When Ancient Shadows Rise

Shadow was never meant to survive.

Cast aside by his parents, beaten for daring to dream, and abandoned in favor of a sister who received all the love he was denied, he made a choice-to disappear.

Lost in the wilds, he should have died. Instead, he found something forgotten by time-two ancient eggs, their heat fading, their life slipping away. With no knowledge of what they were, he did the only thing he could: he kept them warm with his own body. Two years later, the impossible happened.

Wyverns hatched.

The world believed them extinct, but Shadow had unknowingly revived the first of their kind in centuries. As he raised them, he discovered an old journal-the only record of a human who had lived among Wyverns before their extinction. Through it, he learned what no one else knew.

For eleven years, he built a life far from the home that had never wanted him. Deep in the wilds, he uncovered Nyxdarin, an island lost to time, where the last Wyverns thrived under his care. No longer a child, no longer a forgotten boy, he found a place that did not cast him aside-a place where he could exist without being unwanted.

But the past is not so easily left behind.

Now, after more than a decade, he returns to Berk, not to seek revenge, but to face the one person who had never turned away from him-his sister. Scarlet, now nearly grown, has spent years searching for him, desperate for answers. She had once been the reason he was cast aside, but now, she is the only reason he has come back.

But a boy who vanished is not the same as the man who returns.

The world is not ready for what Shadow has become.

And this time, he will not be driven away.