cause for grief-there was a clear advantage that came to Deathfyre, heir to the Dark Queen’s empire-but it was a wrong that called for revenge.
Deathfyre wheeled to pursue the fleeing dragons, but he saw several silver shapes slashing toward him, and his instincts compelled him to protect himself. Though all of them were small, they flew with deadly purpose.
Twisting like a corkscrew in the air, Deathfyre whipped his neck toward the enemy attackers. Jaws gaping, he belched a cloud of roaring flame, a billowing fireball of death that wrapped two of the silver shapes in its killing embrace.
Pushing down with hard strokes of his wings, Deathfyre fought for altitude, trying to avoid the scorched bodies that would tumble out of the dissipating ball of fire-but there were no bodies! The remaining silver serpent curled around, and the red barely pulled his wing out of the way of a vicious blast of frost. He saw that this young silver was a cripple, that its rear legs were weak and shriveled, but that did nothing to tame the deadliness of its breath weapon. Deathfyre tumbled backward, out of control, with a burning pain of ice freezing his tail.
At the same time, he knew how the crippled silver had eluded him. It had been the simple spell of the mirror image, an enchantment Deathfyre himself had known since his first hundred winters. Yet when it was used against him, the simple trick had fooled him completely. There had been only one silver dragon, not three, and his lethal fire had been wasted against a pair of magical impostors!
Infuriated, he swept after the silver as that gleaming serpent flew close to the ground, carving a wide arc back toward the battle raging in the skies. Some of the wyrmlings had escaped, aided by magical speed, but most of the brood had remained to fight. This silver newt was small, little more than half of Deathfyre’s awesome length, but he proved to be a surprisingly fast flier. The withering of his body clearly did not extend to his wings. Straining to the limit, Deathfyre found that he could close the distance only gradually. Finally he breathed, spewing a hellish cloud of fire that surrounded the impudent silver for a searing, fatal instant. The red dragon was already wheeling away as the wrinkled, charred carcass tumbled from the sky.
Clouds of dragons whirled through the sky overhead. A young bronze tumbled, horribly slashed, while blues and blacks caught a pair of coppers in a deadly crossfire of acid and lightning. Fire and smoke drifted through the air, and flashes of flame and clouds of green and noxious gas added a surreal beauty to the scene.
And still more chromatic dragons winged toward the fight, with vengeful challenges ringing through the air before them. Several greens dived from the heights, sweeping toward the smoldering patch of sky, and a wedge of whites, laboring hard to gain altitude, winged speedily closer, their pale, serpentine forms standing out clearly against the mountainous landscape to the north.
Another metal dragon, this one a golden female, plunged downward, writhing and shrieking in pain. As the pathetic creature tumbled past, Deathfyre saw that her entire face had been burned away by a blast of black dragon acid. Another gold, this one a larger male, roared in and torched one of the blacks with a breath of fireball, but then the gilded wyrm was forced to flee for his life as the other blacks whirled about in furious pursuit.
Then suddenly the skies were empty of Paladine’s dragons. A few of the metal serpents had buzzed over the high ridges, scattering away from the mountain valley. They fled in full panic, knowing their clan had been decimated, and for now the chromatic dragons let them go.
Looking down, Deathfyre saw dragons of every color lying in the ghastly stillness of death. The battle had littered the valley floor with corpses, great shapes scattered like bright scars on the ground itself. Here a blue wing twitched, or there a copper tail lashed back and forth, but for the most part the serpents on the valley floor were utterly and irrevocably slain. Even from this height, the awful wounds inflicted by breath and fang and claw were clearly visible, leaving great rends in the scaly bodies.
And central to this killing ground was the mighty golden serpent, Aurican. It pleased Deathfyre to know that not only had the mighty patriarch perished, but also that fewer than a dozen of the metal dragons had escaped the carnage. The few that had fled were no threat for now. They would be hunted down and killed at his leisure.
His mother’s teachings, the words of Takhisis herself, came to Deathfyre in a clear flash: Find your strongest enemy and kill him…
Now, with the dragons of Paladine defeated, he knew where that enemy lay. The power of magic still screened Silvanost, and it was time to reduce that stronghold.
There would be time for the metal wyrmlings later.
Chapter 26
2693 PC
The surviving nestmates gathered in a dark, marble-walled gorge in the tangle of the Kharolis foothills. There were but ten of them, young dragons of metal who had departed the grotto in desperate, magically enhanced haste, with memories of violence and death licking at their heels.
Callak and Auricus were the last to land, after insuring that the evil dragons made no pursuit. The pair had circled for a long time over the Kharolis Mountains while the others tucked their wings and dived to the shelter of the secluded gorge. They all understood that there would be no returning to their ancient lair. Once on the ground, the remaining dragons of the Platinum Father could only huddle miserably together for warmth and comfort.
“Aurican is dead,” Auric whispered, his voice numb with disbelief. “He died so that we could live.”
“He was so wise, so mighty,” wailed Blythe, the golden female who now coiled dejectedly beside Auricus. “How will we survive without him?”
“And so many of our nestmates…” Dazzall said numbly. “I saw Flash perish after he tore the wings from a blue.”
“And Agon,” Daria said, her voice catching. “He led that mighty red away from me… from all of us.”
“Ten dragons of metal… we are all that remain.” It was Callak who called for the attention of the others. He nodded his silver head sadly, reflecting on the brothers and sisters they all had lost.
“Are we safe here?” asked Daria, the only other silver to remain alive.
“We cannot know for sure,” replied Auricus, in tones so deep that he sounded startlingly like his sire. “It may be that Deathfyre or another has tracked our flight, knowing we came here to hide and lick our wounds.”
“At least they felt the sting of our claws, the bite of our fangs!” asserted Tharn with a menacing growl. “I saw Arjen kill two blues… before he perished.”
He sighed, lowering his sharp, angular head to the ground in acknowledgment of the truth they all understood: In a few short minutes over the Valley of Paladine, the good dragons had been dealt a devastating defeat. It had been a tragedy of unprecedented and far-reaching proportions, culling most of their number, slaying their patriarch, reducing these nestlings to a band of pathetic survivors.
True, they had killed some of the Dark Queen’s wyrms, perhaps as many as they themselves had lost. But that, in the balance, still left scores of chromatic dragons, many of them fully mature, arrayed against these five pairs of young serpents.
The dragons of Paladine finally slept, abandoning themselves to torpor. A sunrise and sunset passed, but the nestmates didn’t stir. Instead, they rested, allowing their wounds to heal… but even the passage of time couldn’t quell the rising of despair.
Daria awakened them all with a braying cry of alarm. The silver female regarded her nine nestmates seriously.
“I have had a dream,” she said, her tone low, awestricken. She looked at Callak, then at the others, shaking her head in wonder. “I saw a great Spear of Paladine. Someday there will come to us a weapon that will allow us to battle the dragons of evil.”
“Where do we find this weapon?” growled Callak.
“It will find us, but not for many hundreds of winters. Until then, we must leave this place.” Daria looked at each of the wyrmlings, and the finality of her tone was enough to quell most objections.
“Leave the High Kharolis?” Auricus was the one who voiced the disbelief felt by all of the young dragons.
“New people will claim the grotto-not our enemies, but not our neighbors, either. They will mine these mountains and build great cities on the lake. And we must be gone.”
