I tore through the sky, skimming the treetops of the northern side of the high city. Ahead and to my right was the tallest point, where lay the palace grounds. To my left, the open sea stretched to the horizon. And behind me, closing with terrifying speed, was Behold Her And Know That All Things Must End.

  There was no way I could outrun her. She was far faster than I, and she’d already caught me once. But that time I hadn’t been prepared for just how fast she could fly, and I’d been out of my mind with fear after looking her in the eye and comprehending just how deep her malice ran.

  This time I was still scared. Terrified. But I’d had a minute to accept my mortal terror, and now I knew to keep an eye on Behold Her as she closed in, letting me estimate when she’d catch me. She may have almost knocked me out of the sky once, but that was a one-time thing. This time I was ready for her.

  Or so I told myself. I doubted anyone could truly be ready for Behold Her, no matter what was going on. When the time came, a much too small handful of seconds later, it was all I could do to send myself into a controlled fall instead of letting her tackle me — or worse.

  I dropped onto what had once been a street, breaking branches on my way and touching the ground at a dead run. Above me, Behold Her roared with fury and frustration at my escape. I ran straight ahead for a few seconds, passing unfamiliar ruins, but the first opportunity I had I turned at a right angle. It saved my life. Only moments later a terrible, rushing, wheezing sound erupted from above the canopy, and a thick red cloud raced down the street where I’d just been running, bushes and groundcover simply disintegrating while trees collapsed as their trunks were eaten away and splintered under their own weight.

  That was twice now I’d used the same trick to avoid being turned into a withering husk. But while Behold Her might have fallen for it twice, she wasn’t going to repeat her mistake of trying to chase me on the ground. Last time she’d landed; this time she stayed in the air. Every so often that same terrible wheezing sound would announce another red cloud, as she destroyed sections of the forest seemingly at random. None of them, Mercies be praised, were ever close enough to me to be a threat.

  Stall! Conscience’s voice came suddenly, sharp and urgent. Keep stalling! Just a little longer! Mak has the door to the palace open, and the people at the shrine are leaving. Just a little longer!

  Fine. A little longer. I could do that.

  Then the destruction stopped, and I knew that I had to leave the relative safety of the ground to distract her again. And when I got into the air, I knew that I should have done so quicker. Behold Her was already heading back to the palace, faster than I could pursue.

  We’d only been away for minutes. It was only moments since Conscience told me that the humans were leaving the shrine. How Behold Her knew, I had no idea, it didn’t matter at the moment. What mattered was that they’d be on the move, as exposed as they were likely to be, and my only hope was that Behold Her wouldn’t immediately see them under the cover of the trees.

  As I flew as quickly as I could, climbing at a 45 degree angle just to avoid smashing into the rock, the brilliant red shape of Behold Her swooped and vanished from my sight. Moments later Conscience screamed in my mind.

  Hurry! Behold Her is back! I think she hit the shrine with that horrible breath weapon of hers. Kira and the others are moving as fast as they can, but the forest is disintegrating behind them!

  I’m trying! I screamed back. I was hurrying as fast as I could, but even if I could reach the shrine in less than a minute, every second was precious. By the time Conscience finished alerting me to the danger my humans were in I was above the tops of the trees in the palace grounds, and I got a front row seat to Behold Her doing what she presumably did best: spreading destruction.

  As I approached, Behold Her dove again. My heart stuttered in my chest. She wouldn’t be able to see the humans but either she had guessed where they were going or she had some way of tracking them, because she aimed for the palace.

  She didn’t roar or scream the way she had as she attacked me. She just opened her mouth, and a dense crimson cloud, like a pyroclastic flow if it had been made of boiling blood, enveloped thousands of square feet of the canopy before vanishing below the treetops and racing forward along the ground.

