We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from This Ends in Embers, the sequel to Kamilah Cole’s young adult fantasy So Let Them Burn—out from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers on February 4th. Beware: There are minor spoilers in this excerpt.
Faron Vincent was once the saint of San Irie. Now, she’s done the unthinkable: betrayed her country. Alone, disgraced, and kidnapped, Faron is forced to help Iya grow his bloody empire. With her soul bonded to a ruthless killer, Faron has become an enemy to her people… and she fears they might be right.
Elara Vincent—the new Empyrean—must undo the damage her sister has caused. San Irie has been brought back to the brink of war as Iya proclaims no nation will be safe from his brutal invasion. But how can Elara save her sister, her best friend, her country, and her world when she’s already cracking under the pressure?
Despite her agitation, Elara dozed on and off, drifting from stress dream to stress dream. She saw faceless people vandalizing her house again—this time going a step further and shattering windows—as Signey stood by and watched with an inscrutable expression. She saw Faron with her eyes glowing the same mold green as Lightbringer’s, her sister lost to the Fury and attacking her own allies. She saw Reeve caged and begging for help, pleading with Elara to save him the way he had saved her, even as the iron bars grew smaller and smaller around him…
Worse than the metaphors were the memories that her tired mind latched on to. Once, she had asked Reeve if it had ever bothered him, being the only member of his family who wasn’t a Rider. His mother and father were co-Riders to their carmine, Irontooth, and Reeve had spent most of his childhood bedridden with illness after illness, his immune system so weak, it was almost as if he didn’t have one. For that reason, his parents had never taken him to the Beacon Dragon Preserve, where eggs were laid in an area called the Nest and hatched into colorless dragons waiting for Riders to bond with. Considering the Warwicks were one of the four dragonriding dynasties of Langley—alongside the Sotos, the Hylands, and the Lynwoods—Elara had wondered how that made Reeve feel, long before she’d ever learned half that information.
Reeve had considered the question as thoughtfully as Reeve considered everything, his finger acting as a bookmark in what he was reading at the time: a biography of the first Renard queen. Then he’d said, “Not as much as other things. My parents loved me—or seemed to—but I always got the impression that Irontooth thought I was weak. He protected me, but he scared me, too. And I didn’t even know what he was doing to San Irie. I just thought a creature that powerful shouldn’t be trusted in the hands of people so… small.”
From his tone of voice, it had been clear that he hadn’t just meant in size. Her book of choice, which she could no longer remember the subject of, had been face down on the table. They’d been at the Hanlon house, with Reeve’s foster parents in the kitchen making stew chicken. The window had been open to provide some relief from the late-spring heat, and the wind had been steadily growing cooler as the sun finally began to go down.
That hot-spice smell of stew filling the house. That rhythmic chop-chop-chop of vegetables being diced. That comforting warmth of Reeve’s foot pressing against hers beneath the table. It was those little things that made her heart seize now that he was gone.
“Isn’t that blasphemous of you?” Elara had asked, amused. “You said Riders are worshipped as saints.”
Reeve had glanced off to the side, out the window, his eyes slightly narrowed. “I never said that was a good thing. Being worshipped.”
Elara jolted awake, just in time to find them plunging through the air.
“We’re still a mile out from shore, and we’ve already been spotted by a perimeter guard,” Signey said, snapping Elara into the present. “Ignatz, to be specific.”
“We’re not supposed to engage,” said Elara, her mind still struggling into wakefulness.
“Oh, we’re engaged. Hold on tight.”
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Elara barely had time to make sure her straps were secure before Zephyra shot upward. She closed her eyes against the sunlight that Zephyra was using for cover, and, behind them, she could hear the echoing roar of Ignatz. If she remembered correctly, Ignatz was an ultramarine dragon, deep blue in color, larger than Zephyra in size, and the strongest swimmer of all the breeds. Hopefully, they wouldn’t need to put that to the test.
Wind sliced Elara’s skin. Cloud water slicked her face. Her heart beat so fast, it sounded like static. She didn’t want to think of how high up they were, how quickly she would slip if Zephyra had to roll away from an attack. Instead, she forced herself to remember that she was in the best hands. Signey was one of the top soldiers in Langley. She and Zephyra had bonded half a decade ago, and Signey had been strong enough to bear the dragon bond alone until they’d found a Wingleader in Elara. Together, Signey and Zephyra moved like droplets in a river, harmoniously indistinguishable from each other. Defensive maneuvering was as easy as breathing for them.
Especially when they had Elara to help with the offensive.
She took a deep breath of knife-edged air and called upon the gods. The sky fell away, replaced by the vastness of the divine plane, and then Irie, ruler of the daytime and patron goddess of San Irie, appeared to answer her summons. Instead of floating before her in a forest fire, the world returned in golden color as the sun goddess glided alongside them, easily keeping pace with Zephyra. Her snow-white robes flapped around her dark brown skin, and her pupilless eyes glowered amber beneath her crown. The embroidery on her robe was a gold that matched her lipstick, both shimmering in the light.
