A blood-red pillar of fire shot skyward, a searing lance aimed straight at the silver dragon tearing through the black haze.
The dragon’s scales gleamed like pure silver, its crown of horns delicate but regal.
It folded its membranous wings and slipped past the flame column, then dove like a seabird hunting prey.
Its target: the massive fire wyrm that had just burst from the earth.
The wyrm reared its long body high and answered the sky with a silent shriek.
A thunderous roar shook the ruins.
Golden flame poured down like a waterfall from above, no weaker than the fire column.
The two blasts collided in midair and detonated.
Countless burning fragments rained down like a storm of fire.
Lancel grabbed Lynn, who was still half-exposed, and yanked him under an overhang of collapsed stone.
“Amos, Hoffer.
Get everyone together.
We regroup with the lord.”
The camp had not waited idly.
Sebastian and Aslan Londer were already leading the men toward the collapsed tower, moving fast through the ruins.
The bronze dragon burst through the mushroom cloud of fire where the flames had met.
It raised its razor claws and struck at the wyrm’s massive lizard head.
Its brown membranous wings blotted out the sky.
Even at this distance, Lancel could feel its sheer scale.
The fire wyrm did not flinch.
It let the claws tear into its stone hide, twisted its serpentine body, and lunged to bite the dragon’s belly.
It had underestimated the bronze dragon’s skill.
A claw hooked upward and slammed the wyrm’s gaping mouth shut, snapping its head back.
The silver dragon seized the opening.
Its wings beat once and it shot upward, then its jaws clamped onto the wyrm’s neck, if the thing even had one.
Razor teeth crunched through the stone shell protecting the wyrm’s body.
Magma-hot blood gushed out in thick streams.
The fire wyrm thrashed in silent agony, its ringed body coiling and flailing.
Sheets of flame sprayed in every direction.
The bronze dragon’s scales, now glowing molten gold under the heat, absorbed every blast.
Its claws stayed buried in the wyrm’s lizard skull.
Then it breathed dragonfire straight down, carefully angling the stream away from the silver dragon still locked onto the neck.
Bathed in that searing flame, the fire in the wyrm’s eye sockets dimmed.
The shell protecting its head cracked, then melted.
Lancel swallowed hard.
This was the gods’ payment?
It felt excessive.
The heat in his blood began to fade.
He could sense the blazing things that had stirred underground now fleeing the area at desperate speed.
This was the fringe of the Valyrian ruins.
One giant fire wyrm had ruled here.
The smaller creatures hiding in the collapsed city wanted no part of it.
The bronze dragon finished its breath.
It bit down on the wyrm’s head, where the flames in the eye sockets had already died.
Its teeth tore through the flesh beneath the shell without effort.
The silver dragon pulled.
The wyrm’s head separated from its body.
Only then did the bronze dragon, the severed head still in its jaws, turn slowly toward Lancel and his people.
The two dragons carried the wyrm’s corpse, wings beating lazily, and landed beside the collapsed tower.
The silver dragon glanced at the skeletal remains of its own kind nearby, then turned back to tearing at the wyrm’s flesh.
The searing meat seemed to suit its appetite.
The bronze dragon looked down at Lancel and the others huddled beneath the rubble.
Its gaze was cold.
A flicker of agitation stirred behind its eyes.
It was larger than the silver dragon by a full size, and its gaping mouth was lined with jagged fangs.
Unlike the silver dragon’s small, sparse horns, the bronze dragon’s body was armored with rows of thick spikes.
Its horns were long and heavy, some straight and swept back, others curved downward, together forming a savage crown.
Spikes like a beard lined its lower jaw.
“The magical contamination here has already started affecting them.” Lancel had caught the agitation.
The dragons had barely arrived and the ruins were already working on them.
Combined with their unmistakable appearance, the conclusion was clear.
These two dragons almost certainly belonged to the last surviving dragonlord house: the Targaryens.
The bronze was Vhagar’s only rival in size among living dragons.
The ill-tempered, battle-hungry Bronze Fury, Vermithor, named for the Valyrian god of the forge.
Once the mount of the Old King, Jaehaerys the Conciliator.
And the silver was Silverwing, the dragon of Good Queen Alysanne.
Lancel’s grandparents’ dragons.
The gods were generous.
Assuming he survived Vermithor’s flame.
“Valar.” Lancel called his brother forward.
He cut his palm open and smeared blood across both their faces.
The blood, threaded with silver, ran slowly down the two young men’s cheeks.
Valar hesitated only a moment, then followed his brother, excitement rising.
The dragons seemed not to notice the two insects.
Vermithor crunched through the wyrm’s skull and swallowed the jelly-like, molten core inside.
Its eyes closed in something like pleasure, though the smoke pouring from its nostrils said its mood was far from calm.
Silverwing bit through the stone shell on the wyrm’s body and began tearing off steaming chunks of meat with deliberate care.
Vermithor probed inside the wyrm’s skull a moment longer, then turned and roared at Silverwing.
Silverwing paused.
It shuffled a few steps away, looking almost wounded.
Then it seemed to think better of it and roared back without mercy. New chapters come out on g.com first.
But it roared only once.
Then it tossed a section of the wyrm toward Vermithor with a flick of its head and returned to swallowing the rest in small, neat bites.
Vermithor did not press the issue.
It lowered its head and tore into the offered meat.
Lancel, now at the edge of Vermithor’s wing, had gone pale.
He understood now why dragons inspired such terror.
Vermithor was hundreds of feet long, with a wingspan over a thousand.
In Lancel’s magical sight, the dragon was a living volcano.
An endless fire burned at its core.
Flame ran through its blood.
Flame filled its muscle.
In magical terms, a dragon was fire made flesh.
If the two dragons had not been slowly absorbing the magical contamination from the ruins, the very contamination his father and the mages had studied to create his protective runes, Lancel would never have been able to use that connection to gently nudge their emotions.
And even now, he had barely nudged them.
Whether it was their former riders’ influence or something else, the two dragons shared a strange harmony.
Even with the contamination gnawing at their tempers, they had not fought over the kill like common beasts.
Lancel gripped the black prismatic stone threaded with silver that hung around his neck.
His father had left it for him, with a note in his journal: if he ever had the chance to tame an adult dragon, use this shadow-binding stone from Asshai.
What the stone actually did, his father had never known.
Lancel made his choice.
He grabbed one of Vermithor’s spikes and began to climb.
Vermithor felt something crawling on its body.
It twitched, irritated.
Lancel clung to the spike with everything he had and held on.
“I can’t let it shake me off.”
Lancel knew if Vermithor moved again, he would not last.
He slammed his palm onto a spike.
Blood welled from the puncture instantly.
But instead of dripping, it seeped slowly into Vermithor’s scales.
Silver light flickered.
The wound on Lancel’s palm closed and healed.
Vermithor had gone still.
Lancel kept climbing toward the hollow between the dragon’s shoulders, where several bone spurs offered handholds.
Vermithor had just torn off another chunk of meat and swallowed it when it realized the insect had not been shaken off.
It was on its back.
That was unacceptable.
“Vermithor, fly!” Lancel shouted in High Valyrian.
Vermithor twisted its neck without hesitation and breathed dragonfire straight over its own back.