  If there was any sound I couldn’t hear it, but that just made it worse. Instead it seemed that the whole thing happened in absolute silence, except for the tearing, crashing, and groaning of hundreds of tons of trees withering and coming apart under their own weight, and of birds and other animals fleeing in abject terror.

  As Behold Her breathed out horrific death she curved around, laying a curtain of all-consuming smoke around the front of the palace. It created an impassable zone hundreds of feet long and dozens wide, as revealed by the long, continuous break opening in the canopy from which wisps of lethal crimson mist rose. In the best case, the humans would have to wait it out or find a way around, leaving them vulnerable to Behold Her’s next attack. In the worst…

  I barely dared think about the worst case. I could feel Mak further back, inside or behind the ruin, so she was relatively safe. So was Herald, though I could feel her down there, between the shrine and the palace. She’d gone to help her friends and her sister, and despite all my pleading I hadn’t really expected anything else. The final person I could feel, Tammy, was close to the middle of the courtyard, halfway between the palace and the shrine. That was promising, but it didn’t mean that none of the others had been close enough to the palace to get caught. If they had… Mercies, after seeing Presence I couldn’t imagine a human surviving even a moment in Behold Her’s breath.

  Behold Her rose from her dive and came around almost lazily. The whole thing had taken scant seconds, but I had covered a great deal of the distance between us, heading straight for her and praying that I was fast enough.

  I… didn’t have a plan. I just knew that I had to do something to throw Behold Her off, because she looked like she was lining up for another dive. This one looked to be aimed closer to the middle of the courtyard. Where Tammy was. Goddamn Tammy, who was so filled with remorse and gratitude and loyalty that if I didn’t focus on the horrible things she’d done, my heart might break for her. Goddamn Tammy, whom I loved and cherished, no matter what I might want. And if Tammy was there, I had no doubt that Zabra was with her, and Zabra was no less precious to me.

  My Tammy. My Zabra. My raider and my crime lord. My two despicable slavers. I loved them, and I despised them. Their lives were in danger, and I would do anything to protect them, if only I could make it in time. But they were too far, and Behold Her too close. I could see that now.

  Then, as the ruby dragon began to stoop, there was a flash of golden light from the top of a tree far from where Tammy was, closer to the shrine. The flash turned into a streak, crossing the hundreds of feet between the treetop and Behold Her with greater speed and precision than I’d ever imagined possible for an arrow. And I knew that it had to be an arrow. I’d been on the receiving end of one of those streaks of gold, though they hadn’t travelled quite that fast any of the times that Avjilan, my beautiful nightingale of an archer, took a shot at me.

  Avjilan was a fantastic singer, an attentive caretaker, and surprisingly handy around the inn, but first and foremost he was a hunter of big game and monsters. Looking at him, youthful as he was, it was easy to forget that he had a whole other life behind him in another body. And thanks to that he had, to paraphrase a certain Irish actor, a very particular set of skills, acquired over a decades-long career in which he’d been successful enough to amass what I understood to be a small fortune. He hadn’t had much opportunity to use those skills since I claimed him, but here, finally, was a problem he was almost uniquely suited to helping with.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Flying in a straight line as she was, there was no question of the arrow missing. The streak of light struck Behold Her… and bounced off her scales, streaking off into the distance. Still, it was enough to make her jerk visibly in her descent and abort her attack, letting out a high, shrieking roar of outrage. And here she showed an unfortunate level of cunning and experience, because where I might have continued my attack, smug in my knowledge that my attacker couldn’t hurt me, Behold Her threw herself into an evasive manoeuvre that looked practiced rather than instinctive.

  It didn’t help her. Another arrow streaked out, as accurate as the first and far too fast to dodge. The damn thing must have been moving three or four hundred feet per second, and when this one struck Behold Her I was close enough to see it stick somewhere in her belly.

  I let out a roar of viscous glee as she screamed in pain, then passed above and behind her as she was too distracted to react to my approach. I craned my neck down to track her, just in time to see a third arrow take flight. This one also stuck, though I couldn’t see where.

