But Lithava and I are being separated, dragged apart as our dragons. We continue to roar and blast magical drives at each other, but those who have come for us are strong, despite how vastly depleted I feel they are right now.
We’re all almost done, thanks to how badly the evil down here has eaten us during my sister’s and my fight. But as someone finally gets a powerful bite on my neck, a massive gold and red drake, another drake roars through jaws clamped around some brightly glowing object.
As that drake thrusts his bright object at the evil taint careening all around us, the leviathan ooze shrieks back. It’s the only thing that saves us, as my own faculties suddenly come crashing back.
I realize Bjorn, Ström, Mikkel, Lærke, and Baldur have come—to save me from myself. Though all of them boil with crimson-black curses scalding all through their flesh, their dragon-colors gone disastrously dark from my own infectious Black Dragon ripping into them via our Bloodbonds and pushing them to go black, too, they’re able to weather the storm.
I feel how Bjorn’s masterful yoking of my drakes’ powers, and his blazing, righteous heart, keeps them all from being swamped by the leviathan darkness devouring me in my kin-fight with my sister.
Bjorn has tethered all my drakes together, fighting this darkness as one, as Baldur wields the Soulstone, amplifying its might with his power to push the darkness back.
Ström works his mind-powers in a tirade, bound tight with Mikkel’s and even Lærke’s mind-abilities, though she’s not in our Bloodbond, to paralyze the Black Dragon enough so we all don’t get squashed as it flails and thrashes inside the cave.
Lithava’s drakes are no less, as they contain her from getting to me. They try to keep their group from being smashed by the Black Dragonand seared by its terrible ropes of darkness, blistering through the cavern anew.
But they don’t have the Soulstone, and I feel no matching brightness inside their group like I have with Baldur, Bjorn, Ström, and Mikkel, even Lærke. They can’t push back this leviathan taint like we can; though both groups snarl at each other now, Bjorn with a massive hateful roar at his father, Oggi Magnussen, who has finally arrived on the scene, and Mikkel and Lærke with matching hatred for their foster-father, Emil Beck, who is here also, we have bigger problems right now.
My drakes and I can hold off the gargantuan darkness of the Black Rift with whatever light remains in us. Lithava and her drakes can’t, however, as I see them get overtaken by the Rift’s black tentacles now, issuing out in a tirade from the ruby crystals.
They’re being devoured; I can’t get them out. Though some part of me screams to see my sister become overrun by that terrible darkness now, I can’t get to her, can’t free her.
Because I don’t have enough energy left, as I feel a deep fatigue shudder all through me now, like I once felt during our battle at the Jarl of Copenhagen’s palace. I feel it in my drakes, too; we’re all going to die, right here and now, if we can’t get out of this place fast.
Because the evil taint of the Black Rift is still trying to devour us, too. As Baldur roars again, pushing his cosmic brightness to the max and whipping around in a circle to drive the evil darkness back with the searing-white Soulstone in his jaws, I know we’re out of time.
The Black Dragon is insane, bashing its head against the walls and columns over and over as the Black Rift’s leviathan taint ravages it. Lithava and her drakes have disappeared, overrun by the Rift’s evil in its terrible nest of darkness inside the ruby cavern.
We’re all that’s left, as I feel Bjorn give a masterful heave of his magics now. Roaring as if his soul might just tear right apart, he hauls all of our bound power into one hand with a hard clench of his talonedfist—then slams his palm out, thrusting all that power into the empty space before us.
A new portal rips open in the ruby cavern, right before our snouts. With one vast mind-heave from Mikkel, Lærke, and Ström, all of us are shoved through, as the portal closes with a snap.
The leviathan darkness of the Rift, the Black Dragon, and Lithava and her drakes, gone behind it.
5
DREAM
Awareness does not return to me for a long while, as I sit upon a high turret somewhere, overlooking an ancient city. Seabirds call as the ocean crashes upon cliffs; the breeze stirs my unbound locks, freshened with salt spray. The chill of the air and the scent of detritus tell me autumn has nearly come. Summer is over; the long days are failing. And with it, I feel cold as I shudder in the brisk high-north wind.
A sense of doom taking me.
Someone cuddles close, however, and I’m grateful for it. With a warm, brawny body, he holds me in his lap; as I’m rocked in his arms, we sway like the everlasting sea.
Someone else cuddles close at my right, kissing my cheek as he holds my hand, stroking it with his thumb. He sings sometimes, a tune that is both sweet and sad; I listen, bereaved by it.
Someone else sits on my left. He doesn’t cuddle me, only holds my left hand. I feel a steady goodness pour into me, fortifying me, as a blaze like ancient suns fills me.
The last someone sits in front of me, with another presencebehind him to support him. He does not touch me, only stares into my eyes as I drift so far away in my emptiness.Come back, Rikyava… come back, I hear him repeat, as he pours his mind-magic deep inside me through his beautiful dark eyes, searing with vivid copper light.
Calling me to come and be theirs again.
I’m having trouble coming back, though, because I don’t know where I’ve gone in my empty silence. I only feel the high morning all around, then sometime later it changes to midday. Sometime later, it’s twilight. It’s only as the first stars pop out in the sky’s depths, the twilight luminous with its blue-white nimbus, that I finally blink.
Then cry.
I don’t know how long I cry. It’s a long time, as all my drakes cuddle close and hold me. I feel someone lift me, then; Bjorn, hefting me into his brawny arms. I smell dragon-scents and clean hay, and soft goose down as we lay down in a dragon-nest, and my drakes cuddle around me. I even feel Lærke, sitting like a sentinel nearby, as I wear myself out, then drift into sleep.
I have dreams as I sleep. Dreams of battle, dreams of bloodshed—they’re dreams of kin fighting kin down through the ages, in Blood Dragon battles all throughout time.
