The humans charged to the crumbling lip of the wall, risking their lives to hurl war darts.
Wyrmlings cried in despair, as if to greet the Dark Lady herself in death.
The kezziards clambered forward, crushing wounded and fallen wyrmlings in their path, terrifying in their masks of woven chain. The lizards themselves were the color of fire, with enormous eyes that shone gold. Their tongues snapped and flickered as they scented the battlefield, yet despite the dying all around them, they trudged stupidly on.
Fallion saw dozens of kezziard riders die, iron darts splitting their faces.
Giant graaks neared the city.
Fallion stood, his wings nervously adjusting, preparing for flight.
High up on Mount Luciare, where clouds collided with stone, a pair of Knights Eternal clung to the wall, gripping it with dead fingers and the tiny claws at the joints of their wings.
There at the edge of the coming battle, in the sputtering light of the torches, they spotted the nervous unfolding wings.
The knights looked at each other.
“Fools,” one of them whispered. “They almost beg for death.”
The two winged human warriors hadn’t had time to adapt to a life of flight, and so they squatted along with the rest of their kind. Their attention was riveted on the enemy in front of them, when they should have been scanning the sky above.
With a kick, the Knights Eternal soundlessly broke away from the mountain wall, unfolded their wings, and swooped into a dive.
Like hawks they stooped, wings almost folded, using all of their strength to focus on the wingtips, keeping them rigid against the driving wind, gently tilting, making corrections, as they guided themselves toward their targets.
They gained speed as they fell, and soon were rushing toward ground. With just a tilt of the wingtips, they began to break, and went shooting just feet above the ground.
Thunder drums continued to boom, cracking walls and shattering stone. The wyrmlings wailed and snarled in death as the humans hurled their iron darts, and everywhere men were shouting battle cries. Fallion’s nerves jangled, and for a moment it seemed that all went silent as he tried to block out the sound.
From the castle wall above Fallion, he heard a roar of warning and imagined that from their higher vantage point the lookouts must have spotted some new threat.
Jaz leapt forward, taking aim with his great bow and loosing a black arrow into the throat of a wyrmling kezziard rider. He grabbed a second arrow in a blur, and took aim at a kezziard’s eye.
A war dart came hurtling up from a wyrmling below, and Jaz dodged aside even as he drew a new arrow.
A tall warrior stepped in front of Fallion, blocking his view; quickly Fallion ducked to his left to get a glimpse of the battlefield.
He heard a heavy chunk, crack, chunk.
The warrior that had blocked Fallion’s view suddenly grunted. Fallion glanced at him, and saw that a black dart now sprouted from his back.
The warrior staggered forward a pace and moaned as he toppled over the wall.
That dart barely missed me! Fallion realized. He wondered where it had come from. Obviously, there was an enemy behind him.
At that instant Jaz cried out, falling to his knees.
Fallion heard the muffled flapping of wings, a sound an owl might make as it takes a mouse. A Knight Eternal, he realized.
He ducked. At the same instant something enormous swooped above his head.
Then Fallion spotted a huge black iron war dart protruding from Jaz’s back.
For an instant, time froze. Fallion saw the panic in Rhianna’s eyes, saw her swing her staff wildly as a pair of Knights Eternal blurred above her. But as quickly as they had come, the enemy was gone, winging off into the shadows.
Fallion thought to follow, but knew that it would be too dangerous. He could no longer see them, and their flying skills far outmatched his own.
Jaz knelt on his hands and knees, gasping for breath. He coughed, and gobs of blood spattered to the ground.
He began to laugh just a bit as Fallion drew near.
“What?” Rhianna asked, grabbing for his shoulder, trying to pull him up. Jaz shook his head no, refusing her help.
Jaz looked up at Fallion, smiling broadly, while blood poured freely from his mouth. Tears glistened in his eyes.
“Do you hurt?” Rhianna asked, trying to comfort him.
“The poison…is cold.”
Jaz collapsed, his face banging onto the stone.
“Jaz!” Fallion cried, and reached down to grab him. He listened for Jaz to breathe, but only heard the air escape his brother’s throat.
Rhianna’s face was blank with shock.
All of the roaring, all of the snarl and bass of the thunder drums, all seemed but a small and distant noise. In that instant, Fallion knelt with his brother, utterly alone.
Then Rhianna was on him, trying to pull him back from the wall. “We’ve got to get away! They’re coming!”
Even as she spoke, a great sky serpent flapped overhead, and they were washed in the wind from its wings. Something wet splattered from the sky, and there was a crackling sound as it splashed to the stone walls.
Oil? Fallion wondered. Some vile poison?
But drops of red hit his face, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand. Blood, he realized. Putrid blood, that smelled as if it had been days rotting in a barrel.
The very stench of it made him want to retch, and, oddly, the touch of it began to burn his skin. He heard a hissing sound around him as foul liquid landed on vines and trees and set them steaming.
Death, come to conquer life. It was more than mere blood. There was a spell upon it.
It was an omen.
Suddenly, Fallion felt disoriented. All of the rules of combat he had learned as a child meant nothing here. The wyrmlings fought a different kind of war.
Rhianna grabbed Jaz’s scabbard and bow, then pulled on Fallion’s shoulder, trying to lift him up.
Fallion staggered to his feet, went tottering behind her. He stared back, his eyes on Jaz, hoping that his brother might show some sign of life.
A huge human warrior reached down, grabbed Jaz by the wings, and began trying to lift him.
“He’s dead,” Fallion called back uselessly.
At that instant there was a tearing sound, and Jaz’s wings ripped free. His corpse sloughed away, slapping to the cold stone battlements.
Ah, Fallion realized. He wasn’t helping Jaz, just taking a prize of war.
Rhianna led Fallion away in a daze, racing up the cold stone streets. He couldn’t feel his feet. His body had gone numb. There were shouts everywhere. Giant graaks flapped high over the city while wyrmlings spattered their bloody elixir onto trees and gardens, set the trees and grass sizzling, then found a place to land.
Behind Fallion, there was a shout as kezziards hit the outer wall. Fallion did not understand the war clan’s language, but he knew what they were crying. “Pull back, pull back! The wyrmlings are over the wall.”
Fallion peered back toward Jaz one last time, but could not see him. The human warriors behind Fallion were in full retreat, blocking Fallion’s view, and a kezziard was climbing over the spot where Jaz’s body lay, the wyrmling riders looking fearsome in their thick armor.
In a more perfect world, Fallion thought, my brother is still alive.
He ached to take wing, to fly to the Mouth of the World and dare the tunnels down, seeking out the Seal of the Inferno.
Soon, he promised himself.
But there was a battle to fight first.
A VISION
Every man is a prisoner of his own making. The size of our jail is defined by the limits of our vision.
Time had no meaning in Areth’s cell. Seconds seemed to draw out into hours, hours into centuries. As his unseen Dedicates endured unimaginable tortures, only Areth felt their pain.