Archerax
Castle Kellar, North Kell
The rising heat of a sea of fire filled Archerax’s wings. The city’s southern quarter was a steaming caldera of heat-fused rock and running metal. Such strongly built stone buildings as still stood were blackened and brittle. The screams of those within had brought a flicker of warmth to Archerax’s vast heart, but one that had faded with every ponderously slow beat until it was cool and hard once more.
He swooped low.
These were the children’s children of those who had stood against Hellspanth and Avox and Gehennor and who had seen Margath the Unkind so cruelly slain.
No man or woman would be left unburnt.
This he had vowed, and this would be done.
A company of archers scurried like rodents in the charred bones of what appeared to be a temple to one of the human gods. Black lips pulled back over hard gray teeth and steam emerged. Human gods. The idea amused him. A lazy sweep of his wings showered the ruin in sparks and embers. The humans sheltering there screamed, dropping their weapons in favor of beating on their burning clothing and rolling about in the soil like the ferreting little creatures they were. He chuckled, smoke pouring from his nostrils as he peeled right and climbed.
He could not be harmed by bow and arrow. The mightiest lance thrust could not pierce his scales, nor the broadest shield withstand his breath. The larger spear-throwers that the humans, towards the end of the Wars of Steel, had learned to construct could do him injury if he were to allow it, but they were unwieldy and slow. Humanity was not the only race in Mennara capable of adaptation. Archerax had learned well the lessons of the last war. To keep his distance. To spread his terror wide. To overrun the spear-throwers with hybrid soldiers and disposable allies, and only then to commit his own wrath to the fray.
He engulfed a towering three-floored stronghouse in flame as he soared over it. Its roof rose on a white pillar of fire, a hard rain of rubble and brick crushing the soldiers that sought belatedly to flee the neighboring buildings or clogged the roads beneath.
Kellar was a place of deep gray and grinding cold. It burned reluctantly, but burn it assuredly would.
This, too, he had vowed, and this too would be done.
He bellowed his triumph to the city below him, shattering windows and bending steel, the human legions directly underneath him clapping their hands to their ears and dropping to their knees in terror.
“I am Archerax the Great. Archerax the Terrible. Kneel, for I am your death. I am your god now.”
The green dragon that flapped on moss-covered wings alongside him gave an eager trumpet of her own. Golden eyes glittered madly from beneath a deep ridge of emerald scales, flecked by silver rheum and as good as blind. Her nostrils trembled as she took in the excitements of the burning city. The feral creature was barely intelligent, another wastrel of Margath’s legacy, like the hybrids that had worshipped and feared her as a god-queen of the wood for the past eight hundred years, abandoned as a hatchling when Shaarina Rex had recalled the Dragonlords to the Heath. Archerax had dubbed her Grievax, for that had been the name of her mother, whom the children of Kell had brought down over the forest and been too fearful to pursue, not even for the runebound shards she had borne with her to ground. It was a name that the dragon appeared to revel in, though what she had called herself in the centuries before, if the need or notion of doing so had ever even arisen, Archerax did not know. Or care.
“Spread devastation,” he commanded. “Draw out the Dragonslayer’s Heir or burn him out.”
Grievax hissed her assent, and with a turbulent wingbeat turned herself away, descending gracelessly on the inner city.