Onyx banked south, and Asher looked back.
The white marble was burning. The golden lions that had guarded the staircases since before his grandfather's grandfather were buried under rubble. The reflecting pools were black with ash. The colonnade where he and Ronan had sprinted with a stolen crown and a rogue goat was gone, swallowed by stone and fire and the crawling things beneath.
Everything he had ever known was collapsing into itself, and Asher watched it happen with Natalia unconscious against his chest and Ronan's body cooling under his hand.
He had lost his brother, his kingdom, and his home in the span of an hour. The sky offered nothing. The ground offered less.
Onyx set them down on a ridge overlooking a coastline neither of them recognized. Foreign trees. Foreign soil. A continent that had no name because no one Asher knew had ever stood on it.
Asher pulled Natalia from the dragon's back and laid her on the grass. Then he turned to Ronan.
