Douglas Niles - The Dragons

With a blink of magic, the red dragon vanished, and Lectral guessed that he had teleported back to the battle that was raging in the north. Trembling with rage, the silver whirled about, more than willing to face the four younger reds in a duel.

Flying toward him, the crimson serpents closed the distance fast, spreading apart only slightly as they and the mighty silver converged. Abruptly Lectral tilted into a stall, then pulled himself upward with a powerful push of his wings. The sky beneath him became a hellish inferno of crackling fire, but the silver dragon escaped with just a few scorches on his tail.

Quickly he pivoted, slashing past the reds, sweeping downward in a plunging dive.

Then, as Lectral blasted the nearest chromatic with an explosion of killing frost, there were three. His wings drove him ever faster, and now he was the attacker, trying to close the distance. Clawing at a red body, veering away from another explosion of fiery breath, the silver dragon ripped scales from the flank of an enemy wyrm.

But the trio of red dragons swerved back, and in a clash of talons and fangs, all four serpents came together. A hissing cloud of frost and flame roared like a thunderstorm, engulfing all the dragons in a horrific cloud of mutually destructive breath.

And then Lectral was falling, twisting lazily, watching the trees rush upward to meet him. He tried to break away, but his wings refused to move.

“There!” Arumnus declared in a harrumph of flame. The knight on his back leaned over, studying the distant ground.

“I see them-four or five greens, eh?”

“And the blacks!” the gold dragon noted, banking slightly to bring the rest of the chromatic dragons into view. The gold looked around anxiously. Where were Heart and her knight?

With bellows of vengeful fury, the dragons and their knightly riders dived toward the enemy wyrms. Lances ripped through emerald scales or shredded wings of midnight black, and the skies were full of smoke and flames and screams. Serpentine fliers weaved, slashed, and breathed, while knightly riders wielded their lances with deadly skill. In a few shocking moments of battle, every one of the chromatic dragons had been driven from the sides.

Heart and her rider pulled ahead, winging beside Arumnus. The silver flew strongly, but her expression was grim.

“I must go,” she declared. “We have a different fight to wage.”

“But our destiny lies here!” Arumnus declared, indicating a vast wing of red dragons spreading across the sky, angling toward a renewed attack.

“You will take this destiny,” Heart replied. “As to me, I must follow the commands of love.”

“Love is not for dragons!” Arumnus asserted, but his silver kin-dragon and her rider were already gone.

And a great, five-headed shadow began to loom out of the clouds. Arumnus knew Heart’s goal, and he could only pray that she would succeed.

Lectral’s body twisted under an onslaught of unbelievable pain. He flailed as one of the scarlet serpents swerved past, catching the red’s leathery wing with his sharp talons. Tearing savagely, the silver dragon rent the stiff surface, pulling the red to him, feeling the brittle membrane, frozen by his blast of silver breath, crumble in his talons.

Two more red dragons, smaller than the heir of Crematia but still dangerous, tried to free their comrade, but Lectral clung tightly to the squirming serpent. With a crushing bite, he snapped the wyrm’s neck, but then the rippling agony through his own body drove blackness upward into his brain. He struggled, groping for words, for magic, for something!

When he crashed into the trees, he was vaguely aware of the two reds flying away, leaving him for dead. Pain swept through his body, wracking agony that seemed certain to kill him.

But he still lived. In a nightmare of agony, he realized his wings were shredded, several of his legs smashed and broken.

Finally he reached out a claw, felt the curving surface under his talons, and raised the ram’s horn to his jaws.

1028 PC

“Sire!” Tombfyre cried, appearing in the air before Deathfyre’s flying form. “There is a silver to the south, over the forests of the wild elves! He was pursued by four wyrms, but I cannot say that his life is ended, for I came as soon as I heard your summons.”

“There will be time for him later,” Deathfyre growled. “Now I need you here. See these humans? They come to us with lances, cruel weapons that have already rent flights of whites and greens.”

Corro, the mighty black, fell into formation beside them. He snorted, flexing his midnight wings, with many of his inky clan trailing behind. As Corro passed, Tombfyre felt a new presence, and with awe he watched a mighty cloud seethe upward, growing into a solid entity.

“Show courage, my kin-dragons!” roared the elder red. “Our queen approaches, and if we can win this fight, she will hold sway over all the world!”

Deathfyre led his red dragons in a wedge of lethal flight, bellowing furiously at the sight of the metallic serpents winging toward them. Tombfyre pressed ahead, savage and eager, fires of fury burning in his belly.

Now he saw that the good dragons had saddled themselves with riders, a single human warrior astride each of the serpents. Sunlight glinted from the silvery metal shafts of their wicked lances, but Tombfyre chortled aloud at the realization that his enemies had handicapped themselves with all of this clumsy, unnecessary weight.

The two formations swept closer, and the red dragon bellowed a cry of battle, ordering his serpents into a dive. Corro spat a drool of acid, snarling loudly, leading the remaining blacks and greens-those that had survived the first clash with the Dragonlances. Many blues and whites pulled alongside, and more than sixty of the Dark Queen’s wyrms swept downward in an awful wedge of death.

The metallic dragons closed swiftly, with those curiously shining weapons raised, the wyrms bugling bold challenges of their own. Don’t they see the odds? Tombfyre was amazed and a little shaken by the foe’s tenacity.

“Lances?” declared blue Azurus, gliding beside Deathfyre with a disdainful snort. “As if they could strike us down with mere pinpricks!”

“Beware,” countered Deathfyre, “for those are more than pins.”

The blue looked scornful, and Tombfyre himself was amazed to hear his sire speak of caution.

“Spread out!” warned Deathfyre, urging the blues and whites to give them room, knowing that the eruption of red dragon breath would be deadly even to his own allies and that the lethal frost of the whites and the crackling lightning of the blues could prove equally harmful to the serpents of his own wing. It was far better to attack the enemy with a widespread formation, concentrating all the breath attacks against different portions of the sky.

Azurus led the way, bringing his blues through a plunging curve, sweeping toward the head of the metal dragon flight. Some of these silver and gold wyrms rose toward the blues, while the rest winged on, bearing steadily toward the reds or warily eyeing the whites that swerved outward to make an attack from the other flank.

Lightning crackled as Azurus spat a flaming bolt at the lead dragon, a large gold. But that serpent twisted away, leaving a cascade of sparks spilling from the dragon-scale shield protecting the rider. Then the lance of the leading attacker ripped through the blue membrane of a broad wing. Mighty Azurus, greatest of the blues, lurched and flapped pathetically, veering to the side, then toppling onto his back while the shredded membrane trailed behind him. With a shrieking cry of fury that swelled to disbelief, then curdled into sheer terror, he tumbled from the skies.