The First Daughter of Cassimir has come home. But she is not the only one.
Fifteen years ago, Shreya vanished from the grasslands of Cassimir on the night of the Choosing — lifted from a crumbling temple by the crimson-scaled dragon who had been waiting in stone for her alone. The clans mourned her as a theft. They built fires for her soul. They never stopped watching the horizon.
She is watching it now.
Cassimir is not the province she left. The nomadic herds are thinned. The grain roads are stripped bare. And marching south through the dust — an army so vast it turns the horizon black — is the force Emperor Madrid has been building for a generation. Not to hold Gaia. To leave it.
Shreya returns to find her people surviving in the cracks of an occupation that is almost over — because Madrid no longer needs Cassimir. He needs what is buried beneath it. Deep under the ancient acropolis where she first met her dragon Garnet, his engineers are excavating a relic older than the barriers, older than the Citadel, older than anyone living can remember: the Speaking Stone, a device built by the first Gaian dragons to command their kind across a continent. In Madrid's hands, it becomes something else entirely — the mechanism to issue a single command to every dragon in his engineered army, simultaneously, across an ocean.
But Shreya is not the only person who knows this.
Jael — the chief's son who tackled her in the grass before the Choosing and disappeared to the Citadel the same night — has been Madrid's tax collector in Cassimir for fifteen years. He has ridden Ruby, his crimson dragon, across every valley and every clan encampment, stripping the harvests that feed Madrid's marching army. He has been the face of the occupation for the people who remember him as a boy. And he has been very, very careful about exactly which small acts of mercy the red crystal in his chest can no longer see.
When Shreya finds him, she expects a traitor. What she finds is a man who made an impossible deal at fifteen and has been paying for it ever since — one quietly misfiled report, one redirected patrol, one family who did not lose everything, at a time. The corruption in his crystal is visible now. The years have cost him more than he bargained for. He has one act left in him. He knows what it is. He has been saving it.
As Madrid closes in to claim the Speaking Stone and Shreya races to destroy it before it can be used, an old enemy arrives on dragonback with a new purpose — and the full truth of everything Madrid has built, everything he has sacrificed Gaia for, finally speaks itself aloud.
Not every hero survives what comes next. Some choose not to.
Heart of Cassimir is the ninth book in The Dragon Saga — the epic romantasy series where freedom is won one province at a time, the bonds between dragons and their riders reshape the world, and the cost of choosing right is sometimes everything you have left.
Genre: Fantasy
Fifteen years ago, Shreya vanished from the grasslands of Cassimir on the night of the Choosing — lifted from a crumbling temple by the crimson-scaled dragon who had been waiting in stone for her alone. The clans mourned her as a theft. They built fires for her soul. They never stopped watching the horizon.
She is watching it now.
Cassimir is not the province she left. The nomadic herds are thinned. The grain roads are stripped bare. And marching south through the dust — an army so vast it turns the horizon black — is the force Emperor Madrid has been building for a generation. Not to hold Gaia. To leave it.
Shreya returns to find her people surviving in the cracks of an occupation that is almost over — because Madrid no longer needs Cassimir. He needs what is buried beneath it. Deep under the ancient acropolis where she first met her dragon Garnet, his engineers are excavating a relic older than the barriers, older than the Citadel, older than anyone living can remember: the Speaking Stone, a device built by the first Gaian dragons to command their kind across a continent. In Madrid's hands, it becomes something else entirely — the mechanism to issue a single command to every dragon in his engineered army, simultaneously, across an ocean.
But Shreya is not the only person who knows this.
Jael — the chief's son who tackled her in the grass before the Choosing and disappeared to the Citadel the same night — has been Madrid's tax collector in Cassimir for fifteen years. He has ridden Ruby, his crimson dragon, across every valley and every clan encampment, stripping the harvests that feed Madrid's marching army. He has been the face of the occupation for the people who remember him as a boy. And he has been very, very careful about exactly which small acts of mercy the red crystal in his chest can no longer see.
When Shreya finds him, she expects a traitor. What she finds is a man who made an impossible deal at fifteen and has been paying for it ever since — one quietly misfiled report, one redirected patrol, one family who did not lose everything, at a time. The corruption in his crystal is visible now. The years have cost him more than he bargained for. He has one act left in him. He knows what it is. He has been saving it.
As Madrid closes in to claim the Speaking Stone and Shreya races to destroy it before it can be used, an old enemy arrives on dragonback with a new purpose — and the full truth of everything Madrid has built, everything he has sacrificed Gaia for, finally speaks itself aloud.
Not every hero survives what comes next. Some choose not to.
Heart of Cassimir is the ninth book in The Dragon Saga — the epic romantasy series where freedom is won one province at a time, the bonds between dragons and their riders reshape the world, and the cost of choosing right is sometimes everything you have left.
Genre: Fantasy