Page 25 of Of Empires and Dust

Just as they had before, the kicks came swift and unyielding until she was coughing blood and spewing vomit onto the stone. When the guards were done and the door creaked closed behind them, Kira lay on the floor, battered and bloody.

She curled up on her side, pulling her knees close to her chest, and sobbed. Every piece of her screamed in agony. Her nostrils were so filled with blood she could barely breathe.

After a few minutes, she dragged herself upright in opposition to her body’s protests. Even just holding herself in that position threatened to make her pass out. It was then, as her head pounded like virtuk hooves on stone, she saw a thin strip of fabric on the ground.

With a grunt, she dragged herself across the floor, dropping flat on her stomach as she reached the fabric, her arms refusing to keep pulling her weight.

Her breaths grew heavy, her eyelids drooping as consciousness slipped from her grasp. Kira shook her head, letting out a short breath, then lifted the piece of fabric into her hand.

In the dim light that crept in around the doorframe, she could barely make out the fabric’s crimson colouring. She knew its touch: the smooth linen of her Queensguards’ cloaks.

Kira had personally hand-picked every member of her guard. They had been family to her, and now even they had betrayed her. The thought called that primal fury back to the fore, the pain ebbing at the corners of her mind. But then, as her bloody hands shook, she noticed something: the fabric had not been torn, but neatly cut.

It had not been ripped free in the fighting. It had been cut and placed – with a little haste, by the looks of it, but intentionally.

They wanted me to find it.

Kira allowed herself to drop back onto the stone, her muscles crying out in relief. She drew heavy breaths, every inch of her body throbbing, her head pounding, and her right eye swollen shut.

But as she lay there, her fingers tightening around the strip of red linen, a smile crept onto Kira’s face.

They were coming for her.

Chapter 7

Guardians

6thDay of the Blood Moon

Aravell – Winter, Year 3081 After Doom

Calen stoodin the eyrie connected to Alura. In the distance, the Blood Moon’s crimson light sprayed over the rocky cliffs, igniting the thin clouds in an incandescent fury.

Before him, Valerys’s snow-white scales glistened, tinted with a ruby hue. In the dragon’s attempt to fly to Calen, he had reopened several wounds sustained in the battle and now groaned in discomfort as the elven Healers pushed themselves to exhaustion trying to sew the injuries back together with the Spark.

The four elves applied healing salves to the open wounds on Valerys’s underbelly, wings, and legs, threads of each elemental strand swirling around them. From what Calen understood, the concoctions helped to take the burden off the Healers, allowing them to work for longer. Even with the salves, lethargy seepedinto their movements with each passing moment, the drain sapping at them as they worked.

From what Vaeril had told him, when it came to healing with the Spark, the larger a creature, the more complex their workings, the deeper the wounds, the more energy it required to heal. Dragons, as Vaeril had explained to him, were the most difficult of all, and Valerys was not the only dragon that had sustained deep wounds during the fighting.

Off to Calen’s right, on another of the Eyrie’s platforms, the two surviving Rakina dragons – Varthear and Sardakes – lay curled together, enormous masses of blue and black scales.

“I told you not to come,” Calen whispered as he looked into Valerys’s lavender eyes. He cast his gaze over the dragon, feeling Valerys’s pain in every breath. Calen hated seeing him like this. “You need to rest.”

Valerys lifted his head and shook his neck – much to the dismay of the elven Healers – letting out a warm breath of air that smelled of smouldering coals, a defiant rumble in his chest. He pushed his snout into Calen’s chest with enough force that Calen had to brace himself to stop from falling backwards. No words were needed. Calen could feel Valerys’s intent:you should not have put yourself in danger.

“Faenir wouldn’t have harmed me.”

The images that flashed in Calen’s mind let him know that Valerys disagreed with that assessment. Would Faenir have done him harm? It was near-impossible to imagine, but the wolfpine was different than Calen remembered. Larger, more savage. There had been something in his eyes as he stood over Ella – a ferocity.

Calen let out an exhausted sigh. So much had changed in the last two years. Everything he had known about the world had turned on its head. Why was it so hard for him to believe Faenir was any different? Probably because he had known Faenir sincethe wolfpine had been nothing but a pup, small enough to hold in the crook of his elbow. Calen remembered the first night that tiny ball of fur sat in his arms by the fire. Faenir had spent the whole night whimpering, so much so that Calen had left his bed and slept on the floor with the pup all night, and every night thereafter for a week.

Allowing the memory to linger, he rested one hand on Valerys’s snout, then ran his other along Valerys’s scales. Calen’s fingertips slipped into the cuts and gouges that marked the dragon’s body, tracing over the rough edges. Valerys’s scales had once been smooth as polished stone, and he, too, had been as small as Faenir had been. That seemed so long ago now.

He looked down at the discoloured scar on the back of his own hand where the lance of stone had ripped straight through his palm during the battle for the city. The Healers had offered to rid him of the mark – it had been fresh enough to heal fully. He’d been tempted, but ultimately, he’d refused, just as Dann had when the Fade had struck him with lightning in Belduar. Some scars were worth keeping, if only to remind a person of how close they’d come to Heraya’s embrace.

Lucky didn’t come close to encapsulating what Calen had been the night of the attack. Had Tivar and Avandeer not appeared, he and Valerys would have been ripped to pieces.

If Ella hadn’t roused the Rakina dragons. If they hadn’t caught Eríthan by surprise. If the Dragonguard hadn’t been so sure of their advantage.

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