AIKO
Sunlight sliced through unfamiliar curtains, yanking me from dreams of shadow and scale. For one disorienting moment, panic seized my chest—where was I? The bed beneath me felt impossibly soft, nothing like the rigid sleeping platforms of the Blood Realm or even the ornate dragon nests of my mother's homeland.
Then it hit me. A HUMAN bed. A HUMAN house. The HUMAN realm.
And holy hell, was I loving it.
I stretched, feeling my scales ripple beneath my glamour, that perpetual itch of hiding what I truly was. Memories washed over me in fragments: meeting Eron when we were both twelve at Moonstone, neither of us knowing what destiny had planned; the harrowing journey through the Veins that nearly killed us all; the desperate fight at the waterfall where I'd almost lost myself to dragon
