The air in Eldoria had turned heavy with sulfur from ruptured ARK cores, the copper of fresh blood, and smoke so thick it choked the throat. Cobblestones were buried under ash, viscera, and shattered bone. Above, the portal pulsed with a steady, sickening beat. With each beat, more came through: ogres foaming at the mouth, orcs hurling themselves forward, minotaurs swinging clubs the size of carts, and cyclopes driving their fists through walls that had stood for centuries. The city was a chorus of breaking stone and dying screams.
Leeonir pushed through the center streets, his sword low. Blood had dried on his face in dark streaks, but fresh drops still fell from his hands some from enemies he had cut down, some from people he had arrived too late to reach. He passed a doorway where three children were pressed into the dark. A small hand shook the shoulder of a woman beside them. Her eyes were open and empty.
A single arrow hissed past his ear. It struck the smallest child in the chest. The girl went down without a sound, no cry, no warning, her body folding at the middle as she dropped. She let out a soft exhale and then went still.
The orc that had fired was still tracking its next shot when the Sword of Ecos opened it from shoulder to hip. The body separated before the creature understood it was dead. The black blade came away dark with blood. “I will kill every last one of you,” Leeonir said.
He moved. An ogre came at him on his right flank alongside two orcs, their heavy forms closing in. He stepped into the ogre’s mass with a diagonal shift, drove the Sword of Ecos through the nearest orc’s skull at the base of the jaw, and with his draconic arm punched his claws straight through the second orc’s face, fingers breaking into the bone. Both dropped before they could even recoil. The third orc came in from behind with a blade already raised. Leeonir cut it diagonally from clavicle to hip and stepped past the falling body as Saahag moved across the rooftops to his left.
-----
Saahag moved across the ruined tiles fast and low, her dark blue armor reflecting the firelight. Every step was placed exactly where it needed to be. An ogre moved heavily across the rooftop ahead, head down, its breath coming in thick bursts. It had not heard her. It would not.
Her blades found the gap between vertebrae. Steel went in, bone cracked, and the ogre’s roar started somewhere deep in its chest but never made it out. Its knees buckled. The tiles rattled under its weight. She did not look back.
On the next roof, a girl was huddled under a torn piece of canvas, arms around her own knees, chin down, trembling. Saahag’s breath caught.
The ogre that spotted the girl did not slow. It bellowed, hooves cracking stone, closing fast. Saahag came off the roofline in a blur of dark blue. Her blades drove into the ogre’s kidneys simultaneously and the creature convulsed, a short choked sound escaping it. She wrenched the steel outward and the ogre pitched off the edge of the roof. It hit the stone below and went quiet.
She slid down the building’s face, boots dragging lines in the scorched stone, and dropped to one knee beside the girl. She gathered her with both arms, holding without squeezing, her own breathing slowing deliberately. The girl whimpered once, and Saahag exhaled slowly, trying to steady herself.
Isaac walked through the fire, the flames reflecting off his armor, tracing the dents and burn marks of hours of fighting. Ash had settled in his hair. His axe trembled in his grip from the rage building in his chest. His eyes were wild, red from the heat and the sight of the slaughter. The city burned on all sides of him and he kept walking.
The air was thick with sulfur, hot iron, and the smell of blood. Gray ash drifted in curtains dense enough to turn the afternoon into a heavy, bruised twilight.
“The center has fallen,” Isaac said. His voice was flat, heavy with a weight that needed no explanation.
Saahag tightened her hold on the girl. Her blades hung at her hips, dripping black. Her jaw set once. “I know.”
“We will not hold this sector.”
“Leeonir is ahead of us. We go to him.”
Their eyes met, hers burning, his full of a hatred that had expanded to fill everything around him. Something pulled taut between them. They moved, side by side, into the fire.
-----
Deeper in, near what had been the heart of Eldoria, Leeonir drove from one enemy to the next. He had found a group of soldiers still fighting, humans and elves holding a broken intersection against a press of cyclopes and minotaurs and ogres. The carnage was total. Screams and severed limbs and blood covered every surface. Leeonir folded into the line and the soldiers around him fought harder. He moved among them cutting down whatever came through, keeping them in place with his sheer presence when his voice would not carry over the noise.
The ARK Tower loomed behind him, its upper half gone, the stump expelling black smoke in thick columns. The light from the embers ran across his shattered armor. Blood from a cut along his temple traced his jaw and dripped from his chin. He did not wipe it.
