Dragon Bride (SAMPLE)

Chapter Six

Fire is normally snuffed out in a cold realm such as the one Basilisk found himself entering. The end of all life thrives in the cold embrace of what comes next. Emotions of the living. The heat of a thriving creature, moving or stagnant, none of it exists here.

If Basilisk was not the God of Fire, he would have perished the moment he dared to step inside. Life without a Godly element would falter to the ruler of this mystical everlasting winter.

But all the same, it was a struggle for the God to stay there. His skin crinkled against the freezing element. The harbored breaths he took begged that he stated his business quickly and returned to the safe haven that was heat. Undeterred by this, Basilisk raced to the castle, knowing that was the only place that Angadrona could be.

Noise echoed across its inner walls. Powerful waves of air, sprinkled in snowflakes and icepicks, sliced into the ground and tore the roof from the palace as he stepped inside. The magnitude nearly yanked the God of Fire off his feet.

There was a humongous pot where a throne should have been.

“Angadrona!” He bellowed. “I know that you sense my presence! Show yourself!”

She appeared before him in an instant, unaffected by the rage steaming his skin. Instead, her faces showed other things. Composure, Vexation... and sorrow under the mask of similar anger.

“Basilisk... it's been ages. What are you doing here?”

“You know what I’m doing here.”

A ghostly smile graced her left face. “Yes, but I want to hear you say it...”

Angadrona was too fast. Too fast for the God to see until her skinny, cold fingers pierced his skin and made his skin crawl. “I want to see... if you have the nerve to ask.”

Basilisk growled and flung her hand away, burning it on instinct. “Why are you targeting Kendria Glacies?! You honor that every living thing lives and dies on their own accord. It's your Godlihood. There’s no reason to harm her... unless personal reasons have risen within you.”

It was his turn to taunt.

His turn to threaten her with his own presence.

He loomed over the God with flames pulsing around him, like a wild heartbeat, and every pulse made her realm shake beneath his feet. His rage was not the fleeting kind born of simple anger; it was a cataclysm, an inferno roaring in his chest.

“Were you the one who did it, Angadrona?”

His eyes burned with a supernatural light, twin flames of molten gold and searing crimson, reflecting the depth of his fury. The fire seemed to leap from his gaze, curling and crackling in the air, threatening to consume everything in its path.

“Were you the one who took Ayana and my children away from me? Is that why you want to threaten the last of my descendants?”

His clenched fists trembled, not with fear, but with the barely restrained power coursing through him, a force that demanded justice, demanded vengeance. But Angadrona wasn’t the least bit affected. Insulted, but not afraid. Her eyes hardened as she scanned Basilisk’s entire presence.

“You’re right, Basilisk. It is my nature to protect what we created. Life and its wildness... its uniqueness and free will... it was my job and I sticked to it. All of the Gods did... except you.”

Her voice, an icy wail that carried the anguish of betrayal, echoed through the frostbitten heavens.

"Traitor!" she bellowed, her breath freezing into jagged shards that rained down like tiny daggers. Her pale hands clenched into fists, and with every pulse of her rage, the ground beneath her feet fractured, glaciers splitting with deafening roars. The towers of her palace, once resplendent and unyielding, cracked and tumbled, their icy spires cascading into frozen rubble. Ice storms erupted around her, swirling with the chaos of her wrath, blinding and merciless.