Elizabeth Haydon - Destiny - Child of the Sky

From the midst of the fray, Achmed had cleared the Ledge of emerging corpses. He caught the eye of his Sergeant-Major, standing atop a rise in the ruins of the Moot. The giant Bolg nodded, and the Firbolg king nodded in return.

Grunthor threw back his head and roared. The sound carried over the din below; it vibrated in the Earth itself, shaking loose shale from the mountains, rumbling through the rocks. In the heat of battle raging on the fields surrounding the Moot and on the Krevensfield Plain the combatants felt the tremors from the Sergeant’s call; even the disinterred dead, the war-fallen, seemed to pause at the sound.

A moment later great fissures opened in the Teeth; the battlements and guard towers tore open. The mountainsides ran black as the Firbolg army roared forth, swelling down the cliff faces and onto the steppes below.

Grunthor’s war cry was picked up by half a million voices, chanted across the peaks, screamed in the descent to the fields, rattling the very earth. The soldiers of Roland, embroiled in the conflict with the dead, felt them come, much as they had a year before, only this time to engage a common enemy. The swirling maelstrom of battle blackened further as the Bolg spilled forth, joining the men in common warfare, seeking to drive the dead back into their graves.

Martin Ivenstrand clutched at Tristan Steward’s arm as the ocean of Firbolg rolled like a tidal wave down onto the Krevensfield Plain.

“I though you said they had been decimated!” he shouted above the deafening clamor.

“They—they were,” the Lord Roland mumbled. “They—”

The dukes had just enough opportunity to run for cover as a column of Bolg soldiers stampeded through where they had been standing, screaming a war cadence, bent on destruction.

Rhapsody stood at the top of a torn swale on the plain. All around her cacophony reigned. The ground rumbled with the vibration of war, the thundering of horses; it was all she could do to remain upright in the fray. Amid the shrieking and clashing that filled the air she could hear a frighteningly familiar tattoo, a cadence of horrifying crescendo coming ever closer.

She looked up, trembling. In the near distance a swirling storm of dust and black clods of earth blasted skyward into the air beneath a tangle of galloping hooves, moving closer with each passing second. From within that approaching storm the bloodstained warrior of her nightmares was riding down on her, blue eyes gleaming ferociously, beating his straining mount with merciless urgency. The veins in his neck and forehead protruded from a face clenched in grim concentration.

It was Anborn.

He was shouting something, screaming really, but Rhapsody couldn’t hear him over the din. He leaned slightly off the saddle to the right, stretching his arm out to her. Behind him the horizon was black with motion too distant and frenetic to discern. Rhapsody held out her arms, preparing to be swept up and onto the horse before him.

As she did the sky above and around her darkened, the searing heat of battle suddenly purged by a rush of wind that chilled her to the bone. As if time had slowed, she saw the veins in Anborn’s neck stiffen, his teeth bare, as he opened his mouth in a great war scream, drowned out by the noise all around her. His eyes had moved from her face to the sky above her.

She looked up just as the slashing claw of the dragon that blotted out the sun above struck with blinding speed, snatching her from the ground, crushing her in its talons, taking her into the sky in the twinkling of an eye, like the helpless prey of a raptor.

Ashe was standing on the rise of a broken hillside, urging the remaining Cymrians out of the ruins of the Moot, when he felt Anwyn appear in the sky.

A great blast of energy shocked the air, leaving it dry, almost brittle, in his nostrils. A rolling wave of heat followed by the dark blotting out of sunlight appeared above him a moment later; the dragon had been hanging, formless, in the ether overhead, preparing to strike, and when she took shape the action sucked all the elemental lore that was extant in the air into the creation of her shimmering form. Great jointed wings as wide as two oxcarts each and claws like curved swords appeared first, most solidly, followed by the mistier, wyrmlike body of the beast, which glided over his head, then struck like a snake at the ground on which Rhapsody had been standing. A split second later the serpent took to the sky, the ground beneath her bare and unoccupied. Anborn galloped through the space where she had been, then reined his mount to a crashing halt, staring around wildly.

A word from the past, an agonizing scream of the soul, tore from Ashe’s throat.

Noooooooooo.

From deep within him, in the place where the Rowans had carefully sewn a piece of a star to save his life, the birthplace of his dual nature, the awakening of his own dragon spirit, Ashe felt the change begin. The wyrm within his blood rushed forth like a brushfire, bellowing as it came.

“ Here !” it screamed in his voice and its own, the primal, multitoned sound of the wind within his gullet. “ ANWYN! Here !”

Grunthor, his face bleeding, the cheekbone partially visible, tore his way to Ashe, who was focusing on the objects in the sky and roaring menace and revenge in some wordless wyrm speech that caused every vein to protrude. The giant thought he could see a shift beginning to be visible even beneath Ashe’s armor and the cloak of mist that roared now, rampant, like the crashing waves of the sea.

He grabbed the smaller man’s shoulder and a clump of the copper hair, and pulled him free of the sliding shale of the crumbling Moot, holding him suspended at eye level. Ashe’s eyes did not meet his. He was instead wrenching his body to keep his target in view, writhing, slithering in Grunthor’s grasp, and growing heavier as each second passed, his body turning almost vaporous.

“ANWYN! Here! HERE!”

“Hear!” Grunthor roared in Ashe’s face. The Lord Cymrian’s eyes, vertical pupils slit in the madness of his wyrm rage, struggled to break free from the Sergeant’s grasp; when the Bolg did not drop him he reached for his sword.

Grunthor had had enough. He released the hair and wrapped his whole arm around Ashe, putting his claws firmly into the Lord Cymrian’s throat.

“Be still! Stop your rampage. Be a man! Be a king, or Oi’ll rip you apart right here!”

Ashe blinked. He looked up at the stern visage of the Bolg commander, and felt the dragon’s hold within him break. He swallowed, trying to force his voice.

“I have to get to her. I can’t fail her again.”

Grunthor, face-to-face with the man, found himself staring into eyes blue as a glacier, could see the deep vertical pupils contracting in fear. In the same heartbeat he knew that the Cymrian lord’s terror was only for Rhapsody. And in that moment his anger melted away in the face of the same fear he felt for the same beloved woman.

He set his jaw, grasped Ashe’s forearm roughly, and held the Ring of Wisdom up before the Lord Cymrian’s dragonesque eyes. “What does it tell you?” he demanded above the sounds of anguish and panic flooding over them in the caustic wind that rose, heavy with burning cinders, from the floor of the Bowl.

Ashe’s face went slack, the aspects of the rampant dragon’s rise diminishing somewhat from his features. His brow unfurrowed, and he looked from the ring to the black sky above, then back to Grunthor’s expectantly solemn face.

“If I take on Anwyn in an air battle, Rhapsody will die,” he said, calm returning to his voice.

Grunthor growled brusquely. “What else?”

“Anwyn no longer cares. If I attack her and hold back to spare Rhapsody, we will both die.”