Just one day before the council was consumed by the chaos of the attack on the great village of Mosiah, the traitor Guhile was preparing to expose his plan to his master, Kareed.

  The cavern walls wept. Moisture slicked the stone, and in iron sconces, torches sputtered, their oily flames choked by the stagnant air. Kareed stood at the center of the chamber, leaning over a slab of black stone. A map of Eldoria lay spread across its surface, edges weighted down with pieces of carved obsidian. His fingers traced the veins of roads and rivers as if feeling for a pulse. His hands remained steady, anchored to the edges of Eldoria’s borders.

  Behind him, at the far end of the cavern, the air began to hum. Then it screamed. A portal tore open a jagged, violent rent of emerald light that crackled and hissed. The sound echoed off the stone walls, sharp enough to make the torches flicker. Guhile stumbled through, his boots scraping against the wet floor. His robes were charred rags hanging off his frame. His skin was the color of wet ash. Deep, bruised hollows sat beneath his eyes, and his fingers trembled with a rhythmic, uncontrollable shake.

  The portal snapped shut behind him, leaving a vacuum that popped the ears and sent a rush of cold air through the chamber.

  Kareed didn’t turn. “Report.”

  Guhile took three unsteady steps forward, his breath coming in short, hitching gasps. He stopped ten feet from the table. His throat clicked as he swallowed. “The final node remains hidden. I’ve searched the tunnels beneath the Tower of Engineering. The archives. The old foundation. Nothing. And now Leelinor has summoned the council. He wants answers. I needed a distraction. Something to keep their eyes off the shadows.”

  “So you gave them Mosiah.”

  “I did.”

  Kareed turned. Slowly. His movements were deliberate, almost lazy. His eyes were voids, reflecting nothing. The runes etched into his forearms pulsed with a dull, sickly light that painted his skin in shifting shadows. “A village, Guhile? You think a few burning huts will suffice?”

  Guhile’s hands clenched at his sides. “It’s at the capital’s throat. Close enough to see from Eldoria’s walls. It will breed panic. Chaos. It will pull Leelinor away from the capital, away from the council, away from—”

  “From you.” Kareed’s mouth twitched—a hard, joyless line. “You bought yourself time. You want to scurry through the dark without a lantern at your back.”

  Guhile nodded, his breath hitching in his tight chest. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

  Kareed stepped closer. Three strides brought him within arm’s reach. He smelled of cold stone and old power, something metallic and wrong. “You’ve endured, Guhile. Most would have snapped under the weight of this. The pressure. The constant threat of discovery. You didn’t. You adapted. You found a way to bleed the enemy to save your own skin.”

  Relief hit Guhile like a physical blow, unearned and desperate. His shoulders sagged. “Thank you.”

  “But a village is a spark. I want a pyre.” Kareed’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. He leaned in, his breath cold against Guhile’s ear. “Give them a tragedy that consumes their every heartbeat. Something they cannot look away from. Something that will haunt them for generations.”

  He straightened and turned back to the table. His finger stabbed down onto the map. Mosiah. A small mark near the eastern edge, close enough to Eldoria’s capital that the smoke would be visible from the walls. “Two dragons.”

  Guhile’s eyes stretched wide. His mouth opened. Closed. “Two?”

  “Nakar will command the yellow from the northern ridge overlooking Mosiah. You will direct the green from the eastern cliffs. The collars will bind them to your will. You’ve practiced the commands?” Kareed’s finger traced a pincer movement on the map, two lines converging on the village from opposite sides. “Brass scales, blue fire for Nakar. Olive skin, red fire for you. Coordinate your strikes. Burn the outskirts first. Drive them into the center like cattle into a pen. Herd them into the town square. Then ignite it. Leave nothing.”

  “And the survivors?”

  “There will be no need to count them.” Kareed straightened, his spine a rod of iron. His hands folded behind his back. “To ensure the slaughter, Harueel will send ground forces. Twenty ogres. Ten cyclopes. Ten minotaurs. All modified. All honed. All mine.”

  Guhile’s stomach did a slow, nauseating roll. “Modified… that’s good.”