His hand tightened around the hilt of the Sword of Ecos. Deehia. Ecos. Eldoria. Elooha. Children crushed under stone. Promises broken under the weight of the screaming. Every oath he had watched come apart. He held it all in his chest and kept moving.
An ogre charged with a rusted mace. Leeonir barely turned. His blade rose in one clean arc and the ogre’s head left its shoulders. Black blood hissed where it hit the scorched pavement. He turned to the elf beside him to tell him to find his father. The elf’s head snapped sideways. An arrow had gone through it at the temple. Blood crossed Leeonir’s face in a warm line.
He spun. A minotaur’s iron club caught him across the ribs before he completed the turn. The impact drove him off his feet. He hit the ground and rolled, the air forced from his lungs, his left side flaring with agony. He pushed upright and the world blurred. Every breath felt like a blade turning between his ribs. He pulled his muscles tight and braced, because the next blow was already coming and there was nowhere to go.
A human knight hit the minotaur from the side at a full run, lance driving into its flank, screaming something wordless. The minotaur staggered. Leeonir surged forward, went up the minotaur’s back in two steps, and the Sword of Ecos came down in a black arc. The bull’s head rolled through the ash.
He landed, panting. His ribs ground with every breath. He scanned the intersection.
Save Eldoria. Save Eldoria. Save Eldoria.
The mantra beat inside him like a second pulse. He held to it and kept moving.
-----
They found him cutting through the alley ahead, all three converging through the haze at the same moment. Saahag still carried the girl, whose fingers had curled around a strap of her armor and would not let go. Isaac guided a cluster of survivors, gray-faced, trembling, children attached to whatever adult was closest. The girl in Saahag’s arms lay still, her breathing shallow, her fingers hooked in the armor’s grooves. The air was thick with burnt hair and hot metal and sulfur. Every breath scratched on the way down.
Then a door exploded outward. Wood fragments spun through the air. A minotaur burst from the darkness beyond it, head lowered, its roar hammering off the walls. Saahag moved fast, already turning, but not fast enough. The horns caught her in the ribs. She left the ground. Her armor scraped the brick as she hit the wall and pain shot through her flank, sharp and total, her vision going gray before snapping back.
The girl’s body jolted with the impact and then went still. The blood ran warm across Saahag’s palms. The air left her chest and she could not find it again.
Isaac saw Saahag hit the wall and saw the child’s head drop. His hand closed on the axe until the veins stood out in his forearms. He did not scream yet. He ran. He hit the minotaur hard. At the same instant Leeonir arrived from the other side, his draconic forearm driving straight through the minotaur’s chest, fingers closing around something vital inside the ribcage. Isaac’s axe came down into the clavicle, burying itself deep. The minotaur bellowed and staggered.
They did not stop. The second blow shattered the jaw. The third caved the skull. They kept going, each impact harder than the last, until the creature’s head was pulp and its body twitched from dying nerves. They stood over it covered in blood that was not theirs.
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“Every last one of you will pay for this!” Isaac roared, his voice cracking. Leeonir said nothing. He stood over the body with his draconic arm still dripping.
Behind them, Saahag pulled herself upright through the ash, ignoring the grinding in her ribs. She gathered the girl against her chest and held her, rocking her. Her eyes went empty and then sharpened into something colder. She pressed her forehead against the girl’s. “I will kill every last one of you,” she whispered, the words barely rising above the sound of the flames.
-----
Leeonir saw the shadow first. A vast dark shape sliding over the smoke and the fire, too large and too steady to be anything carried by the wind. Then the clouds thinned. The sound arrived before the form, a vibration that moved through the ground and up through the soles of his boots. Every creature in the streets froze. The orcs and minotaurs and ogres all stopped, their bloodlust swamped by an older terror.
Then the dragon came through the portal. It split the sky. Wings unfolded slowly, enormous and unhurried. Its body stretched the length of five houses, every scale black as obsidian and threaded with veins of molten gold that pulsed beneath the surface. The firelight ran across its hide. Its deep yellow eyes swept Eldoria below, a weapon selecting a target.
Around its neck, a collar pulsed with blue runes, vibrating at the same frequency as the destroyed ARK Tower. This was not a wild creature. It had been broken and remade. The collar did not restrain a dragon; it directed one. And somewhere, a mind held the end of that leash.
