Scarbeake watched his subordinate fall and clicked his beak. He'd been gauging the dragons since the fight began. Their speed, their range, their limitations. Sky dragons were fast and technical, but they were light. Built for agility, and not endurance. Their hollow bones gave them speed but robbed them of the mass needed for sustained grappling. And their breath, while devastating in bursts, required them to inhale between volleys. A half-second vulnerability that a patient predator could exploit.
"Formation Talon!" he commanded. "Three high, three low. Box them in. Make them breathe, then hit them in the inhale."
The rocs obeyed, accustomed to cooperative hunting. Six of the largest repositioned themselves in a three-dimensional cage around the combat zone; three above, three below, talons spread wide to catch anything that dove for escape.
Velpyre recognized the trap instantly. "They're corralling us. If we breathe to push out, the high group fires into the channel. If we dive, the low group grapples."
"Then we don't breathe out," Korrin said, and did something that made even Scarbeake hesitate.
He inhaled.
The sky dragon's chest expanded, allowing his ribcage to flex outward as the specialized air sacs unique to his kind inflated to maximum capacity. The air around him thinned visibly; clouds dispersed moisture evaporated oxygen depleted in a sphere that expanded outward in a temporary vaccuum.
The rocs in the high formation felt it first. The air beneath their wings vanished. Their massive wingspans became useless sails with nothing to catch. They dropped with their feathers scrabbling at thinning air that offered no stability.
"What... what is this?" one of them squawked, tumbling past Korrin's position close enough to see the sky dragon's feathers vibrating. His body had become a living compression chamber, holding enough pressurized atmosphere to level a mountain range.
Scarbeake knew what was coming. He'd had once heard stories from the elder rocs. tales of sky dragons who could swallow storms whole and spit them back as hurricanes. "SCATTER!" he screamed. "SCATTER NOW! HE'S GOING TO...!"
Korrin exhaled everything at once.
The shockwave hit the disoriented rocs like a wall of solid air. A sphere sent them tumbling end over end, with their electrical reserves discharging uselessly into the blast front. The energy dissipated into static that made the clouds glow briefly violet.
Scarbeake, further from the epicenter than his flock, was merely buffeted rather than broken. He rode the shockwave's edge, angling his body to shed momentum rather than absorb it. When the blast passed, he found himself three kilometers from where he'd started, his feathers were in disarray but his wings intact.
He looked back at the three sky dragons hovering in the center of atmosphere. Maintaining a bubble of calm in the churning sky where Korrin's detonation had swept every cloud away. Tessava's crest was raised in challenge. Velpyre's eyes were calm and assessing. Korrin's chest still heaved from the exertion, but his posture radiated readiness.
The remaining rocs, regrouped behind Scarbeake in ragged formation. Several nursed dislocated joints while others had shed so many feathers to the shockwave that their flight was labored and listing. None of them had enough stored charge to throw so much as a spark.
Scarface met Tessava's gaze across the divide.
"There'll be other nests," he announced to his flock, loud enough for the dragons to hear. "The fowl with the ice trick won't always be here. And these eggs won't always have guardians."
"Come back anytime, feather duster," Tessava called after him, her voice bright. "We'll be here. We chose to stay."
Scarface banked northward without responding, his flock falling into a ragged V behind him. But he paused once, turning his scarred head to look back at the remains of the leviathan carcass below. He regretted the feast he was abandoning and at the fae dancing on their rivers of leaves along the lake's edge, untouched and unconcerned by the violence above.
"Mark those three," he said quietly to his nearest lieutenant. "The fast one, the tactician, and the bomb. I want to know their hunting patterns, their sleep cycles, their weaknesses. Scavengers are patient creatures." His beak cracked in what passed for a smile. "And patience is how empires outlast their dragons."
The rocs disappeared into the northern clouds, leaving behind only the smell of ozone and singed feathers.
Tessava landed on the highest remaining peak, her siblings flanking her. She looked north, where the great migration had vanished, then south, where the rocs had retreated, and finally down at the abandoned nests they had sworn to protect.