  After that I expected Behold Her to flee, or more likely to come after me. She didn’t. For some reason I couldn’t fathom, likely because reason had nothing to do with it, she chose to go after her tormentor.

  The moment I saw her begin her turn I did the same. I doubted that she knew exactly where Avjilan was, but she didn’t need to. With the width of the area she could cover in a single attack, anywhere within fifty feet would put my hunter in mortal danger. And as she finished her turn and started her approach, it became clear she’d targeted a spot closer than that to the tree I’d seen Avjilan shoot from.

  Avjilan might or might not have dropped out of his tree and started running. I didn’t know. It made no difference. I couldn’t risk her dropping a cloud of withering death anywhere near him. I had to buy him and everyone else time to get to safety. I had to grab and hold Behold Her’s attention, and I knew only one way that was guaranteed to do that.

  She was completely locked in on her target, and so was I. Behold Her was faster than me, but I was closer to Avjilan, I was far more agile, and I’d finished my turn at least a full second before she did. Together, those three factors gave me the edge I needed.

  She screamed in murderous fury as she prepared to unleash hell. I screamed too, both for courage and in furious desperation, as I pushed myself to go just a tiny bit faster instead of trying to brake as I intercepted her.

  Things almost went as well as they possibly could have. Almost.

  In the last seconds before impact I saw her white eye swivel, the black slit of the pupil focusing on me. And I thought it widened in surprise, as though she was so focused on killing humans that she’d forgotten me entirely. Perhaps she had. Perhaps aggression had made her stupid, at least for a moment. I could only hope. It would definitely improve my chances of surviving to see my humans again. But that moment of possible surprise didn’t stop her from turning her head, jaws already wide open, and filling my world with red.

  Pain seared up my right side as I smashed into the ruby monster. I struck with a force that drove the air from my lungs and a shock that I’d swear I could feel in my soul. Most of the force went into her right shoulder, where I hit her dead on with my chest; I’d hoped to hit her wing, but her shoulder was good enough. The impact sent her tumbling, and with the rhythm of her wings ruined and me scrabbling furiously to grab onto anything I could, she had no chance of recovering.

  I’d hoped to do some damage before the surprise wore off. I knew as soon as I struck that that wasn’t happening. Each of us had been racing toward the ground at an angle, and we’d been three hundred feet up at best when I struck. It was all I could do to hold on for the few seconds we had before we reached the trees.

  The next part would have been the worst, if any part of my “plan” — if it was even worth the name — was in any way better than any other. We smashed through the crown of one tree, branches snapping like dry twigs under the force of our descent. A thought later we were among the trunks, and I couldn’t say how many broke against Behold Her’s armored bulk before we came to a stop. I was exceedingly lucky in that I didn’t take any of the impacts directly, and that Behold Her only rolled over me once on the ground before I was thrown clear.

  Thanks to Behold Her bearing the brunt of the impact, our crash wasn’t the most painful experience of my life, though it certainly ranked up there with smashing my wing into the mast of a fishing boat, being mauled by trolls and bears, and being stabbed through the lung. It wasn’t even the most painful thing that happened to me that minute; my whole right side felt like it was on fire, or like it had been dipped in acid, and I didn’t dare look to see what her breath had done to me. My fresh memory of what Presence had looked like was bad enough.

  Still, Greater Fortitude really was an amazing Advancement. Thanks to it I survived our spectacular crash, and even managed to figure out which way was down so I could get my feet under me and start crawling away, winded, confused, and half blind with pain. Unfortunately, Behold Her had also survived, no worse for wear than I was — which admittedly wasn’t saying much. As soon as I’d started making more progress forward than sideways there was a shriek of absolute, murderous rage, followed by an enormous crash as—well, I didn’t turn to look, but I assumed that Behold Her must have knocked a tree over, either in anger or by simple accident as she righted herself.