The Sword of Ecos vibrated in Leeonir’s fist, humming at a pitch that moved through the bones of his hand. Above him, Lua screamed, circling wide to stay clear of the creature, her sharp calls cutting through the roar of falling stone.
The dragon’s wings beat twice. The pressure wave flattened smoke, extinguished lesser fires, and knocked soldiers off their feet. Then it turned toward what remained of the ARK Tower and drew breath.
The fire came. The blast caught all three of them at the outer edge. The heat was enough to flash the air from a man’s lungs and cook exposed skin. The burn hit Leeonir across his jaw and neck, immediate and total. His reddened skin absorbed heat that would have killed another, but the pain was still blinding. The world went white.
The tower collapsed with a sound of stone and ARK lines failing simultaneously. A pillar of blue fire and rubble drove upward and then outward, the shockwave throwing everything in its radius. When his vision cleared, the alley was gone. Isaac was pushing himself up through the debris. Saahag had been thrown against a wall twenty feet back; she was moving, one hand pressed to her ribs. Both were alive.
Leeonir forced himself upright, using his sword for leverage. He kept his eyes closed for a moment. He saw faces—Deehia, Ecos, and others. Friends who had laughed with him in halls now carbonized. Children who had copied his footwork with wooden swords in courtyards that no longer existed. His city. His people. Gone while he stood in the middle of it. He opened his eyes. The black blade of the sword was dark with blood and ash.
“I am going to kill that dragon,” he said, the words coming out rough. “I am going to kill that dragon.”
He pushed forward. The flames caught on the edges of his shredded armor. He cut through an orc, then a torso, then a throat. He was not going to die with his back to it. He looked back once. Isaac and Saahag were on their feet, moving toward the survivors. He turned and walked into the smoke.
-----
Ahead of him, through the haze, a pocket of Eldoria’s soldiers was still holding a broken intersection. They were bleeding and barely standing, but they held. Leeonir moved toward them, cutting through whatever came between him and the line.
Save Eldoria. Save Eldoria. Save Eldoria.
He reached the line and the soldiers fought harder. He killed an orc, then a minotaur, then two orcs coming in behind it. He was driving his blade into a third when he heard a roar that was separate and enormous. He turned and saw Rothrak’s back, white-skinned and massive, the hammer still rising and falling over something on the ground that no longer had a shape. The soldiers around Leeonir had gone still. He was already moving.
-----
Zeeshoof had been a scholar, a guide, and a keeper of old names. His hands had traced records of things that happened long before any living person had drawn their first breath. They were not made for war, but they held a sword anyway.
Earlier, before he had descended into the square, he had stood on the balcony of a half-destroyed observatory. The light from the breach and the ARK fires painted his creased face in hard contrast, every wrinkle deepened. He had gripped the hilt of his sword, a weapon that still felt wrong in his hand. “So,” he had murmured. “This is it.”
Below him, Eldoria burned. The living screamed in streets choked with smoke and rubble. The dead were still falling from collapsed balconies as the enemy pushed forward. Smoke moved through the alleys in dense walls, swallowing landmarks and leaving only fire and motion.
The Columns of the Awakening advanced in formation. Ogres in battered armor, lean orcs barking in harsh tongues, and minotaurs shoulder-checking their way through buildings. Cyclopes brought walls down in methodical blows. But Eldoria had not gone quiet. Archers climbed to shattered towers, facing the end of their world with bows that suddenly felt very thin.
Zeeshoof had gone down into the square. His blade trembled with each blow from the age in his muscles. He was a thinker, not a killer, and yet there he was, soaked in blood, his spine bent but not broken. He cut down whatever came into the square because no one else could reach it. His chest heaved with every breath of smoke. Sweat ran into his eyes and burned. The blood on his robes had been replaced by fresh blood more than once. He was still standing when Rothrak came.
The ogre general emerged from the smoke, each footfall cracking the stone. His war hammer was a slab of forged iron wide as a man’s chest. His eyes found Zeeshoof and stayed there. Zeeshoof barely avoided the first swing. The second he managed to parry. The impact ran from his wrists to his shoulders and through his spine. Something gave. A sharp crack sounded up his arm. Pain flared through his body. He screamed, a raw sound torn from a body too old for this.
Rothrak looked down at him with contempt. “I should make you suffer for this. Do you know how many of mine you have killed, old man?”
Zeeshoof spat blood. “Then stop talking and do it, you savage.”
