Onyx Storm Summary & ending explained

The shadow wielder wants you kept safe, Tairn grumbles down the bond. He should start by keeping you safe from himself.

I don't answer. He isn't wrong.

Basgiath nearly fell. My mother died in that battle, pouring her life into the wardstone so the wards would hold. And somewhere in the middle of it, Xaden Riorson pulled his power straight out of the earth, the way only dark wielders do, to keep me alive.

His eyes haven't gone red. He hasn't channeled since. But I know what he is now, and so does he: a venin initiate. The thing we've been training our whole lives to kill.

Only a handful of us know, Imogen, Garrick and Bodhi among them. And Jack Barlowe, who sits in a cell under the college and smiles every time someone mentions Xaden's name.

The bond between Xaden and me, the one that used to hum like a second heartbeat, has gone cold as polished stone. He keeps it shut. He doesn't trust what might come through.

"I'm fine," he tells me, every morning. Every morning, he's lying.

So I keep busy. I visit Sawyer, who stares at the place his leg used to be and asks if a rider without a leg is still a rider. I read my mother's journals by lamplight. And I make plans I don't tell Xaden about.

Because Andarna is different now. Grown. Her scales shimmer and shift in the light, and she remembers something the rest of the Continent has forgotten: there's a seventh breed of dragon. Her breed. If anyone knows how to save a man who's started to turn, it's them.

Then a scribe walks into the corridor ahead of me, hood low, ink on his fingers, and his eyes are rimmed in red.

Behind me, a second one. Behind him, a third.

They're inside the walls.

I've got two daggers drawn when the corridor goes black, and shadows rip the three of them off their feet. When the light comes back, they're dead on the stone, and Xaden is standing over them, breathing hard.

"I felt them," he says quietly. "Calling to me."

He looks at me, and for one heartbeat I don't recognize him.

"Don't trust me, Violence. Not anymore."