The Crown of Gilded Bones (Blood and..

full of intelligence, it awed me. It tilted its head. A soft,
whirring trill came from its throat, and I had no idea what
that meant, but it had to be better than the snarling. A thin
membrane fluttered across its eyes, and then its gaze
shifted past me—past where Casteel and the others stood—
to the Temple.
A wave of awareness shivered through me, raising the
tiny hairs all over my body. Pressure pushed against the
nape of my neck, boring into the center of my back. I turned
around without really having made a conscious decision to
do so. Casteel did the same. I didn’t know if any of the
others followed because all I could now see was the man
standing on the Temple steps between two pillars.
He was tall—taller than even Casteel. Mid-length brown
hair fell to his shoulders, glinting a coppery red in the
sunlight. The dusky wheatish skin of his features was all
planes and angles, pieced together with the same beautiful
mastery as the stone shell that had encased the draken. He
would’ve been the most beautiful being I’d ever seen if it
weren’t for the infinite coldness of his features and his
luminous eyes the color of the brightest moon. I knew who
he was even though his face had never been painted or
carved.
It was Nyktos.