What force remained in him he put into one last thrust toward the ogre’s throat. For Eldoria. For every name he had preserved. Rothrak was faster. The hammer swept sideways. Steel rang against iron. Bone broke. The world went black as Zeeshoof’s skull met the cobblestones.
Rothrak stood over the body, his chest heaving. The old elf had not begged. “No. It was not supposed to end like that. I wanted you to crawl!” The hammer came down again and again. Each blow cracked across the plaza until there was nothing left of Zeeshoof. Rothrak straightened, blood running from him in thick ropes. His eyes were not satisfied. He stepped over the remains and moved on.
-----
Leeonir arrived at the plaza and saw the end of it. He did not look at the ground; he would carry that weight later. Rothrak was turning, and his eyes found Leeonir.
The white-skinned giant stood with his hammer in one hand. Wounds gaped across his torso. Leeonir’s armor was torn open, pieces hanging loose. Blood dripped from his elbows. His ribs ground together with every breath.
“I am not stopping!” he shouted.
Rothrak answered with a roar that shook the walls. He lifted the hammer in both hands and drove forward, the weapon swinging in a horizontal arc. The pressure wave arrived first. Leeonir dropped. He felt the iron pass close enough to disturb his hair. The hammer hit the structure behind him and the building ceased to exist in an explosion of splinters and dust.
Leeonir rolled and came up moving. Rothrak’s first footfall cracked the stone. He raised the hammer overhead, sparks showering as the iron scraped the wall. Leeonir ran directly at him. “Come then, little prince!” Rothrak bellowed.
In the last half-second, the hammer came down. Leeonir jumped. The hammer struck the marble, punching a crater into the floor. Leeonir cleared Rothrak’s head with the Sword of Ecos raised and the blade came down with his full weight. Bone cracked and cartilage tore. The ogre’s chest gave way.
Rothrak bellowed, the sound too wet and broken. He swatted upward. Leeonir twisted the blade and rolled off the ogre’s shoulder, hit the ground in a slide, and came up with blood on the wall behind him. Rothrak dropped to one knee.
Leeonir’s arms trembled. Each breath stabbed. He pulled the blade free and the spray crossed fifteen feet of ruined marble. The ogre swung backhand from the ground and his palm caught Leeonir’s shoulder, driving him into a fallen column. Leeonir hit it and coughed blood, his vision tilting. He got up.
Rothrak tried to lift the hammer. His arms shook. Leeonir ran at him. He vaulted a toppled table. Rothrak tried to set his weight, but he was too slow. Leeonir slid under the hammer’s final swing, sparks screaming from the marble, and came up on Rothrak’s left side. He cut through the back of the ogre’s leg, parting the tendon clean. Rothrak went down on both knees.
Leeonir drove the blade into the ogre’s back and ran it up the spine. Rothrak collapsed. Leeonir wrenched the blade free.
“This is for Eldoria!”
The blade came down on the ogre’s shoulder.
“For every child!”
Across the ribs.
“For every soldier!”
Into the gut.
“For every name you erased!”
A diagonal cut from hip to clavicle. Rothrak had been dead before the third blow, but Leeonir kept swinging until the sword slipped from his fingers.
He knelt there, shaking, his breath coming in short broken pulls. Tears cut through the blood and soot on his face. His hands pressed flat against the stone as the sword lay in the blood beside him.
-----
Saahag found him first, with Isaac behind her. They slowed when they saw the carnage. Isaac lowered his axe and said nothing. From above the smoke, Lua descended, her feathers gray with ash. She landed beside him and pressed her skull against his draconic arm, making a low sound. Saahag crossed the plaza and crouched in front of him.
“Leeonir.” He did not look up. “Leeonir.” Her voice was steady as her hand touched his shoulder. “The war is not over.”
He blinked once. Lua pressed harder. Above them, the dragon circled, blue fire trailing from its jaws. The battle continued in every street. The screaming had not stopped.
He blinked again. His eyes found her face. Leeonir drew one breath. It shook on the way in and came out steadier. He reached down and closed his hand around the hilt of the Sword of Ecos. “I know,” he said.
He got to his feet. Isaac moved in to help. Lua stayed close. Leeonir stood and looked up at the dragon in the sky. His jaw was tight. His hands were still shaking. He had not been able to protect them. He had arrived too late, again and again. He looked at the dragon, turned, and walked back into the battle.