  “Harueel’s masterpieces.” A note of grim pride entered Kareed’s voice. He turned to face Guhile fully, his expression unreadable in the flickering torchlight. “The beasts no longer lumber. They think. They speak. They kill with intent. They understand orders. They coordinate. They are the new evolution of servitude.”

  Guhile clenched his fists, the hum of the closed portal still vibrating in his teeth. He wanted to ask what had been carved out of them what essence or organ or piece of soul to make room for that intelligence. He kept his mouth shut. Some questions were better left unasked.

  “They will enter through a localized rift,” Kareed continued, his tone matter-of-fact. “Thirty at a time. The portal is small. Unstable. But it’s enough. While the dragons turn the sky to ash, the ground forces will harvest what remains. Anyone who survives the fire will die on their blades.”

  “And if Leelinor intervenes?”

  Kareed’s face remained a mask of stone. His eyes, however, gleamed. “Then we shall see if the great leader of Eldoria prefers to save his crown or watch his people melt into the cobbles.”

  He stepped back, putting distance between them once more. His gaze locked onto Guhile with predatory intensity. “Five days, Guhile. Find the node. Wake it. Activate the network. When that portal opens the true portal, not these pathetic rifts it won’t be thirty soldiers stepping through. It will be a tide of thousands. And Eldoria will drown.”

  Guhile nodded, his mouth tasting of copper. “Five days.”

  “Five days.” Kareed’s voice was stone grinding against stone. “Do not make me find a replacement for you.”

  Guhile raised a shaking hand. Emerald light hissed between his fingers, spitting sparks onto the wet floor. He tore a hole in the world, the portal’s edges unstable and flickering. He stepped through without a second glance, his form swallowed by the green fire.

  The portal snapped shut. The silence that followed was heavy, pressing down on the chamber like a physical weight. Kareed returned to the table. His fingers traced the borders of Eldoria once more, slow and deliberate, as if memorizing every line.

  “Soon,” he whispered to the empty dark. “Very soon.”

  ?

  To the north, far beyond Eldoria’s walls, the air was a thick soup of woodsmoke and iron-scented blood. The camp sprawled across a barren ridge, tents made of patched hides and stolen canvas. Fires burned in iron drums, casting jagged shadows across the ground.

  Nakar stood at the edge of the ridge, looking down into a shallow valley where the yellow dragon waited. Her scales were the color of tarnished brass, tipped with black soot. Each scale was the size of a dinner plate, overlapping like armor forged by a god. Her eyes were pits of molten gold, the pupils narrow as needles. Around her neck, a collar pulsed with sapphire runes, biting into her throat with every snarl. The runes flared and dimmed in rhythm with her breathing, a leash of magic that choked her will and bent it to another’s.

  Nakar rested a hand on the hilt of his blade. His voice was low, almost gentle. “Tomorrow, you feed.”

  The dragon stared back. There was no soul there only hatred, agony, and forced obedience. Her chest rose and fell with slow, labored breaths. Smoke curled from her nostrils.

  Beside the camp, beneath a canopy of torn sailcloth, Harueel worked with the silence of a grave-robber. Vials clinked softly as he moved them across a stone table. Essences swirled inside glass containers, glowing with a sickly, internal light green, red, violet. Each one pulsed like a tiny heart. Behind him, arranged in perfect, terrifying ranks, the modified stood at attention.

  Twenty ogres, their musculature braided with steel-hard fiber that bulged beneath their skin. Their eyes were bright with a cold, unnatural lucidity no longer the dull, animal gaze of their wild kin. Ten cyclopes, standing tall and unnaturally poised. Their single eyes, each the size of a fist, tracked the flight of a moth across the camp with terrifying precision. Ten minotaurs, runes carved directly into their horns, glowing faintly in the firelight. Their bodies rippled with a strength that looked painful to possess, muscles layered over muscles in grotesque, shivering mounds.

  One cyclops tilted its head, the movement smooth and disturbingly human. “Master Harueel. When is the harvest?”

  Harueel didn’t look up from his tinctures. His hands moved with practiced precision, measuring drops of glowing liquid into a vial. “Tomorrow. Follow the fire. Kill anything that breathes.”

  “As you command.”

  The beast bowed a gesture too human, too graceful for its massive frame and returned to the line. The others didn’t move. Didn’t speak. They simply waited, their eyes reflecting the firelight.

