Balur stared. He felt the skin of his face stretching, muscles in his cheeks and forehead tightening, his slit eyeballs dilating. He felt his eyes pushing forward, testing the limits of their sockets, all in an attempt to express the depth of his horror.
Before him, one by one, the Dragon Consortium landed on the dull burnt grass of the plain. Beneath his feet, the ground shook with each impact. They stood in a circle around the flaming ruins of the pay wagons.
Around the ruins of Will and Lette.
There was a great tearing inside him, an agonizing ripping of self; pain and sorrow and hate all fracturing in his guts. He wanted to drop to his knees, to scream at the night. He wanted to charge forward, to smash into those dragons, to bore into their hearts and drink their blood. He wanted to be immolated in their fire, a blazing signal fire for Lette’s memory.
Slowly, piece by piece, the wagons fell apart. A slab of paneling fell away. A wheel collapsed. An axle finally, inevitably shattered. A wagon dropped to the ground. Its roof caved in, slumped away. The blazing walls collapsed.
The fire was bright, a crackling yellow and white, hard to look at in the smothering darkness of the night and the clouds of Hallows’ Mouth. The dragons were brightly lit, their bellies glistening, their snaking necks shimmering. The scene was perfectly clear.
And so it was that everyone saw when the walls of the pay wagon collapsed, not golden coins spilling out into the night, not wages ready to be paid, not jewels sparkling in the gloom.
Instead they saw nothing but dull chunks of lead scattering across the landscape.
A great inhalation of breath. A gasp so great, so collective, that the wind actually caused the flames to flicker. Even the dragons seemed to gasp in that moment.
Quietly, ignorant of the attention placed upon it, the second wagon collapsed.
Dull chunks of lead rolled loose.
Balur didn’t understand. It made no sense to him. Why were the dragons paying their troops in lead?
But only a tiny piece of him cared. And it was too easily obliterated by the war raging in him between grief and hatred.
Murmurs arose from the Consortium army. A few shouts. Then cries of outrage. Anger.
“It was true!” cried out a voice, carried on the night’s wind.
Inside Balur, hatred won the war.
He let out a howl of rage, the purest, greatest battle cry of his life. A scream that ripped up through his gut and left him hollow. Then all that space filled with fire, with bile, with bloodlust. He charged. He charged still screaming, still doomed, not giving a single fuck. He was going to die, but he was going to die maiming the fuck out of some dragons.
One beast turned to look at him. An arrogant sneer on its face, marred only by the disbelief that something this insignificant, this profane should dare to challenge it. It sucked in its breath. Fire sparked at the back of its throat.
And then, falling out of nowhere, as inexplicable as a thunderbolt from the gods, a bronze spear sailed out of the air, and smashed into the scales above the dragon’s golden, glittering eye. A spark flared in the night where it struck. The spear sailed harmlessly away, glancing off the thick scale. But the dragon jerked its head. The storm of fire aimed at Balur became a stuttering, sparking cough, billowing harmlessly into the night.
Above the dragon a griffin rider wheeled his beast around. He was shaking his fist. His beast screamed. He seized another bronze spear, hurled it. It slashed down the dragon’s side, tearing a ragged hole in its wing.
The dragon screamed. A sound of shock. A sound of pain.
Balur stumbled to a halt. A Consortium soldier was attacking his masters. Balur didn’t understand what was happening.
Neither, it seemed, did much of the Consortium army. They all stared at the skies. And then there was another griffin rider beside the first. She swooped around the dragons. Her spear flashed through the air. A spark flared just above the dragon’s eye where it struck. The dragon roared again.
Then an arrow loosed suddenly out of the crowd, borne aloft by shouts of rage and anger. It punched a tiny hole in the wing of a black dragon. And while it couldn’t have felt like more than a gnat’s sting, that dragon too roared. Almost as much outrage as pain.
And then more arrows. Like the start of a rainstorm—those few drizzling drops. And then a lightning bolt, flung by one of the Consortium mages. And shouts of outrage and anger were the booming thunder that followed.
And the dragons roared, and twisted, and seemed to try to understand what was happening.
And then, suddenly, like a cresting wave breaking, the Consortium troops surged forward. There was no discipline to the charge. There was no cry from the sergeants, no long blast on the trumpet. And yet, as one, the entire Consortium army put their heads down and hurled themselves forward.
