist, in a time they cannot yet imagine. “One will live behind walls, blind to truth. Sheltered. Protected. Trained for a role he does not yet understand, while the world burns beyond his sight.” The black one shifts uncomfortably. “That doesn’t sound very fun.” “It isn’t.” I turn to the white hatchling. “The other will drown in blood not her own. She will learn to move through shadow because the light has become dangerous. She will carry wounds no child should bear, and she will wear them not as weakness, but as armour.” My daughter’s frost-pale scales seem to glow brighter in the dimness, as if responding to the image. “Why?” she asks, and the word is small but fierce. “Because someone will want them dead,” I say simply. “Because their blood is a threat to a crown that was stolen. Because the woman who took that crown — their aunt, their mother’s own sister — would rather see the line end than share what she has claimed.” The twins look at each other. In the space between their mismatched gazes, something passes — a current of understanding, wordless and perfect. Then, as children do when the weight of prophecy becomes too much to hold, they burst into laughter. “We’ll fix it!” the white one chirps, bouncing on her hind claws. “Easy! We’ll find them and we’ll protect them and nobody will hurt anybody!” The black one launches himself at a stalactite, pretending to gnaw on it with exaggerated ferocity. “We’ll bite the darkness! Chomp! Chomp! No more evil aunt! Just... crumbs!” Their laughter fills the cavern, bouncing off the stone, multiplying until it seems like a dozen dragons are laughing, not two. I watch them, and I feel it — that peculiar ache that lives in the chest of every parent who knows what their children cannot: that the path ahead is both exactly what I have described and nothing like what they imagine. That fixing will require breaking first. That biting the darkness means swallowing some of it, and learning to carry that taste. “Perhaps you will,” I whisper. The words are barely audible above their play, but they land where they need to. The cavern falls silent except for the distant crackle of fire deep in the mountain’s heart, the steady drip of mineral-rich water from the ceiling, the soft scrape of claw on stone as the twins circle each other, already inventing new games from the fragments of my prophecy. I should stop here. They are too young. The weight of what comes is not theirs to carry, not yet. But the knowing presses against my ribs, urgent and insistent, and the words come despite myself. “Remember this,” I say, and my voice has changed — older now, fraying at the edges, the voice of the mountain itself speaking through scale and bone. “Light and shadow are not enemies.” I look at my children — one radiant with cold fire, one drinking the darkness like water — and I see the truth of it written in their very bodies. “They are halves of the same heart. The same breath. The same desperate, impossible hope.” The white one stops her circling. Her gold eyes find mine, suddenly solemn. “We know, Mama.” “Do you?” She nods, a quick, decisive movement. “He’s my other half. Even when he’s being annoying.” “Am not annoying,” the black one protests, but he coils his tail around her hind leg as he says it, a gesture so instinctive he doesn’t seem aware he’s doing it. Two bodies, one motion. I smile, and the weariness in it is centuries deep. “Then you already know more than most who will live through what comes.” I settle back into the shadows, feeling the prophecy settle with me — not gone, but banked, like the embers in the river below. “The riders who find you will need that knowledge. They will need each other, and they will need you, and you will need them. And together, you will hold the fate of kings and queens between your claws.” “And the breath of the world,” the black one adds, surprisingly earnest. He has been listening more closely than I thought. “Yes.” I close my eyes, feeling the mountain around us, the weight of stone and time and possibility. “The breath of the world itself. But first—” I open one eye, fixing them with a look that brokers no argument, “—they must learn. As must you.” The white one puffs a delicate cloud of frost. “Learn what?” “To guard.” I let the word sit between us, heavy with meaning. “And to rule. For only when the guardian becomes queen, and the twin stands beside her, will the chains of the world loosen.” The chains. I do not elaborate. They are too young for the full weight of what binds the seven kingdoms — the old magic, the older fears, the treaties written in blood and broken a dozen times over. The distance between realms that was once merely political and has become something darker: a fragmentation of the world itself, each kingdom holding its piece of the sky and refusing to look up at the whole. But they sense it. Children always sense the unsaid. The black one’s tail has gone still. The white one’s frost-breath hangs in the air between us, not dissipating, as if the very cold is listening. “Seven kingdoms,” I say quietly. “Once united. Now distant. Keeping themselves separate, as if distance could protect them from what is coming.” I look toward the cavern mouth again, where the red horizon has deepened to the color of old blood. “But darkness does not respect borders. It feeds on isolation. It grows in the spaces between.” “We’ll reunite them,” the white one says, with the absolute conviction of a creature who has never failed at anything because she has never tried. “All seven! We’ll fly between them and we’ll say, ‘Stop being silly and come have dinner,’ and they’ll all say, ‘Okay, sorry,’ and then there will be cake.” The black one snorts. “Cake? For reuniting kingdoms?” “Cake for everything,” she insists. “Cake fixes cracks. You told us, Mama. Cracks need sweet things.” I laugh again, and this time it is genuine, breaking through the prophecy like sunlight through storm clouds. “Perhaps they do, frost-heart. Perhaps they do.” We sit in silence for a while after that. The twins eventually return to their play, though it is quieter now, thoughtful, punctuated by the occasional whispered conference. I watch them and I feel the strange double-vision that comes with age: seeing what is and what will be, superimposed, one reality bleeding into the other until it is difficult to tell where the now ends and the then begins. Somewhere beyond the mountains, beyond the red horizon, beyond the seven fractured kingdoms and the stolen crown and the blood that has not yet been spilled, the first tremor of destiny stirs. Not a sound. Not a movement. A settling, like the final piece of a mechanism sliding into place after centuries of misalignment. The twins do not feel it. They are rolling a round stone between them, taking turns batting it with their tails, utterly absorbed in the simple physics of play. But I feel it — in my bones, in my scales, in the ancient runes etched into my hide that have been waiting for this moment since before these children were conceived. It has begun. The long, slow unwinding of what was set in motion five hundred years ago, when a different dragon spoke a different prophecy into different ears. The wheel turns. The pattern repeats. But this time — This time, there are two where there should be one. Light and shadow, moving as one creature. Two hearts beating in the same rhythm. Two sets of claws holding the same fate. This time, perhaps, the cracks will mend. I close my eyes and listen to my children laugh, and I hold the sound close, like an ember I must carry through the coming winter. They will need it. Their riders will need it. The world, drowning in blood not its own, will need it most of all. Remember this, I think, though I do not say it aloud. Light and shadow are not enemies. They are halves of the same desperate, roaring, magnificent heart. And somewhere, beyond the mountains, a tremor answers.