  Harueel’s hands never faltered. Mixing. Measuring. Refining. A thin smile touched his lips. “Evolution,” he muttered to himself. “Pure, beautiful evolution.”

  ?

  The next day. The day of the explosion in Mosiah. The center of Eldoria.

  The infirmary smelled of dried lavender and the metallic tang of old blood. Sunlight cut through a high window, illuminating the dust motes dancing lazily over the stone floor. The room was quiet, save for the soft scratch of quill on parchment and the occasional clink of glass.

  Leeonir sat on the edge of a padded examination table, his legs dangling. His left hand rested on his thigh a nightmare of black scales, gleaming like obsidian, creeping up his forearm in jagged, tectonic plates. The scales caught the light, edges tinged dark red, surfaces smooth as polished glass.

  Tetus hovered nearby, peering through a crystalline lens held inches from Leeonir’s hand. His white hair was pulled back tight into a knot at the base of his skull. His scarred hands, steady from decades of surgery and battlefield medicine, moved with clinical grace.

  “Hold,” Tetus commanded, his voice soft but firm.

  Leeonir’s jaw was a knot of tension. The scales felt hot. Thrumming. Like a second heart beating against his muscle, out of sync with his own pulse. He loathed the weight of them, the wrongness, the way they pulsed with heat that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside his bones.

  Tetus set the lens aside on a tray and picked up a needle-thin probe, its tip gleaming silver. He pressed it gently against the seam where elven flesh met draconic plate. Leeonir hissed, flinching back instinctively.

  “Pain?”

  “No.” Leeonir’s voice was tight. “It just feels… wrong. Like my skin is being worn by someone else.”

  Tetus made a sharp scratch on the parchment beside him, his handwriting cramped and precise. “I’ve spent days on this. The results are consistent.” He set the probe down and turned to face Leeonir fully, his expression serious. “And?”

  Leeonir looked up, his mismatched eyes one green, one blue burning with barely contained frustration. “And?”

  “It’s magic, fused at the marrow. These scales aren’t a growth. They aren’t a parasite feeding off you. They are you, Leeonir. Your biology has rewritten its own script at a fundamental level.”

  Leeonir’s breath caught in his throat. “So I’m a freak. Permanently.”

  “Likely.” Tetus’s tone was blunt. “I’ve found nothing in the Great Library. No record of draconic essence grafting to elven blood like this. No case studies. No legends that match.” He set the probe down and met Leeonir’s gaze directly. “But I have a theory.”

  Leeonir waited, his heart thumping hard against his ribs.

  “The agony, the weakness, the sense of wrongness you describe.” Tetus gestured to the obsidian hand with one scarred finger. “It’s not the scales. It’s you.”

  “Explain.”

  “You are at war with yourself. You see this as a rot. A curse. An invasion. And your body is reacting to that rejection. The heat, the lack of control, the pain that’s the friction of your soul fighting your skin.” Tetus’s voice was soft, but heavy with truth. “If you accepted the change, stopped seeing it as an enemy…”

  Leeonir stared at the hand. The scales were beautiful in a terrible way, dark red at the edges, smooth as polished glass, gleaming like volcanic rock. He flexed his fingers slowly. The scales moved with his skin, seamless, perfect.

  “If you stopped fighting the beast,” Tetus continued, “it might stop biting you.”

  The floor shuddered. A subtle tremor, but enough to make the glass vials on the table dance a frantic jig. The two assistants working at a side bench froze, their hands hovering over their instruments. Then came the sound. A deep, guttural vibration that bypassed the ears and rattled the lungs, resonating in the chest like a drum struck too hard.

  A roar.

  Leeonir’s head snapped toward the window. Another roar followed closer, louder, carrying the weight of a mountain falling. The walls trembled. Dust sifted down from the ceiling. Panic erupted in the halls outside. Footsteps thundered. Shouts rose, stripped of all discipline, raw and terrified.

  “What is that?” one of the assistants whispered, his face draining of color.

  Tetus moved for the door, but it slammed open before he reached the handle. A nurse stumbled in, her breath coming in ragged gasps, her eyes wide with terror. “Dragons! Two of them! Mosiah is burning!”

