Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King

If there was a world record for worst week, Guinevere Lunaris was lapping the competition and the finish line wasn’t even in sight. She had survived lashes, a dungeon heist, an eight-hundred-mile run, and a blade at her throat. This should have been nothing.

It wasn’t nothing.

A guard was storming towards her wearing glow-in-the-dark armor and yelling at her when all she was trying to do was escape her abduction.

”Stop right there!”

Part of her wanted to stop because she was a rule follower at heart. The rational part of her said move, ho, and her legs agreed. She shot around the corner out of view and cleared the railing downward before he came around.

The sound of his boots thundered above, missing her completely.

She waited.

Her heartbeat was so loud she was convinced it would give her away before the light did. Every inhale was too fast, too shallow, pulling air that wasn’t reaching her lungs. She was running on adrenaline fumes and the fumes were thinning.

WHOOOM.

The entire large plaza lit bright white under her boots and every fountain doubled in height. Like it was trying to announce to the guards that she was there.

She looked down at her own body and hated what she saw. Glowing bright. Runes carving onto her skin in real-time. A walking signal fire in a city full of guards.

She couldn’t turn it off.

Please don’t. I am trying to hide, she thought to it.

Wrong thing to say. That made it worse. It got brighter with every heartbeat, feeding off her fear like fuel, and the irony was so vicious it almost made her laugh. Her own light was hunting her.

Then she felt it. A giant tree at the edge of the plaza wanted her to go to it. She didn’t know how she knew, only that she did. Every instinct in her body was splitting in two. The rational side was screaming to keep running, find stairs, find a gate, find anything that looked like an exit.

The other side, the deeper side, the one connected to the light and the warmth and whatever was pulsing inside her chest, was pulling her towards that tree with a gravity she couldn’t explain and couldn’t resist. She was being torn between her brain and whatever lived underneath it.

”Stop!” another guard yelled.

She didn’t.

More yells followed.

She couldn’t hear the words. Couldn’t process them. The world had narrowed to the sound of her own breathing, the slap of her boots on stone, and the hammering in her chest that felt less like a heartbeat and more like a countdown.

All she knew was she was running as fast as she could away from them and everything kept lighting up and giving away her location. She was trying to disappear in a city that wouldn’t let her be invisible, and the harder she ran the brighter it got, like the whole kingdom was conspiring against her.

The panic bubbling in her chest was at an all-time high and steering the ship.

She vaulted the railing, dropped two stories, hit the next terrace rolling, and was running again before the stone finished lighting up under her.

THWACK.

Her foot caught the lip of a step she hadn’t seen and she hit the stone face-first, sliding two feet before she could stop herself.

Footsteps closed in as she pushed herself up.

”You! On your knees! Hands where I can see them!” a guard commanded.

For a split second, she was immobilized because her attention had narrowed to the glowing blade in his hand. More appeared behind the guard, weapons drawn.

Every survival instinct she had fired at once. Her legs moved on their own, sprinting away from them.

The tears she’d been killing since the bedroom were winning, leaking down her face in hot, angry streaks she didn’t have the hands to wipe. Her throat was raw from breathing too hard. Her calves were burning.

A sob broke out of her chest mid-stride, high and fractured and involuntary. She swallowed the next one so hard her breath sounded like a wheeze. She couldn’t cry and run at the same time. She couldn’t cry and think at the same time. She couldn’t cry and survive at the same time, and surviving was the only thing on the list tonight.

She jumped the railing without looking. That was the mistake. There was no garden below this one, just clouds.

The scream came this time.

The city blurred upward, white stone and golden light streaking past her vision, and her stomach launched into her throat.

She could hear guards’ shouts from above.

Her heart was thudding in her ears. The giant tree that wanted her to go to it was larger than she realized, spanning multiple stories and glowing from within. The branches spread wide and held entire terraces the way a hand holds water.

For a moment all she could do was look at it. The fact she was falling was less important.

Then she passed through a layer of clouds and it was gone, replaced by floating islands linked by light threads, and reality set in.

She was fucking falling.

Beautiful. All of it was beautiful. And she was going to die in it. Her vision tunneled, her lungs locked, and her fingers spread, grasping at air that had nothing to offer.

The wind was ripping the tears off her face before they could fall. Her body had stopped fighting, a combination of surrender and exhaustion.

All of it was too much. She had spent every drop of fight she had getting out of that bed, down those terraces, past those guards, and she had nothing left for gravity.

She shut her eyes just as Kael’s voice cut in her mind.

Guinevere? What is happening? What’s wrong?

She was losing her mind and didn’t have it in her to tell imaginary Kael that she was having a full-blown panic attack. Or maybe it was the real Kael. She wasn’t sure.