The Scorned Daughter: Favored by the Dragon Sovereign

nna

ever her mortal breath and harve

low, resonant drone. Beneath the suffocating incense of sulfur, pyre-ash, and ne

ible. Treating my raw, unawakened lineage as catalyst oil to revive the late Beaumont heir's collapsed dragonfire. In doing so, they wou

s Booth, my father's favored vassal concubine, dabbing her dry eyes with an embroidered silk handkerchief. "To lose her footing and tum

before wheedling her way into my father's bed as a secondary concubine, she wore her newly bought nobility like gaudy war paint. Through the crack in the timb

n Earthbound creature with a silent Dragon Core-she was nothing more than an embarrassment to Lord Barton's name! Offer

nt cedes their royal sponsorship directly to my Kristal! A dead idiot's bones

snickers rippled thr

t. "Better ground into pyre-dust inside an alch

e of momentum coiled in my battered sinews, I raised my mud-caked righ

O

ing violent arcs against the stone masonry and sending clouds of choking bone ash,

ied like blown-out candles. Two hundred pairs of eyes snapped

reshold into the blinding glare

g to my hollow cheeks like funeral veils, framing a face drained of li

-piercing shriek. Her gold-leaf goblet slipped from her trembling fingers, clatterin

ripped throu

ed from the shadows. "The dead

altar. Each step of my heavy, mud-soaked boots struck the plush red

ar fire, but beneath her powdered lead rouge, every drop of blood drained from her cheeks. Beside her, Vivian's eyes bulged until the crimson veins thre

m the altar st

igned to render noble marrow into alchemical essence-and then locked onto the bronze urn c

n Dragon Speech against the "filthy Earthbound" defiling a sacred extraction rite, but when my dead, unb

as my gravelly voice sliced into every corner of the froz

hing on a heavy silver candelabrum and sending it c

e breaking into a ragged squeak. "A

ate, Concubine Deloris. It has only been a month, and you

is stared in wild terror, but as her fran

ed behind my boots. And onto the red carpet fell thick, warm drops of

allowed whole by decades of lethal court survival. She smoothed her wrinkled s

ard with open arms as if to embrace me. "What a blessing! Had any misfortune truly

dn't move an inch, letting her embrace catch empty air as I locked my icy glare

he hall like a winter blade. "I am back alive

inally snapped Vivian'

knew what she and her daughters had done at the edge of that abyss; to her, there was n

r steps on all fours, her manicured fingers clawing at the stone. "Shadow or not, no mortal survives the Drag

orward. "Guards! Knights! What are you standing there for?! Seize thi