Arcanjo’s wings carved through the smoke like blades through silk. Each beat drove them deeper into the black wall that had swallowed Mosiah whole. Leelinor’s legs gripped the pegasus’s flanks, his thighs locked tight, his body moving as one with the mount beneath him. The heat was immediate and brutal, a furnace that turned each breath into fire in his lungs. Sweat evaporated from his skin before it could form droplets. His white hair, long and loose, whipped behind him like a banner, the ends already singed.

  He wore light armor chest plate, pauldrons, greaves over his boots. The vital points covered, nothing more. Heavy plate would slow him down, and Leelinor had learned centuries ago that speed was survival. The SunStone blade rested in his right hand, its translucent surface catching what little light pierced the smoke, casting faint, ghostly reflections across his face.

  Below, the screams rose and fell in waves. This was chaos. Wet. Ragged. The sound of families dying. Children burning. Elders crushed beneath collapsing beams.

  Leelinor’s jaw tightened. His green eyes, sharp as cut glass, scanned the smoke ahead. Visibility was less than twenty feet. The world had become a swirling nightmare of gray and black, punctuated by flashes of orange where fire broke through.

  Then he saw it.

  A shape. Massive. Moving through the smoke like a leviathan through deep water. Wings the size of sails displaced the ash in rolling waves. Scales the color of tarnished brass gleamed dully in the firelight, each one large as a dinner plate, overlapping in perfect, terrible symmetry. The dragon was enormous larger than the one he’d killed in the valley, larger than the beast at Zao that his father had brought down decades ago.

  Blue light gathered in its throat, pulsing brighter with each breath. The collar around its neck flared with sapphire runes, biting deep into scales and flesh, forcing obedience through pain.

  Leelinor’s grip tightened on the SunStone blade. “There.”

  Arcanjo didn’t need further instruction. The pegasus angled upward, wings beating faster, climbing toward the dragon’s underbelly. Leelinor leaned forward, his body flat against Arcanjo’s neck, reducing drag, becoming one with the mount.

  The dragon turned. Its molten gold eyes, each the size of a shield, locked onto them. The pupils narrowed to slits.

  Its jaws opened.

  Blue fire erupted a torrent. The flames didn’t burn red or orange. They burned cold and white-hot simultaneously, a contradiction that defied nature. The air itself screamed as superheated wind tore through the smoke.

  “Left!” Leelinor shouted.

  Arcanjo banked hard. His wings folded tight against his body, and they dropped twenty feet in a single heartbeat. The fire passed overhead, so close that Leelinor felt his hair crisp and curl. The heat blistered the back of his neck. The smell of burning hair filled his nose.

  They leveled out. Leelinor’s eyes tracked the dragon’s movement. It circled, wings beating in slow, deliberate strokes, conserving energy. It wasn’t panicked. It wasn’t wild. It was hunting.

  “Up,” Leelinor murmured. “Get me above it.”

  Arcanjo climbed. The smoke thinned slightly at higher altitude, and for a moment, Leelinor could see the full scope of the destruction below. Mosiah was gone. Streets melted into rivers of molten stone. Buildings reduced to skeletal frames that glowed like coals. Bodies everywhere, some still moving, most not.

  And then he saw the second dragon. Olive green, sleeker, faster. It dove toward something near the center of the village—a black shape tumbling through the air.

  Leelinor’s heart stopped.

  Lua.

  The raven’s wings flailed, broken. She spun, plummeting toward the cobbles. And falling beside her, ripped from her back by the force of the dragon’s strike—

  Leeonir.

  His son hit the ground hard. Even from this distance, Leelinor saw the impact, saw the way his body rolled through the debris, limbs loose, uncontrolled.

  “Leeonir!” The word tore from Leelinor’s throat, raw and desperate.

  Arcanjo started to bank toward him. Leelinor’s instinct screamed to dive, to reach his son, to—

  The yellow dragon’s shadow fell over them.

  Leelinor looked up. Too late.

