Page 49 of Echoes of Fire

There was no sign of the vial. I could yell at myself for wasting it later. If I survived.

Where the hell was Rath?

A hiss rippled through the arena—sharper, hungrier than the lizards.

I turned slowly, dread pooling in my gut. The ground beneath my boots trembled as a new shadow uncoiled from a deep tunnel, its scales clicking like a death rattle. It was like a living earthquake: pulsing, breathing, lethal.

I backpedaled, ankle screaming where melted boot leather fused to burnt flesh. The creature rising from the pit wasn’t lizard—not with those segmented metallic plates rippling along its thirty-foot length, not with the dozen articulated legs tipped in hooked barbs that screeched against stone.

Its head swung toward me on a serpentine neck, faceted eyes reflecting a thousand fractured images of my trembling form. Molten veins pulsed beneath pulsing yellow scales, casting hellish light through the joints in its armor. The stench of rotting sulfur and singed bone clawed at my nostrils as it hissed, spined tail whipping behind it in arcs that carved gouges in the arena floor.

A roar split the air—not the beast’s, but familiar.

Mine.

Rath dropped from the ceiling like a comet trailing smoke, wings folding tight against his back as he landed. Twin lava-forged swords blazed in his claws, their edges white-hot as he landed between me and the monstrosity. Sand vaporized where his boots struck, the shockwave knocking me to my knees. His scales glowed with an infernal intensity, veins of orange light flickering in the cracks along his arms and shoulders.

“Stay behind me!” he barked, voice rough, scorching. I’d never been happier to be yelled at.

The wyrm struck.

Rath’s swords met its jaws in a shower of sparks. I scrambled backward as acid-green blood rained down, eating pockmarks into the sand. The wyrm’s barbed legs scissored wildly, shearing off chunks of Rath’s armor. He didn’t flinch, driving a blade upward through its palpitating throat. A gush of fluorescent ichor splattered the closest rock face, sizzling on contact.

“Orla! The pillar!”

I turned toward his shout just as a wyrmling—smaller, faster—spewed liquid fire from above. Heat slapped my shoulders, singeing the ends of my hair even worse than before. I dove behind a stalagmite, fists clenched. The stone exploded behind me in a shower of fragments, shrapnel scraping against me.

Rath’s wing clipped my side as he soared past, snatching the wyrmling mid-leap. They crashed into the arena wall in a tangle of scales and snapping jaws. I didn’t wait—I snatched up a fallen barb the size of my forearm, its edge still dripping wyrm blood that sizzled against my palm.

“Stubborn human!” Rath roared, pinning the wyrmling with a knee to its sparking thorax. His free sword hovered at its shuddering neck. “I said stay?—”

The sand between us bulged.

We moved in together—Rath yanking his blade free, me driving my stolen barb downward. The emerging wyrm pup died with a wet gurgle, acidic blood spraying my forearms. I barely felt the new burns, adrenaline numbing everything but the will to keep fighting.

Rath’s claw closed around my bicep, hauling me toward a crumbling stone column. He wrapped his arms around me, tail securing me in place, and launched us up. The ground below vanished, swirling steam and predator eyes glaring with ravenous malice.

But there was no hope of escaping the arena. We were closed in, and I didn’t need to be told that the only way out was to win. Whatever winning meant to the Drakarn.

Rath carefully set me down on top of one of the pillars, obsidian shards scraping the soles of my boots. “Stay. Here.” His voice thrummed with command.

“Not arguing!” I shouted back, though my pulse hammered in protest.

But there was barely any sanctuary on top of the pillar, just crumbling rock and a panoramic view of certain death. Rath’s wings blotted out the arena’s hellish glow as he dove back toward the writhing wyrm. I stood alone with the sizzle of my burnt flesh and the acidic reek of dead reptiles filling my lungs, the noise of the crowd rolling in thunderous waves.

Something clicked beneath me.

I looked down. The stone under my boots swam with shadows—no, not shadows.Scales.Dozens of them, rippling up the pillar in a shimmering wave. Snakes. Their arrowhead skulls broke the surface first, lidless eyes burning with phosphorescent hate, forked tongues tasting my terror.

I dug in my boot, heart pounding like a war drum, yanking my dagger from my boot just in time.

The first strike came from behind. I pivoted, the snake’s fangs grazing my hip as I brought the blade down in a wild arc. Metal bit through scale and bone, severing a skull that rolled hissing into the abyss. Acid blood sprayed my wrist—agony, then a terrifying numbness that spread like wildfire.

They swarmed.

I became a creature of instinct—jabbing, sneering, kicking when teeth closed around my boot. A tail lashed my ribs. Another snake coiled around my thigh, its body searing like a brand. The sound of them—tangled hisses, the scrape of scaleson rock—flooded my ears, drowning out the roar of the crowd for a moment.

The world tilted, and the ledge crumbled.

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