Page 71 of The Truth

Aeson let the words repeat in his mind. He opened his eyes and did not shy away from the darkness that consumed the city. The traitors may have brought Ilnaen to its knees, but he would make them pay in blood for every stone that fell and every life they stole.

Below, Lyara spotted a smaller dragon who smelled of berries and burning wood, scales coloured like winter leaves. Two larger dragons chased her across the city top. Both smelled of death and blood, their hearts radiating hunger.

“Uthikar.”

Together.

Lyara folded her wings and plummeted, pressure building within her. She unfurled her wings at the last moment, shifting left and sweeping towards the two traitors. At the last moment, she extended her legs and smashed into the closest of the two, her talons sinking into bright green scales. The dragon shrieked, but Lyara smashed the creature into the white stone of the blazing buildings as they flew, scales and blood bursting into the air. Aeson watched as the Draleid’s head crashed into a length of shattered steel, helmet collapsing inwards. As the dragon shrieked, Lyara let it go, and it went straight through a wall, vanishing in flames and smoke.

In the same motion, Lyara angled herself and swept down and around so that Aeson hung inverted in the air above the second traitor for just a moment before Lyara spun and crashed down upon them. Once more her talons cracked through scale and flesh as she tore into the dragon’s back and ripped it from the air. As they fell, she snatched the Draleid in her jaws and cleaved him in half with a single wrench of her neck.

As his body flapped into the wind, Lyara bit down into the dragon’s wing, tasting blood and flesh. She released it just before they would crash, watching the creature smash into the stone below, crushing a host of Uraks beneath it.

The dragon was still moving when Lyara spread her wings and alighted atop it. She kicked her head back and unleashed a torrent of fire down over the traitor’s broken body, her flames raging until she felt its heartbeat fade.

As the flames died, the street came into view, scores of Uraks charging towards them.

Lyara reared with a beat of her wings and once more spewed dragonfire from her open maw. Her heart found joy in the monsters’ screams, in the smell of their burning flesh.

They were the destroyers of life, the shadow that smothered all light. She was fire incarnate, she was fury, and she was deliverance.

As the blazing bodies collapsed to the stone, Lyara charged, cracked her wings, and lifted back into the air. Above, the small dragon they had protected swung back towards them, her white and brown scales glowing in the firelight.

“Thank you,” came a voice carried on threads of Air. The Draleid looked no older than sixteen summers, garbed in nothing but his smallclothes and brown robes.

“Fly this place!” Aeson called back. “Do not stop. Do not look back.” He thought for a second. How far had this treachery gone? What safe havens existed for the young Draleid to flee to? “There is a woodland fifty miles north, marked by a forked river. Wait there for a day and no longer.”

“The others!” the young Draleid called back. “We got separated! They were making for the southern gate with the hatchlings!”

“Go! I will find them.”

Lyara separated from the young dragon and swept around a golden turret, a crack of her wings launching her forwards like a spear. They could not look back; they could only hope.

Shinyara swept low across the city, shifting left and right to avoid streaks of lightning or shards of stone and metal launched by mages below. She cracked her wings and soared upwards as they approached the broken remnants that were the Tower of Faith, still jutting high above the structures that surrounded it.

She could smell him, smell the fire that had lived in his heart, the scent of ancient oak, of lightning. And sure enough, as Shinyara descended into the city, she found Vyldrar’s bloodied corpse amidst a sea of rubble and bodies. The dragon’s neck was shattered, pieces of him missing, that fire in his heart gone.

Shinyara alighted atop the rubble, and Farda pressed himself to her scales as she lay beside Vyldrar, a hole forming in her heart. She lowered her snout, tucked it beneath his wing, and lifted, only for it to drop lifeless back to the stones.

A soft, high-pitched cry left Shinyara’s throat, and she rested her head beside Vyldrar’s, unwilling to move.

What had they done? How had everything been worth this cost?

In the corner of her vision, Shinyara saw something that caused Farda to slide from her back. He dropped to the stone and climbed over the piles of rubble to where a body lay, bones shattered from a fall, clothes bloody. A blade had sliced clean through the neck.

He dropped to his knees at the sight, unable to move. He would not even known it was Alvira if not for the ring on her right hand. Thin and silver with a tiny emerald. Hana had picked it out for her at the markets in Vaerleon, near the soapmaker’s. Hana had been excited because the emerald matched Vyldrar’s scales.

“Do you even think about them? Do they cross your mind? Do you even remember that they are dead?”

The words echoed in Farda’s mind. Words he wished he could claw back into himself.

He pushed himself to his feet, staggering over the rubble, and took Alvira’s body into his arms. Shinyara lifted her head as he approached, and he lay Alvira’s body across Vyldrar’s broken wing. He knelt beside her and took her hand in his, kissing her bloodied knuckles.

“How do I know if I’ve made the right choice?” he heard Alvira say in his memories as she had after Arathín burned.

“You never know,” Farda whispered, repeating the words he had spoken in response that day. “All we can do is trust that we have done our best.” He pressed his forehead to her hand. “Where did it all go so wrong?”

He kissed her knuckles once more, then moved to Shinyara’s side. The dragon did not need to wait for his word. She pressed her forelimbs into the rubble and stood, a familiar pressure burning within her. Memories of Alvira and Vyldrar poured between their minds. Happy memories, sad memories, furious memories. The last time Farda and Alvira had spoken had been the second worst day of Farda’s life.