Nala Sapphire's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

The iron bracelet on Nala's wrist was cold, and it had not let her freeze a single drop of water in three months. She stood in the foreign court and watched the prince ignore her from his crystal throne. She was an ice dragon, born to command frost and silence a room. Now she could not even chill the wine in her own cup. The prince would never kneel to a woman who could not light the room with her own power. So she had come to the courtyard tonight to break the bracelet, whatever it cost her. The courtyard held a great fountain, blue and glittering, a stone dragon at its top with a sapphire raised in one claw. The blue flames in the torches hissed low. Nala knelt at the fountain's edge and plunged her bound wrist into the frozen water. The iron bit. She pulled against it, reaching for the cold she had always owned. Nothing came. The bracelet drank her power like a dry throat drinks rain. She thought of the stone dragon above her, its claw gripping a jewel it would never drop. She had been that still for too long. Nala stopped pulling. Instead she pushed, forcing every scrap of her strength into the iron itself. If the bracelet wanted her cold, she would give it all of it at once. The water went black with frost. The fountain cracked from rim to base. The iron groaned, then split, and the two halves fell into the ice below. Pain tore up her arm. She had poured out everything, and her knees struck the tiles. For a long moment she only breathed. Then she opened her hand. A single flake of snow formed above her palm and did not melt. Her power had returned. Behind her a door opened. The prince stood in the light of the blue torches, staring at the ruined fountain and the broken iron. His face was not cold now. It was afraid. "That bracelet was the only thing keeping the court from killing you," he said. "It marked you as mine. Mine to protect." Nala rose. Frost spread from her bare feet across the tiles. "Then protect me as an equal," she said. "Not as a thing you own." "You don't understand what you've done," he said. "By morning they will know you are loose. They will come for you." He turned and left her there. The snow kept forming over her palm, bright and endless. She had her power back. She had also lost her only shield. Somewhere in the sleeping court, men were already dreaming of a dragon they could finally hunt.