First Chosen by the Dragon (Evelyn) novel Chapter 88

[Evelyn’s POV]

Aspis can’t be contained anymore. I feel it through the bond before dawn — the pressure building like steam in a sealed chamber.

She’s too large for the sea caves, wings scraping stone when she stretches, her body coiled against walls that shrink with every passing day.

“Today,” she says and it wasn’t a request. “Today, or I tear the cliff open myself.”

“Draven’s arranged it. Dawn launch from the eastern cliffs, before the compound wakes.”

“I don’t care who wakes or who sees.”

“I do. Give me this — one hour of sky without an audience. After that, the world can watch.”

She agrees, but the impatience boils through the bond like fever.

Draven meets me at the tunnel entrance in the gray half-light. Khaira waits on the overlook above, her black silhouette barely visible against the pre-dawn sky.

“Eastern launch point,” he says. “Over open water, away from the compound. The cliff drops two hundred feet to the sea — enough altitude for her to catch the updraft even if the first wingbeats are rough.”

“Comforting.”

“You’ll be fine, the bond will hold you.” He catches my arm as I pass. His grip is warm, his dark eyes searching my face. “Are you ready?”

“I’ve been ready my whole life. I just didn’t know for what.”

He releases me. I descend the tunnel to the sea caves for the last time.

Aspis is waiting at the cave mouth where the stone opens to sky. The dawn light catches her scales and sets them burning — a white dragon, luminous, trembling with caged power.

Her violet eyes find me and the bond floods with an emotion so raw and overwhelming that my knees nearly buckle. Pure, primal, desperate joy.

“Get on.”

I climb onto her back. No saddle, no harness — just my legs pressing against warm scales, hands gripping the bony ridge between her shoulders.

The muscle beneath me shifts and coils. Her heartbeat thunders against my inner thighs, steady and enormous.

“Hold tight.”

“Wait — how do we—”

Aspis launches.

She throws herself from the cave mouth with an explosion of muscle that slams my chest against her spine, and then the world drops away.

The cliff face blurs past — gray stone rushing upward as we plummet down. Wind hits me like a wall, and my stomach lurches into my throat.

Below, the sea rushes up, dark and vast, waves shattering white against rocks that grow larger with terrifying speed.

I scream.

The sound rips from my chest, involuntary and absolute — and through the bond, something happens to it.

The terror transmutes. The scream twists in my throat, reshapes, and what comes out of my mouth on the next breath is laughter.

Raw, gasping, half-mad laughter that the wind tears away the instant it leaves my lips.

Aspis spreads her wings.

The catch is violent — a wrenching deceleration that snaps my body backward, my spine arching, my fingers nearly losing the ridge.

Then the updraft hits and we surge upward so fast that the horizon tilts and the sea drops away beneath us like a discarded blanket.

We climb. The air thins and cools against my face, against the silver hair streaming behind me — no more dye, no more hiding, just the hair I was born with blazing in the first light of dawn.

My lungs burn. My eyes water from the wind. Every cell in my body is electric with a terror so close to ecstasy I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.

“Do you feel it?” she asks.

“This is what we are. This is what they tried to take from us. Every cage, every cave, every year in the dark — it was the price we paid to reach this sky.”

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