  The tail came like a whip, a solid mass of muscle and bone and scale moving faster than anything that size had a right to move. It struck Arcanjo’s left side. The impact was a thunderclap. Ribs cracked Leelinor felt them go, three sharp pops that sent white fire through his chest. Arcanjo screamed, a sound of pure agony, and they were thrown sideways through the air.

  Leelinor held on. His legs locked around Arcanjo’s body. His free hand tangled in the pegasus’s mane. The world spun sky, smoke, ground, fire blurring into a nauseating kaleidoscope.

  They tumbled. Arcanjo’s wings flailed, trying to catch air, but the momentum was too great. The ground rushed up.

  They hit.

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  Arcanjo landed first, his body absorbing the brunt of the impact. His legs buckled. His wings crumpled. Leelinor was thrown clear, his grip finally breaking. He hit the cobbles and rolled, armor scraping against stone, the sound like nails on slate. He tumbled through ash and debris, his body slamming into the remains of a collapsed wall.

  He stopped. Gasped. Pain exploded through his ribs. Each breath was a knife. He pushed himself up on his elbows, spitting blood. His mouth tasted of copper and ash.

  Around him, the village screamed. A woman stumbled past, her clothes on fire, her hair a shroud of flame. She fell ten feet away and stopped moving. An ogre one of the modified dragged an elf from the rubble by his hair, lifted him, and snapped his spine over one knee with a wet crack before tossing the body aside like refuse.

  Leelinor’s vision swam. For a moment, he wasn’t in Mosiah. He was in the valley. Claamvor was burning. Hiiuf was dying. The dragon’s roar echoed in his ears, overlapping with the present, past and present bleeding together until he couldn’t tell which screams belonged to which massacre.

  *Not again.*

  His hands clenched into fists. Blood ran from his split knuckles.

  *I can’t fail again.*

  He forced himself to his knees. His ribs screamed in protest. He ignored them. Pain was information. Information could be ignored.

  He scanned the square. Fifty feet away, Arcanjo lay in a heap, his white coat streaked with blood and soot. His wings twitched but didn’t lift. Alive. Hurt, but alive.

  And beyond him, through the haze—

  Leeonir.

  His son stood in the center of the carnage. His scaled left hand was buried inside an ogre’s chest, arm plunged to the elbow, blood running down to his shoulder in thick rivulets. As Leelinor watched, Leeonir’s clawed fingers squeezed one final time. The ogre’s body convulsed. Leeonir ripped his arm free with a wet, tearing sound. A spray of dark blood painted his face. The ogre collapsed backward, hitting the ground like a felled tree.

  Leeonir stood there for a moment, gasping, his chest rising and falling in ragged beats. Then he bent down, his movements slow, deliberate. His right hand closed around the hilt of the Sword of Ecos lying in the ash beside the corpse. He straightened, the blade gleaming faintly in the firelight, and looked up.

  Their eyes met across the smoke and ruin.

  “Leeonir!” Leelinor’s voice tore from his throat. He started forward, his legs moving before his mind could catch up. “Leeonir!”

  His son’s mouth opened, forming words that were lost in the roar of flames.

  An ogre stepped into Leelinor’s path. Massive. Runes glowing across its chest. It raised a serrated blade, teeth bared in a feral grin.

  Leelinor didn’t slow. The SunStone blade came up in a single, fluid motion. He drove it forward with every ounce of strength in his body, punching through the ogre’s sternum, through ribs, through muscle. The translucent steel disappeared into the beast’s chest until Leelinor’s knuckles pressed against hot, slick flesh. He felt the heart spasm around the blade. Felt it stop.

  The ogre’s eyes went wide. Its mouth opened in a soundless gasp. Leelinor twisted the blade and ripped it free. The ogre collapsed in a heap at his feet, hitting the cobbles with a heavy, final thud.

  Leelinor stepped over the body without looking down. His eyes locked onto his son. “Leeonir! To me!”

  Leeonir took a step forward. His scaled hand still glowed faintly, pulsing with that internal amber fire. His mismatched eyes one green, one blue found his father’s face through the smoke.

  He opened his mouth to answer.

  The sky split open.