  The words felt like a physical strike to Leeonir’s chest. The air left his lungs. He was off the table before the nurse could finish her sentence, his boots hitting the stone floor with a sharp crack.

  “Leeonir, wait—” Tetus shouted, reaching for him.

  “No.”

  He grabbed the breastplate of Ecos’s armor from the chair where it had been resting. It was heavy, scarred by previous fires, dented by forgotten blades, the metal tarnished and dark. He pulled it over his head and buckled it over his chest with trembling fingers, the straps biting into his shoulders.

  “Leeonir, you aren’t ready—”

  “I’m done waiting.” He reached for the Sword of Ecos leaning against the wall. The hilt felt familiar, worn smooth by generations of hands. The weight of the steel was a comfort, solid and real. He turned for the door.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  “Your hand, boy! You don’t understand—”

  “It’ll have to do.”

  Tetus stepped directly into his path, blocking the doorway with his body. “Listen to me! If you stop fighting the scales, they could help you. But if you keep rejecting them—”

  Leeonir didn’t argue. He moved Tetus aside with his shoulder not a strike, but a firm shove fueled by the absolute certainty of a man with nothing left to lose. Tetus stumbled back, catching himself against the table.

  Leeonir ran.

  The corridor was a chaotic blur of motion and sound. Healers collided with fleeing patients, their hands raised to steady the injured. The air was thick with the scent of medicinal herbs, sweat, and raw fear. Leeonir ignored the cries, his boots slamming against the stone with heavy, rhythmic thuds. His left hand pulsed with a heat that threatened to blister his own arm, the scales glowing faintly from within. He burst through the infirmary doors and into the courtyard beyond.

  The courtyard was a madhouse. Mothers dragged screaming children by the arms. Guards barked orders at the wind, their voices lost in the chaos. Beyond the city walls, visible even from here, a pillar of oily black smoke rose into the sky, thick and roiling, choking the eastern horizon.

  Mosiah.

  Leeonir’s heart died a little in his chest. The image of the valley flashed behind his eyes—Claamvor burning, the screams, the bodies. “No. Not again.”

  He bit his lip until he tasted blood, the coppery tang sharp on his tongue. He raised two fingers to his mouth and whistled. The sound was a jagged blade of noise, sharp and piercing, cutting through the chaos.

  The sky darkened. A shadow swept over the courtyard, massive and sudden. Lua descended. The black raven was a blur of midnight feathers and silver-gray highlights, her wings spread wide, each beat sending a gust of wind that kicked up dust and scattered loose parchment. Her talons shrieked against the stone as she landed, gouging shallow furrows in the cobbles. Her slate-gray eyes found Leeonir immediately, calm and steady the only calm thing in the entire city.

  Leeonir didn’t hesitate. He grabbed a fistful of her feathers and hauled himself onto her back, the armor clanking against his ribs. He gripped her neck with both hands, his scaled fingers sinking into the soft down at the base of her skull.

  “Go,” he snarled. “Fly!”

  Lua launched. One massive beat of her wings sent a cloud of dust billowing across the courtyard, forcing onlookers to shield their faces. The ground vanished beneath them. The wind became a roar in Leeonir’s ears, cold and sharp. Below, the symmetry of Eldoria fell away streets, towers, walls shrinking into a miniature model of itself. To the east, the horizon was an angry, pulsing red.

  Mosiah was a pyre.

  Leeonir leaned into the wind, his chest pressed hard against Lua’s spine, his legs gripping her sides. “Faster, Lua! Faster!”

  She obeyed, her wings cutting the air like scythes, each stroke driving them higher and faster. The city blurred beneath them. Behind them, far below, Tetus stood alone in the courtyard, one hand shielding his eyes as he watched the black speck disappear into the smoke.

  “Accept it,” he whispered to the wind, though no one could hear him. “Or it will burn you alive.”

  But Leeonir was already gone.

  ?

  Lua’s wings worked like pistons, each stroke powerful and deliberate, biting into the gale that rose from the heat ahead. The air grew thicker, hotter, tinged with the smell of burning wood and something worse flesh, hair, the acrid stench of destruction. Below, the world spread out like a map of desperation.

