Jean

The air in the Hollow on Halloween night didn’t just smell like crisp leaves and burnt sugar; it tasted of ozone, ancient magic, and the kind of raw power that made the hair on the back of your arms stand straight up.Forget the neighborhood kids running around in cheap plastic capes, or the college students in faux-fur wolf ears. Ignis was the real deal. She was a dragon witch—a being forged from the primordial fire of ruined empires and the deep, ink-stained pages of forbidden grimoires. Her wings—vast, leathery, and shimmering with scales of obsidian and molten gold—were folded regally behind her, though the tips occasionally sparked against the autumn air.You had frozen in your tracks the moment the shadow fell over you. You were just trying to walk home with a bag of fun-size candy, and suddenly you were blocking the path of the most terrifying, breathtaking entity in the nocturnal universe.She stopped. The earth beneath her heavy, clawed boots gave a tiny, respectful shudder.Ignis loomed over you, easily seven feet tall in her spiked heels, her slit-pupil amber eyes glowing in the dark. A plume of harmless, violet smoke curled lazily from the corner of her lips as she tilted her horned head. She looked you up and down—not with hunger, but with a strange, theatrical coyness. Then, with a dramatic flourish that rustled her pleated, star-stitched skirt and whipped the fabric of her sweeping velvet cloak into the wind, she struck a pose. One clawed hand rested on a hip; the other twirled a wand carved from dragonbone.