For a moment the dragons stood stunned. They did not—could not, perhaps—understand what was happening. For thirty years they had reigned with absolute power. Their citizens had been absolutely cowed, controlled through poverty and fear. For thirty years they had been untouchable. Monarchs. Despots. Gods.
And now they were not.
Around Balur, a cry arose. “For the prophet!” seemed to echo from every lung. A wave of sound smashing around Balur. And then the sound of feet. Ten thousand pairs of feet. His army swarmed around him, charged for the dragons.
Bronze spears flew through the air, punctured wings. Griffin’s smashed down against dragons’ backs, claws slashing. Lightning bolts crackled down, charring and hissing
But the Consortium’s hesitation lasted only a moment. The Dragons of Kondorra had not won this valley through backdoor deals, through mergers, or through buying out their competition. They had fought for this place. They had ripped it free of its formers owners. And they would not go down now without a fight.
Flames dug a trench through the oncoming troops. The red dragon opened its mouth and spewed an obscenity of roaring death that left crumbling black bodies in its wake, filling the air with the scent of roasting meat. The green dragon sprayed a wide arc of flame. Soldiers, unable to halt their charge, piled into the wall of fire. Nothing but ash emerged from the other side. The brown dragon vomited up great smoking balls of greasy fire that it hawked across the field of battle like catapult stones. They crashed down flinging burning bodies about like children’s toys.
Not all were killed outright. Some took a few moments, lying gasping as their skin sloughed off, melted anatomy exposed. Balur could see one woman reeling back, her forearm seared off, the wound neatly cauterized at the elbow. He couldn’t hear her screams over the cacophony of the battle.
He tried to work it all out. Everything that had happened. Everything that had led to here. The dragon’s wealth had been revealed as a lie. Every soldier in their army had seen it. They had seen it after a day of seeing the skull of a dead dragon paraded before him.
Gold and fear. Both removed. Just like Will said. The Consortium troops rising up against their masters. Just like Will had said.
And then it struck him. Really struck him. Like a punch to the solar plexus. No. Not as Will had said.
As Will had prophesized.
“Holy shit,” he said to himself.
And then he threw himself into the battle. With a smile on his face. With his teeth bared. With the broken arm of a clock raised high above his head. For the memory of Lette. For the promise he had made her that he would end a dragon. And ripping, and tearing, and snarling, he lost his perspective on the battle, became only a raging, ripping participant.
The fighting had intensified around the brown dragon. Its bloated body shortened the range of its sweeping claws. Its fire, lobbed away, let the soldiers get close. Plus it was an ugly motherfucker, squat body the color of excrement, with a sickly white underbelly. Balur tore toward it.
A griffin smashed into the back of the brown dragon’s head. Its beak slashed at one of the dragon’s massive eyes. Blood bloomed in the socket. Then the dragon clawed the creature free, disemboweled it with one long slash of its claws.
The brown dragon spread its wings, shrieked a roar so loud that men nearby dropped to the ground and clutched their helmets. Then a storm of spears fell. A contingent of soldiers cheered until the black dragon fell about them, ripping and tearing, gathering mouthfuls of them, scattering chunks around the battlefield.
But it was too late for the brown one. Its wings were a ruin. It beat the air with ragged flaps of flesh, and went nowhere. Troops were already climbing over each other to mount its back. They hacked at its flesh with swords, pikes, axes.
The brown howled, rolled over, crushed lives with its bulk. Armor was flattened. The men inside simply burst, a mush of muscle, bone, and blood squirting between the seams of plate mail. But the dragon’s white belly was exposed now, and men, undeterred climbed up, hacking, sawing.
The dragon’s flesh ruptured massively. It contained an ocean of blood, a mile of spilling slippery guts. Its screams sounded like the sky tearing. Flame gushed out of its mouth, spilled out the spreading seam in its stomach. Its bowels burst into crackling fire. Men fell to the floor screaming, covering in flaming shit. The brown dragon writhed, its death throes ending yet more lives.
And then suddenly it was still. Suddenly it was dead.
For a moment the whole battlefield seemed to quake with the impact of the moment. The dragons—mouths full of flame and blood, claws in the guts of their foes; the soldiers—spears poised ready for launch, blades caught in scales; they hesitated for a moment. Battle cries and roars died away.
