Iron Flame

You’re going to love Violet. She’s smart and stubborn.
Reminds me a lot of you, actually.
You just have to remember when you meet her:
she’s not her mother.
—RECOVERED CORRESPONDENCE OF CADET LIAM MAIRI TO SLOANE MAIRI

“If Solas comes near you again, he knows I will devour his human whole and let him rot within me while his heart still beats, and then I’ll take the eye I so graciously left him.”

Who is Aetos?” Cadet Quiet asks from Aoife’s left. It’s the first time the curvy brunette has spoken in hours, but her brown eyes are

It’s all that’s left of my mother

Ten. “You’re beginning to think—” Tairn starts.

“Like Brennan?” I suggest as the wyvern enter our airspace.

“Like Tairn,” Sgaeyl answers,

and I pull lightning from the sky so quickly that I no longer feel like I direct the storm.

I am the storm

Maybe I’m becoming complacent with betrayal because it’s fucking everywhere

“You’re capable of hurting me in ways I’m not sure you’ve even begun to
fathom, Violet. I might be skilled enough to land a death blow, but you alone have the power to fucking destroy me.” His hand slides out from behind my back to help bolster his weight. “Now, we can talk here, or we can see if Sgaeyl and Tairn are done fighting and fly through this snowstorm to the nearest vacant peak, but make no mistake, we’re going to work this out.”

After telling her there would be no logical way to explain her presence even if Tairn carried her, which she was adamantly opposed to, Andarna cursed Tairn’s entire family line, then blocked us both and went to practice with the elders.

Tairn’s only response had been a muttered expletive about the moods of adolescents

It doesn’t escape my notice that Sgaeyl stands between Teine and Fann, Ulices’s cantankerous Green Swordtail, not next to Tairn, which either explains or is a result of his surly mood this morning.

Mom and Dad are fighting, and everyone knows it