  Leeonir saw the gates of Eldoria swing open far behind them, the massive wooden doors groaning as they were hauled aside by teams of soldiers. Thalion emerged at the head of a column of cavalry. He was a speck from this height, mounted on a black charger, his armor throwing sparks of reflected firelight. His arm moved in sharp, commanding arcs as the cavalry formed a wedge behind him, lances raised, shields gleaming. But they were miles away. Too slow. Too late.

  Leeonir’s eyes scanned the smoke ahead, searching desperately. A flash of white cut through the soot Arcanjo. The pegasus moved like a lightning bolt, wings beating with frantic speed, its silver-edged feathers catching the light. And on its back, a silhouette Leeonir knew better than his own soul.

  His father.

  Leelinor was flying straight into the mouth of the storm. Alone. No guards, no support, no backup just a king and his mount against the end of the world.

  Leeonir’s throat closed up, his chest tight. “Not alone. Not this time.”

  Then he saw the monsters.

  Two dragons circled Mosiah like vultures over a corpse. The yellow dragon was massive, a heavy, brassy nightmare. Her wings displaced the smoke in rolling waves with each beat, sending ash spiraling in chaotic patterns. Blue light gathered in her gullet, pulsing brighter with each breath, casting flickering shadows across the ruins below. The green dragon was leaner, sleeker, a needle of death. Olive scales gleamed darkly, and red fire trailed from its jaws in a liquid ribbon that licked the rooftops, igniting everything it touched.

  Leeonir’s vision tunneled, the world narrowing to those two shapes. His scaled hand began to glow from within, a dull, internal amber that pulsed in time with his racing heartbeat. “Faster, Lua!”

  Lua folded her wings and plummeted. The world turned into a scream of wind and ash. The ground rushed up a mosaic of burning thatch, crumbling stone, and bodies. His father vanished into a bank of black smoke, swallowed whole.

  “Father!” Leeonir screamed, but the sound was torn from his lips and swallowed by the roar of the fire below.

  ?

  The heat hit them first a wall of shimmering, suffocating air that scorched the lungs with every breath. Leeonir’s skin felt like it was peeling, the moisture evaporating from his face in seconds. Sweat turned to steam before it could even run down his cheeks. Then came the symphony of the dying. The splintering of timber as buildings collapsed. The metallic screech of collapsing iron beams. And the screams from elven throats, the guttural bellows of attackers, the high, keening wails of children, the wet, choking gasps of the burned.

  The smoke thickened as they descended, turning from gray to an impenetrable, oily black that stung Leeonir’s eyes and filled his nose with the taste of ash. Visibility died. He could barely see Lua’s head in front of him.

  “Down!” Leeonir roared, his voice raw. “Get us down!”

  Lua dove harder, her wings tucked tight against her body. The heat intensified until Leeonir’s eyes watered, tears streaming down his face and evaporating instantly.

  “Father! Where are you?!”

  Only the roar of the inferno answered, a living, breathing thing that consumed sound and light and hope.

  They broke through the canopy of smoke. Mosiah lay bared below them, and it was worse than anything Leeonir had imagined.

  It was a slaughterhouse.

  The village hadn’t just been attacked it was being systematically erased from existence. Streets that had once been cobbled and clean were now rivers of liquid flame, the stones themselves melting under the heat. Buildings were reduced to skeletons of glowing charcoal, their beams collapsing inward with groans that sounded almost human. Bodies were everywhere. Some were mounds of ash, unrecognizable. Others were still moving, still screaming, crawling through the fire with nowhere to go.

  Ogres moved through the ruins with surgical cruelty. These weren’t the lumbering beasts of the wild. They moved with a terrifying, heavy grace, their steps coordinated, deliberate. They worked in pairs, one holding a victim down while the other crushed their skull with rhythmic efficiency. They dragged families from the rubble mothers, children, elders just to tear them apart in full view of the survivors. Their eyes glowed with that cold, unnatural lucidity Harueel had given them.

  Cyclopes followed in their wake, their single eyes glowing with a cold, analytical light. One reached into a burning shop, its massive hand closing around a screaming woman. It pulled her out and snapped her neck with a casual flick of the wrist, the sound sharp and final. Then it tossed her body into the furnace of the next house, where the flames consumed her instantly.