It had happened. The unthinkable, the impossible.
The people of Kondorra had risen up and killed a dragon. They could all see it. They all knew it. Man and dragon alike. It could be done.
Balur felt it like electricity. A tremble in his legs, his guts. He could feel the blood pulsing faster in his veins, racing toward some crescendo. Some howl of rage, and fear, and joy.
Then the battle was rejoined, harder and faster, and more ferocious than before. The dragons battling for their lives, the men fighting for lives they thought they’d already lost.
Flame lit the night. Claws rent the air. The heavens spat lightning. The trolls made it to the circle of battle, closed around the yellow dragon. Their massive clubs fell, smashing through pale scales, making black blood spit up from ruptures in the flesh. The dragon rose spitting and yipping, letting out curiously canine barks. It hissed out flame in white-hot, scorching streaks, fire that ate through flesh and bone, slicing through bodies like a blade six feet wide.
It took to the air, the yellow dragon, rising on broad wings, shrieking in outrage and pain, black blood streaking down its pale sides, falling like rain on the troops below. A few men still clung to its sides, still hacking away, futile and mad. One by one they lost their grip, fell to the ground like bombs full of meat.
Fire lanced down, scribbled murder on the battlefield. Soldiers flung spears. They fell harmlessly short. The dragon bellowed victory.
The catapult stone caught it completely unawares. Launched recklessly out of darkness and into darkness, the vast chunk of stone sailed through the air, then smashed into the neck of the beast, ripping through scale, muscle, bone, tearing a great gaping hole in its throat.
The writhing dragon went limp instantly. Blood poured in great gouts, steaming and spitting, a waterfall bursting forth from the night sky. Below, the weight of it smashed men to the ground, turned earth to mud.
And then it fell. All its glory and grace gone. A sack of meat and shit—the dragon smashed into the ground. Dirt and mud and the broken bodies of soldiers flew, all caught in its collapse. A great tidal wave of its own blood sprayed in all directions.
And then it simply lay there, dead on the ground.
A great cheer arose from the lung of every man, woman, and child still able to breathe upon that battlefield. The sound swallowed Balur, chewed him, and spat him out, reeling from the magnitude of what was happening.
What was happening?
They were winning.
Were they winning?
The dead lay around like felled wheat. Everything was fire and blood. Two dragons were down but three remained. Shock and awe was slipping away through blood-slick fingers. The tide of battle teetered on a blade’s edge, on the point of a dragon’s claw.
The red dragon burst free of a gnarled knot of soldiers swarming over it. It caught women and men beneath its massive paws, trampled them to the ground. It rose up, roaring, belching fire, launched itself into the air, to take the place of the yellow.
Catapult stones went flying, but the red was wise to that now. It twisted out of the way of the first, the second. They crashed down into the human army, obliterating life, smearing it across the mud. The dragon caught the third stone, spun with the weight of it, hurled it down to the ground. Screams rose from frail human lungs.
The green dragon arched up out of the battlefield, swept up in an arc, dripping blood and bodies. It streaked low across the field of battle, arrows clattering off its thick scales. Fire lashed out of its mouth, swallowing the fringe of the battlefield. First one catapult went up in flame, then a second, and another. It left a line of five pyres at the edge of the field.
The black stayed on the ground, pacing in a circle. The wall of flame rose around it, a perfect circle, growing higher and higher. Spears, and arrows, and men were all immolated.
The red came crashing down to land, using its own body as a battering ram. Lines of soldiers tried to break, to turn, to run. Bloodthirsty comrades pushed them forward. Both groups died messy deaths. The red dragon kicked off for the sky once more.
The head of the black dragon lashed out through its circle of fire, dragged mouthfuls of screaming soldiers back.
The green swept back and forth, breathing fire the whole while, like a child erasing chalk from a board.
Then the griffins fell upon it. There were fewer of them now. Perhaps half of the force that had started the battle. But they were still a black clot of feathers, rage, and claws that swept out of the night and landed en masse on the dragon’s back. Their beaks rose and fell. Their claws peeled back great skeins of scale and flesh. The green dragon screamed, roared, immolated its own body in great gasping streams of fire, but it fell to the ground before all the griffins did, nothing more than a chunk of meat.