Page 258 of The Wild Prince's Favorite
“Kassein,” she whimpered again between her tears.
But then, he let go of her hand, barked a command, and Kein took off. Alezya barely had a second to brace herself before they shot into the sky. The force of the ascent pressed her back, the wind howling in her ears as rain lashed against her skin. Below, Kassein and the warriors shrank into a blur of frantic movement beneath the cover of the trees. She sucked in a deep breath, her chest tight. This was what she had wanted—to be part of this battle, to fight alongside them. Now wasn’t the time to panic. Especially not when she was riding a dragon.
Alezya willed the hysteria away, forced herself into taking a deep breath, and angrily wiped her tears and rain-saturated cheeks.
“Let’s go see that Wailing Rift,” she muttered.
Perhaps Kein heard her, because the dragon replied with a deafening growl that shook the area awake. She saw birds take off in fright ahead of them now that the largest predator of all was roaming the skies. Those weren’t her prey, though.
Focusing on shifting her hips to navigate Kein and keep a tight hold on those spines or whatever it was that she could grab on the dragon’s neck, Alezya only took seconds to get used to riding alone. It wasn’t as smooth as Kassein’s riding, and she missed his warm and reassuring presence behind her, but she was pretty confident she could direct Kein by shifting her weight or shouting what she wanted the dragon to do.
It didn’t take long until she saw the Wailing Rift, and to Alezya’s horror, the scary tales she’d heard as a child were shockingly accurate.
This place was unlike any landscape she had seen in the mountains, and she thought she’d seen it all. But the Wailing Rift wasn’t a valley nor a pass. It looked like the giant maw of a starving beast carved in black rocks and ice. The mere sight of it sent a chill down her spine.
It looked like a twisted, fractured gorge, a jagged crevice of blackened rock and treacherous snow stretching for miles. Knife-sharp cliffs extended like broken teeth at unpredictable angles, and she could guess just as many thin and treacherous crevices were waiting to lure men into the darkness of its depths under the thin, unreliable coating of ice and snow. She couldn’t believe this was the place her father had picked.
One had to be a madman to go in there willingly, let alone elect it as a battlefield! How deep was this place? She couldn’teven see the end of it; its depth was too dark, the shadows and angles too hard to figure out.
There was a howling wind haunting this rift along with an unexplainable, eerie mist, and suddenly, the tales she’d heard as a child of deceased gods haunting this place didn’t seem so far-fetched. This place looked like a centuries-old graveyard in the making, a death trap of danger waiting to lure the living. And they were about to send hundreds of men into this hellhole. Her father had chosen the worst battlefield, not just for them but for everyone.
Alezya was horrified; many men from both sides would die not in battle but impaled on those jagged rocks or swallowed by those crevices. There was definitely no place for Kein to land or even get close to. With its humongous size, Kassein’s dragon would clip its wings or impale itself before it got close to any human down there.
Alezya was horrified by this nightmare of a battlefield before her, but it was gradually replaced with fury when she recalled this had been her father’s choice and the choice of the madmen who had followed on his warpath. Those men were so blinded by their fear of a dragon that they would willingly march to their own deaths in this antechamber of hell.
They were so obsessed with winning that they never once considered peace. They wanted this war, and they were ready to let this land, and the gods that haunted it, reap their lives and those of their brothers for it.
She considered turning around, warning Kassein that this was madness and too many people were going to die here, but it was too late; on both ends of this gorge, she could see men descending at impressive speed through the cracks and tortuous paths, converging toward its depth.
It took her a few seconds to realize that it wasn’t just the wind that reached her ears; it was now combined with the voicesof hundreds of men, long battle cries echoing through the rocks as they all ran toward their enemy.
It wasn’t just down the gorge either; as Kein did another loop around the Wailing Rift, Alezya realized men were descending from all sides, some emerging out of secret caves and others negotiating their descent as fast as they could while trying not to break their necks before they made it to the battlefield. When she saw the first man trip, fall, and break his body like a twig on the rocks, she grimaced, her heart sinking.
This was merely a glimpse of how dozens of men were going to lose their lives today because of her father’s madness.
“We need to stop them,” she hissed.
The dragon roared with her, momentarily startling some of the clans. She saw some nearby groups freeze and glance up, wary of the predator flying above their heads. One group that had to be their allies barely seemed to flinch, while the others were either running to hide or directing their weapons toward Kein, bows and other throwing devices emerging and being aimed at the dragon.
That was precisely what Alezya needed; she prompted Kein in the direction of a mountain in which a disorganized clan was freaking out and trying to run inside, and as if it had read her mind, the dragon roared and furiously ripped the mountain’s flank with its claws, making dozens of rocks break and fall, creating a landslide and an avalanche all at the same time before it took off again.
Alezya felt proud; she wouldn’t be so useless if she could block some of her father’s allies. She knew Ekata’s plan to try and use their allies to surround their enemies, but clans were converging from all sides to join the battle, and now, it was up to her to prevent their enemies from advancing and let their allies through.
Again, Alezya had Kein speed up, doing a quick tour of the area while she tried to identify friend from foe; she had limited knowledge of the foreign clans, but their reaction to Kein’s arrival was all she needed. The difference was so evident between their allies, who trusted the dragon wouldn’t harm them, and her father’s allies, who systematically panicked anytime they were near. Even Kein seemed to pick up on their fear, as the dragon attacked any clan that showed weakness without needing Alezya to prompt it.
Their duo was becoming almost symbiotic, as if Kein could read her mind and understood perfectly the slightest shift in her movements.
Alezya did try to shout commands, but by now, they were riding through a thunderstorm, and most of her voice was carried away by the strong winds, the thunder, and the heavy rain. It was bad enough riding in that cataclysmic weather; she could barely think about what it had to be like down below. After they’d wrecked yet another ridge, she decided it was time to check on the battlefield, and she and Kein turned around, risking their lowest ride yet.
Alezya was nervous about accidentally clipping one of Kein’s wings on the mountains or the dragon impaling itself on an unseen cliff. She tried to prevent the dragon from going too low, but she had to check how the battle was going, and the weather made it harder to see what was going on down there. It took her a lot to convince Kein not to approach too close as Kassein’s dragon was far bolder, while she looked for its owner.
It was absolute chaos down there.
She was glad she hadn’t seen when both sides had collided because now, it looked like a sea of men, and she could hardly believe it wasn’t a bloodbath already. There were a lot of people lying still, injured, dead, or dying, and she tried not to thinkabout it while she focused on the people she wanted to see alive and standing.
Thankfully, it didn’t take her long to spot Kassein; his bronze coverings were shining, his stature amongst the largest of all, and from what she could see, he was effortlessly dominating his surroundings.
There was a large area of defeated men around him, and he stood at the epicenter like a god of war, leaving a trail of death and destruction in his wake. Alezya had Kein hover in place while she eyed her lover as if she needed to see for herself that he was holding his own.