  Minotaurs stalked the alleys, their movements too fast for creatures their size. Their horns were etched with red-pulsing runes that cast flickering light across their faces. Their muscles were layered in grotesque, shivering mounds, bulging unnaturally beneath their hide.

  And the victims… they were everyone. Humans with blonde hair matted with blood. Elves with silver braids now charred black. Even the ogre families who had sought peace in Eldoria who had turned their backs on the tribes and chosen to live under Eldoria’s protection they were being butchered by their own kind, their bodies piled like cordwood in the ash, left to burn with the rest.

  Leeonir’s mismatched eyes burned, his breath coming in jagged, desperate stabs. “No,” he whispered, his voice breaking. “No, no, no…”

  ?

  The shadow came from above, sudden and total. The olive dragon dropped like a stone, its wings folding tight against its body. Red fire spilled from its jaws, a liquid ribbon of death that splashed across the ground below, igniting everything it touched.

  Lua shrieked a high, breaking sound of pure terror that Leeonir had never heard from her before. She tried to bank left, her wings flaring. Too late.

  The dragon’s talons raked Lua’s right flank. Feathers exploded in a spray of black and silver. Blood sprayed, hot and dark. The impact was a thunderclap that shook Leeonir’s entire body. He was torn from his seat, his fingers ripping free from Lua’s feathers, his grip breaking. The world became a kaleidoscope of fire, sky, smoke, ground spinning, tumbling, weightless.

  He glimpsed Lua tumbling beside him, her wings flailing, her beak open in a silent scream. Then the cobbles rushed up.

  He hit hard. His right shoulder took the brunt of the impact, the armor denting inward with a sickening crunch. His head whipped back against the stone with a crack that sent white light exploding across his vision. Pain detonated in his ribs, white-hot and blinding. The Sword of Ecos was torn from his grip, skittering away across the rubble with a metallic clatter.

  He rolled through the ash, tumbling over broken stone and shattered wood, gasping for air that was mostly smoke. His lungs burned. His vision swam in red circles, the edges of the world blurring and darkening. He pushed himself up on his elbows, spitting blood. His mouth tasted of copper and ash.

  Lua.

  She was thirty feet away, tangled in the ruins of a collapsed stable. The wooden beams had splintered around her, jagged ends jutting out at angles. Her left wing was a ruin splintered bone visible through shredded feathers, blood pooling beneath her in a dark, spreading stain. She tried to stand, her legs trembling, but the wing wouldn’t lift. It dragged behind her, broken and useless. Her gray eyes found his across the wreckage, and she let out a low, broken trill of agony.

  Leeonir tried to crawl toward her, but his legs were lead, unresponsive. His left hand was screaming now, the heat beneath the scales becoming an agonizing throb that pulsed up his arm.

  “Lua…”

  A shadow blotted out the sun. The green dragon circled overhead, a hundred feet up, its throat glowing with impending flame. It wasn’t interested in finishing them yet. It was herding. Pushing the few survivors toward the center of the village. Toward the waiting ogres.

  Leeonir dragged himself forward, his fingers clawing at the soot-covered ground. The sword. Where was the sword? His vision cleared slightly. There. Twenty feet away, half-buried in a mound of ash, the blade still gleaming faintly in the firelight.

  He reached for it, his arm stretching, fingers grasping.

  ?

  A voice cut through the roar of flames. Hoarse. Desperate. Breaking. “Help! Please! My leg!”

  Leeonir’s head snapped up. Forty feet ahead, through the haze of smoke, an elf barely thirty, his face streaked with blood and soot was pinned beneath a smoldering support beam. One of his legs was trapped, bent at a wrong angle. Blood masked half his face, running from a gash across his forehead. His hands reached out toward Leeonir, clawing at the air. “Please! I can’t it’s too heavy I can’t move it!”

  Leeonir’s fingers closed around the hilt of the Sword of Ecos. He wrenched it free from the ash, the weight solid and familiar in his hand. The elf’s eyes locked onto his, wide and desperate and pleading. “Please!”

  Leeonir forced himself to his knees, his legs shaking beneath him. Pain lanced through his ribs with every breath. He took one agonizing step forward. Then another. Thirty feet. Twenty-five.

  The sky opened.

