Page 477 - Fourth Wing

one desperate generation to change history—even erase it.

I know you’ll make the right choice when the time comes. You have

always been the best of both your mother and me.

Love,

Dad

My brow furrows, and I pass the letter to Xaden, flipping through the

book. The tales are all familiar, and I can still hear my father’s voice
reading every word, as if I were still a child curled on his lap after a long

day.

“That’s cryptic,” Xaden remarks.
“He got a little…cryptic in the years after Brennan died,” I admit softly.

“Losing my brother made my father even more reclusive. I only really got
to spend time with him because I was always in the Archives, studying to

be a scribe.”

The pages flutter as I flip through stories of an ancient kingdom that
spanned from ocean to ocean and a Great War among three brothers who

fought to control the magic in this mystical land. Some of the fables tell

stories of the first riders who learned to bond with dragons and how those
bonds could turn on the rider if they tried to consume too much power.

Others talk of a great evil that spread across the land as man became

corrupted by dark magic and turned into creatures known as venin who
created flocks of winged creatures called wyvern and scourged the land of

all magic in the thirst for more power. Another talks about the dangers of
wielding power from the ground instead of the skies, as one could easily

start drawing magic from the earth and eventually be driven mad.

One of the purposes of the fables is to teach children about the dangers of
too much power. No one wants to become a venin; they’re the monsters that

hide beneath our beds when we have nightmares. And we certainly never
want to try to control magic without a dragon to ground us. But that’s all