  Then she came after me.

  She didn’t bother with threats or declarations or anything else. Or perhaps she was speaking in Draconic, but her fury made it so that I couldn’t recognize anything coming out of her as language. No matter what the roars, growls and hisses she made were, they had the desired effect; I fled, ice in my spine and running like the devil herself was at my back. I extended my claws for extra purchase, clamped my jaw shut against the pain, and used every trick I knew or could think of to make myself harder to pursue. And I might’ve actually had a chance of outrunning her; dragons weren’t made for moving quickly on the ground, and it was really only my combination of Advancements that let me do so. But Behold Her didn’t need to run me down. Every moment I expected a red cloud to envelop me, the last thing I ever saw as my eyes withered out of their sockets. That was the real danger, the real terror, and I weaved drunkenly between trees, used bushes and fallen trunks to try and break line of sight, and searched desperately for a break that would let me take to the air.

  When I finally saw one, I recognized where I was; I’d made my way toward the shrine, and the break I saw was the clearing that Embers had created in front of it, now turned into a much wider wasteland, full of nothing but dust and ashes and absolutely dead. But there was no red mist there, only blue sky and escape, and I blessed myself for having the wherewithal to unconsciously head in that direction.

  Then I realized that I hadn’t been heading for the shrine. Dead ahead in the direction I’d been moving, though well over a hundred miles away, was my hoard. I hadn’t been clever, just scared and hurt, and in my pain and confusion I had headed for my greatest source of comfort and safety in this world. It almost made me laugh, despite everything. Instinct might be gone, at least for the moment, but in my weakest moments I was almost as much dragon as she was.

  Except… maybe not. Because in the same direction, though I couldn’t see her, was Herald. And if there was any source of comfort that could compete with my hoard, in a much more human way, it was my first and dearest friend. My dear, brave, clever little sister. My Herald.

  That made things complicated. I couldn’t put her in danger, but I needed to escape. But I couldn’t change course now. I didn’t know how close Behold Her was, but I could still hear her crashing and roaring, and I didn’t dare slow down.

  I made a decision. Herald wasn’t in or around the shrine, but somewhere beyond the clearing; my sense of where she was didn’t give me a very good idea of distance. She must be able to hear us coming, and she was smart; she wouldn’t put herself in danger unnecessarily. At least I had to tell myself that, because the open sky in the clearing beyond the trees was calling.

  I took the last few loping strides past the debris of a tree that had fallen but hadn’t been consumed entirely by the mist, and then I was in the open. My feet sank into the powdery remains of what had been tens or hundred or thousands of tons of trees — I had no clue what a tree weighed, honestly. At any other time I might have been horrified; now all I felt was relief. I could finally get airborne, and lead Behold Her away. She must surely be furious enough now to follow me wherever I went, and whatever I tried.

  I didn’t know where to go. Embers would have been the obvious choice, but I didn’t know where she was. Indomitable, perhaps? He was family. He’d gone through great trouble to help Sandstorm, a far removed descendant. Perhaps he—

  As I considered my options I leaped into the air, beating my wings hard. Only, to my surprise, instead of lifting me into the air it sent me into a roll. I came down hard on my right side, the side that Behold Her’s breath had scoured, and it flared with fresh agony.

  My left wing had gripped the air powerfully, lifting me the way it should. My right wing had moved painfully, and had gripped nothing.

  I pushed myself laboriously back to my feet. My right side would barely carry me, it hurt so much, and with mounting horror I finally forced myself to look at what she’d done to me.

  I couldn’t see much. My scales were so dark that I didn’t think they could look lifeless, but it didn’t look like any had fallen. But there was one thing I could see, and it made me moan with the closest thing I’d ever felt to despair.

  On my right side, all that remained of my wing membranes were a few scraps, hanging from the suddenly fragile-looking fingers. Behold Her And Know That All Things Must End had taken the sky from me. And she was still coming.

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