  A torrent of red fire poured down from above a vertical sea of flame, wide as a house, falling like a hammer. It hit the elf, the beam, the ground. In an instant, flesh vaporized. Bone turned to white powder. Stone shattered and melted into glass. The heat was so intense that the air itself ignited, a wall of superheated wind that slammed into Leeonir like a physical blow.

  He threw his arms up instinctively, trying to shield his face. The fire licked his forearms, touching exposed skin. Blisters formed instantly, skin curling and blackening. The stench of his own burning meat filled his nostrils, thick and nauseating.

  The shockwave hurled him backward. He hit the ground hard, his armor scraping against stone. He rolled. Stopped. For a heartbeat, there was only white silence, his ears ringing, his vision gone.

  Then the red returned, flooding back in with the pain.

  He screamed. It wasn’t a cry for help. It wasn’t a plea. It was a sound of something fundamental breaking inside a man a thread snapping, a wall collapsing, a dam bursting.

  “I’LL KILL YOU!” he shrieked, his voice tearing his throat raw, shredding vocal cords. “I’LL KILL ALL OF YOU!”

  He staggered to his feet, his legs barely holding him. The Sword of Ecos was still in his hand, fused there by sheer will. His arms were raw, bleeding, skin hanging in charred ribbons from his forearms. He didn’t feel it. The pain was there, distant, belonging to someone else. His scaled hand was a sun, glowing from within, hot and hungry and screaming for blood.

  ?

  Movement to his left. Small. Fast. Burning.

  A child burst from the ruins of a collapsed doorway twenty feet away. An ogre girl, no more than six years old. Her clothes were a shroud of flame, the fabric melting into her skin. Her hair was on fire, a crown of orange and yellow. She stumbled, ran blind, her arms outstretched, screaming in a high, thin wail that cut through everything.

  “Mama! Mama!”

  Leeonir’s hand shot out instinctively. “Wait—”

  But she was already past him, a streak of fire and terror, too fast to catch. She ran toward the center of what had once been the village square. Ahead, at the far end of the open space, a modified ogre stepped into her path. He was a mountain of muscle, his chest bare, runes glowing blue across his skin. His eyes were cold, empty, devoid of anything resembling mercy. He raised a massive, black-iron axe above his head, the blade still dripping with blood from his last kill.

  Leeonir lunged forward, his legs pumping, his boots pounding against the stone. “No!”

  But he was too far. Fifty feet. Forty. Thirty.

  The axe fell.

  The girl’s head was severed in a clean, brutal arc. It flew through the air, trailing blood and flame. It bounced once against the cobbles with a wet thud. Twice. Then it rolled, slowly, until it came to a stop at Leeonir’s boots.

  Her eyes were still open. Still wide. Still filled with the terror of the fire.

  Leeonir stared down at it. His lungs stopped working. His heart stuttered. The world went silent no roar of fire, no screams, no clash of steel. Just silence. Heavy. Absolute. Crushing.

  Something in the center of his chest didn’t just snap. It shredded. It tore into a thousand jagged edges that cut him from the inside.

  ?

  The modified ogre looked at him across the square. Blood dripped from the axe blade, pattering onto the stone. He grinned, showing teeth filed to sharp points. His eyes glittered with something that might have been amusement.

  Leeonir didn’t think. There was no plan. No tactic. No strategy. Only the frenzy.

  He covered the distance in four strides, his boots hammering the ground. The ogre swung his axe in a wide, lazy arc, confident in his strength.

  Too slow.

  The Sword of Ecos slid between the ogre’s ribs with a wet hiss, punching through leather, through muscle, through bone. Leeonir twisted the blade with both hands, feeling the grind of steel on bone, the resistance of flesh tearing. The ogre’s eyes bulged, his mouth opening in a soundless gasp. He vomited a torrent of dark blood that splashed across Leeonir’s chest, hot and thick.

  Leeonir didn’t wait for him to die. He planted his boot on the ogre’s chest and ripped the sword free with a wet, sucking sound. The ogre collapsed backward, hitting the ground like a felled tree.

  Leeonir turned, chest heaving, blood dripping from the blade.