  The yellow dragon descended like the wrath of god. Its wings folded tight against its body, and it plummeted toward them in a controlled dive. Its jaws opened. Blue light erupted from its throat a cataract of liquid fire that poured down in a vertical torrent fifty feet wide.

  The flames struck the ground between them.

  Leelinor threw his arm up instinctively, shielding his face. The heat slammed into him like a physical blow, stealing the air from his lungs. The fire roared past, a curtain of blue and white that turned the world into a furnace. He felt his skin blister, felt the edges of his armor begin to glow red-hot.

  Screams rose from the inferno. A child no more than eight ran out of the flames, her entire body on fire. She took three steps before collapsing, her small frame curling in on itself. A soldier in Mosiah’s colors staggered through the wall of fire, his armor melting into his skin, his face a ruin of blackened flesh. He fell to his knees and didn’t rise.

  The fire cut off as abruptly as it had begun. The dragon’s wings beat once, twice, lifting it back into the smoke-filled sky.

  Leelinor lowered his arm. Smoke curled from his sleeve. The skin beneath was red, blistering. He ignored it. His eyes swept the square frantically.

  The space where Leeonir had been standing was gone. Buried beneath rubble. Hidden by smoke. A crater of molten stone and ash where the dragon’s fire had struck.

  “Leeonir!” Leelinor’s voice cracked. He took a step forward, then another, his boots crunching over superheated stone. “Leeonir! Answer me!”

  Nothing. Only the crackle of flames and the distant screams of the dying.

  “Leeonir!” He turned in a circle, his chest tightening, his breath coming in short, desperate gasps. The smoke was too thick. The destruction too complete. “Where are you?! Leeonir!”

  His hands shook. The SunStone blade trembled in his grip. For the first time in centuries, Leelinor felt something he had almost forgotten helplessness.

  *I lost him. I lost my son.*

  The thought hit like a blade to the chest.

  Then he heard it. Hoofbeats. The heavy, rhythmic thud of weight on stone.

  Arcanjo emerged from the smoke, limping but alive. His white coat was streaked with blood and soot, his left wing dragging slightly. But his eyes were clear. Steady. The pegasus stopped ten feet away and lowered his head, his breath coming in heavy, labored snorts.

  Leelinor stared at him. Then at the sky. The yellow dragon circled overhead, wings beating slowly, methodically. Its throat glowed again, blue light gathering for another strike.

  Leeonir would want him to finish this. His son wherever he was, alive or dead want the dragon dead. Would want the village avenged. Would want his father to *fight*.

  Leelinor’s jaw clenched. His hands stopped shaking. The fear didn’t leave. He simply buried it. Locked it down. Became stone.

  “You’re right,” he whispered to the absent boy. To the memory of Claamvor. To the ghosts that followed him. “I finish this.”

  He crossed to Arcanjo in three strides. His hand found the pegasus’s mane, his fingers tangling in the coarse hair. He pulled himself onto the mount’s back, ignoring the protest of his broken ribs, the burn of blistered skin. Pain was irrelevant.

  “One more time. Just one more.”

  Arcanjo’s wings spread. They were torn, bloodied, barely functional. But they beat. Once. Twice. The pegasus launched into the air, climbing through the smoke with agonizing slowness.

  The yellow dragon turned its massive head. Its molten gold eyes locked onto them. Recognition flickered in those inhuman depths. It knew what was coming.

  Leelinor leaned forward, his body flat against Arcanjo’s neck. The SunStone blade rested across the pegasus’s mane, ready. His father’s voice echoed in his mind, a memory from decades past:

  *“A dragon is just a beast with wings. Find the weakness. Exploit it. Kill it.”*

  Leelinor’s lips pulled back from his teeth. Not a smile. Not a snarl. Something colder. Something final.

  “Let’s see if you bleed.”

  And he drove Arcanjo straight toward the sun, toward the dragon that hung in the sky like a god waiting to be killed, toward the end of everything or the beginning of revenge.

  The world narrowed to three things: the pegasus beneath him, the blade in his hand, and the monster ahead. Nothing else mattered.