Please, Elara gasped. Please, help us.
Irie’s expression was shrewd. Do you see, now, why this world needs to be rid of dragons?
Please!
Ah, of course. There is some urgency, isn’t there?
PLEASE!
Elara reached out and Irie merged with her, the majestic force of Irie’s soul briefly making her feel like a balloon close to popping. Despite the chill this high in the sky, she began sweating, her clothes clinging to her overheated body. Fire raced up her spine, and for a moment she thought that Ignatz had caught up with them, before she realized that it was just Irie’s power settling within her. Irie, she had learned, had magic that eclipsed that of both Mala and Obie, the kind of raw power that leveled cities and created worlds. What she loaned to Elara was just a trickle of something that was vast enough to corrode Elara’s weak human flesh from the inside—and that energy was exactly what she needed right now.
Though she’d have to talk with the gods about the effort it had taken to get it.
“Going down,” Signey said as Elara focused on the world around her.
Zephyra dived again, narrowly avoiding a burst of fire. She dropped so precipitously that Elara partially lifted from the saddle, the straps straining to keep her from falling. But Elara’s heart was no longer racing. Irie’s calm confidence had become her own.
She twisted around just far enough to stick her hand out toward Ignatz. Light erupted from her palm, illuminating the morning with a destructive beam that seared one of Ignatz’s horns. The dragon roared in pain and swerved away from them to regroup. His next attack came from the front, but Elara saw it coming and leaned around Signey to shoot two blasts of light at the gigantic blue target. Ignatz puffed a cloud of fire in their direction, which collided with the light beams and exploded in a blinding flash.
Zephyra was low enough that she had to pull up to avoid skimming the top of a mountain range; Elara’s mental map identified it as the one that cut through the Emerald Highlands in the south of Langley. They had passed the Hestan Archipelago entirely, and, even if they turned back, they had thoroughly lost any chance at stealth. Iya would either send his other dragons after them or take Zephyra out of the equation with the Fury. That left them with only two options: fight or flight.
Die or run.
“We’re made,” she said to Signey, settling properly into the saddle. “We have to turn back.”
“I can still drop you off—”
“They’ll expect something like that now. And there’s a dragon on top of us!”
Signey didn’t argue further. Seconds later, Zephyra was ascending into the clouds and racing back the way they had come. The gap between them and Ignatz widened until they were blissfully alone in the sky, too far from the Hestan Archipelago for Ignatz to still consider them a threat. Then and only then did Elara expel Irie from her body, allowing the exhaustion of summoning to settle into a full-body ache. Her eyes fluttered closed, from both fatigue and shame.
Another failure to add to the pile.
“It’s another four hours from here to Beacon,” Signey whispered. “Jesper and Torrey would love to see you, and we could use the time to regroup.”
“Okay.”
Signey let the silence envelop them, and it was broken only by the rhythmic flap of Zephyra’s wings. With no one but the stars to see her, Elara let the tears fall, wondering if she would ever feel like the Maiden Empyrean or if she was just going to keep failing massively and publicly until the gods realized they’d made another mistake. She wished she could talk to Faron about how she dealt with this unceasing pressure, this weight on her chest, this unrelenting dread that she was failing the world. Granted, it was an emotion that Elara was familiar with from being an older sibling, but it was heavier now that she had more than her parents’ expectations to meet.
Reeve had been right. Being worshipped was hardly a good thing, and a pedestal was nothing but a clifftop to fall from.
Elara reached down until her fingers were touching Zephyra’s hard scales, wishing she could hear the dragon’s kind voice in her head, could lean upon the strength of Zephyra’s soul to keep herself from shattering. Then Signey gasped, and Elara thought for a wild moment that she had somehow succeeded in renewing their bond just by wanting it badly enough.
Her hopes were dashed seconds later when Signey said, “It’s Iya. He’s—he’s speaking to us. To all the dragons. We can hear him, feel him, in our heads.”
“What? What’s he saying?”
Signey listened, her curls rippling in the wind. Elara didn’t need to see the expression on her girlfriend’s face, because she could picture it perfectly: the clenched jaw and glazed eyes and thunderous furrow of her forehead. Things were weird between them, and Elara couldn’t read Signey as well as Signey could read her, but she had seen that expression often enough in the last few months to draw it from memory.
When Signey spoke again, it was with barely concealed wrath. “He’s calling for all dragons and Riders to join his faction. If we do, we’ll be safe from his conquest. If we don’t”—and here her voice shook, though Elara couldn’t tell if it was from anger or fear— “he’ll sever our bonds and just take our dragons for himself.”
Excerpted from This Ends in Embers, copyright © 2025 by Kamilah Cole.