  Two more enemies appeared at the edge of the square, fifty feet away. An ogre on the left, fists like boulders, shoulders as wide as a door. A minotaur on the right, horns lowered, muscles rippling unnaturally beneath its hide. They moved in tandem, closing the distance with coordinated precision.

  Forty feet. Thirty. Twenty.

  The ogre reached him first. His fist came like a battering ram, aimed at Leeonir’s head. Leeonir tried to dodge, tried to step left.

  Too slow.

  The blow caught him in the side, just below the ribs. Bone cracked three, maybe four ribs snapping like dry twigs. The impact lifted him off his feet and hurled him backward through the air. He slammed into the wall of a half-collapsed shop, soot and splinters raining down around him. His vision blurred, darkness creeping in at the edges. He slumped against the wall, sliding down.

  Forced himself up. His ribs screamed with every breath, each inhale a knife of pain.

  Through the haze, he saw the minotaur charging, head lowered, horns aimed directly at his chest. The distance closed in seconds. Ten feet. Five.

  Leeonir dropped the sword. His hands shot out and caught the horns, one in each palm. The momentum drove him backward, his boots carving deep furrows in the stone, sparks flying. His shoulders screamed, the joints threatening to dislocate. His muscles began to tear, fibers snapping under the strain. The minotaur tossed its head violently, trying to impale him, trying to throw him off.

  Leeonir held on, his grip tightening until his knuckles turned white.

  “Small elf-child,” the minotaur rumbled, its voice a gravelly, artificial thing, each word slow and deliberate. “I bigger. You meat now.”

  Leeonir bared his teeth, which were slick with his own blood, his vision narrowing to a red tunnel. “Your mistake.”

  His left hand clenched around the horn. The scales didn’t just heat they ignited. They sharpened, edges becoming razors, points becoming talons. His fingers transformed into obsidian claws, glowing from within with that internal amber fire.

  He drove them into the minotaur’s skull, punching through bone. The sound was like breaking pottery, a wet crunch that echoed in the square. Bone splintered like dry wood. The minotaur’s single eye rolled back, the pupil disappearing. Leeonir twisted his hand inside the brainpan, feeling the soft tissue give way, and pulled.

  The minotaur collapsed, its massive weight hitting the dirt with a thud that shook the ground beneath Leeonir’s boots.

  He turned, chest heaving, blood and brain matter dripping from his clawed hand. His hair was matted with blood his own and theirs.

  The last ogre stood thirty feet away, at the edge of the square. In his hand, held mockingly aloft, was the Sword of Ecos. Leeonir’s vision went a toxic shade of red, deeper than before, almost black at the edges.

  The ogre grinned and dragged the blade through the dirt a slow, deliberate scrape that set Leeonir’s teeth on edge, a sound designed to provoke, to insult.

  Leeonir didn’t speak. He moved.

  The ogre swung the stolen sword in a wide, clumsy arc, the blade whistling through the air. Leeonir ducked beneath it, his body moving on pure instinct. He didn’t reach for a weapon. He didn’t need one. He used the monster he was becoming.

  His scaled hand, hardened into a spearpoint of obsidian and rage, drove forward. Through the leather armor. Through the reinforced muscle. Through the sternum. His entire arm disappeared into the ogre’s chest, up to the elbow.

  He reached the heart.

  The ogre’s mouth opened in a silent ‘O,’ his eyes going wide. Leeonir’s clawed fingers closed around the beating organ. Squeezed. He felt the muscle burst like an overripe fruit, hot blood flooding over his hand and arm.

  He ripped his arm out, pulling a spray of dark, arterial blood with it. The blood painted his face, his neck, his chest. The ogre slumped forward, hitting the ground like a sack of wet grain, the Sword of Ecos clattering from his lifeless grip.

  Leeonir stood over him, gasping, blood dripping from his claws in steady rivulets. His body was a map of agony ribs broken, skin burned, muscles torn but the fire in his hand was louder than all of it, drowning out the pain.

  Around him, Mosiah continued to scream. The dragons continued to roar overhead, their shadows passing over the ruins. Smoke rose in thick columns, blotting out the sun.

  And Leeonir felt the thought that had destroyed his father begin to take root in his own mind, a poisonous seed that dug in deep.

  *Why am I failing again?*

  *Why am I not enough?*