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"Well," Korrin said, settling his ruffled feathers with a shake that sent frost cascading from his plumage. "That's one flock. How many more do you think will come?"
Velpyre's eyes tracked the horizon in every direction. "All of them," she said simply. "Every scavenger on Yara knows what the dragons have left. We are three, guarding the bones of an empire. The day we submit to urniel would never arrive."
Tessava's crest rose as her voice carried.
"Then we'd better get creative."
Dominating the horizon beyond the lake rose crown of trees so ancient and vast that they had grown together into a living monument the size of a mountain. The massive trunks, each one large enough to house entire cities, were woven together in an intricate braid that spiraled skyward. Their branches intertwined so completely that it was impossible to tell where one tree ended and another began. Leaves the size of house roofs formed a canopy that caught clouds in its uppermost reaches, and deep within the wooden labyrinth, glimpses of golden light suggested chambers and passages carved by time itself.
This arboreal crown had witnessed the rise and fall of countless dragon generations, and now it stood sentinel over lands suddenly empty of their great winged stewards. "Let's come back after the next departure. I know where an elder buried itself. It passed below crack jaws crevice last week and she's been gorging herself ever since". Scarbeake said.
The rocs, masters of the air themselves, responded with their own aerial prowess. They banked and wheeled in tight formations, their keen eyes tracking the dragons' movements as they attempted to outmaneuver their reptilian opponents. "One should only be greedy on thier last day. Let's enjoy our spoils for the day young ones. Spegier jested. The faster rocs managed to evade the dragons' lunges, rising on thermals and striking from above with their massive talons. The elite and youngsters eager to prove thier worth disembarked quickly after eating thier fill. It was mostly the rebellious teens that grew overconfident. "Who knew basilisk can fly, maybe uncle can remind Spegier that we've outnumber them by twenty each." One particularly massive roc, heavy with stolen eggs, couldn't gain altitude quickly enough. a camouflaged dragon burst from what appeared to be a boulder-strewn outcrop, jaws clamping down on the bird's neck in a spray of crimson feathers.
In the aftermath of the aerial battle, the survivors head towards the south while the Rocs settled in the nest of the last king Xerxes. a whirlpool of living fire and molten stone that spiraled inward. The flames danced in millions of colors, blues and greens threading through the traditional reds and golds, while chunks of superheated rock orbited the fiery vortex like planets around a star. Heat distortion made the air shimmer above it.
The scarred roc perched upon the volcanic ridge, his mutilated visage a map of old battles and bitter defeats. Spegier's surveyed the reverse geysers below. those peculiar phenomena where superheated air and mineral-rich vapors were drawn downward into the earth's hungering depths. "Perfect," he rasped, his voice like grinding stone. The plan had festered in his mind for moons now, ever since Xerxes and his brood had claimed dominion over the Draco Isles. If chaos was what it would take to shatter their newfound peace, then chaos he would deliver.
The roc spiraled upward through sheets of cascading rain, its wings; each spanning five thousand meters. Water streamed off primaries the color of storm clouds, while bronze tertials crackled with gathered static. Spegier's ascent carved through weather itself, his passage leaving spiral contrails of disturbed atmosphere that glowed faintly with an residual charge.
The mountain pierced skyward like a titan's talon, its peak lost in roiling thunderheads that never dispersed. Fulgurite Peak; the Lightning Throne was hollow, its interior carved by millennia of electrical strikes that had vitrified the stone into glass. The mountain's bones were black spires, each one a natural lightning rod that rose from the cavern floor and stretched toward the storm-wreathed ceiling kilometers above. Arcs leapt between spires, creating a web of electrical current that bathed the entire chamber in strobing white-blue radiance. The air tasted of ozone and scorched stone. Thunder was constant, a bass rumble that made the mountain's hollow interior resonate like the chamber of some colossal heart.
Spegier's talons, each one the length of a war galley, he found balance on the eastern prominence. a natural throne of fused stone that overlooked the roost. The impact sent tremors through the rock. His head, bearing a beak that could shear through dragon hide, rose on a neck thick with muscle. Eyes the color of amber lightning surveyed his domain.
