Far off, just outside the huge dining hall, a gargantuan, fluffy gold dragon variegated with circles of deep blue sniffs the air. Gods above, it must have scented Lyra’s dragon and followed us all the way from Ilium!
“The size of it!” Indel cries. It’s twice as large as the already gargantuan transport dragon, and ten times as mean, it seems. The blue gold flash of it is like a city sized storm-cloud, blocking out the sun.
The dragon rears back its bristling jaws and unleashes a glut of wispy golden flame across the grassy field. A thick vine races up to meet it, shield flowers sprouting and burning away within a second. But it buys enough time for Alyx and Mae to race away from the fire. “Down there!” I shout, pointing, and Castellan pulls into a hard dive.
Alyx and Mae are alone on the field, sweating through their dresses and panting. Sinewy vines and roots entangle across Alyx’s dress, turning it into actual armour — though it’ll do no good if that dragon’s breath catches her full on.
“Hattie!” Mae shouts as we both leap from the pegasus, the four of us against a dragon.
“What were you doing out here?” I ask.
“Looking for Nym,” Alyx replies, never taking her eyes off the circling leviathan. “She disappeared on us.”
The dragon dives. Fire lances from its mouth like an angry javelin. “Reposition!” Alyx shouts, conjuring another vine to buy us the time. Indel remains behind, though, working her claws.
“Obey!” she cries, forming a huge orb before the dragon’s eyes — it barrels right through, unfazed. The plants above her wither, and flames dance across her feathers. I scream as they burn away.
“Indel!”
Oracle, from nowhere, crashes into her chest and sends them both rolling over to us.
“Mae, help the rich girl,” Alyx says, mana crackling in her hands. She slumps, leans against me, breathes hard. “Thank the Gods you’re here. At least we’ll die together.”
“How much do you have left?”
“Enough to try something.”
A strangling stalk bursts from the ground further down the field, where the dragon is trying to pull back up. It wraps around the thing’s neck and slows it- only for a moment. The monster crests into an ascent and the vine snaps like rubber.
“Imagine if it worked though,” Alyx says, all her weight against me — only my hands under her arms keep her upright.
A crest of blinding flame arcs toward us. I drag Alyx desperately away, but I can already tell we won’t be fast enough to get out from under the deadly jet. I want to close my eyes as the fire grows closer, hotter, but I find all I can do is stare.
A shield of light, even more blinding than the fire — like looking directly into the sun — shoots before us just in time. The dragonfire splays out around the shield, creating a wall of flame.
“First Form girls!” comes the brilliant voice — and a moment later Headmistress Lyra, the brilliant white lioness appears beside us. “Into the Grand Hall, now!”
“Why is it that, no matter the travesty, one of my Mystics is always at the centre,” comes Tailina’s voice from behind me. I flush, but waste no time dragging Alyx to her feet. The heat radiating from behind the shield is torturous.
“Let’s go,” says Mae, crouched over a healed Princess. I wrench Alyx off her feet; Castellan scoops Indel up with his strong face and rolls her onto his back, catching her with his wings. We take our first step, though, and fire rakes the ground before us.
“It’s cutting us off.” Alyx coughs, smoke stinging her face as much as it’s stinging mine.
Tailina shoots a purple, smoky beam of magic at the monster, connecting them.
“I have its fire!” she cries, voice cracking. She wastes no time directing the stolen flames up toward the monster.
The dragon turns in a tight circle, swinging around for another pass and finding its fire breath disabled. From the sky, blinding jets of sunlight shoot down toward the dragon like the fury of the Gods. Remarkably, the monster not only twists between them, but identifies their source, shooting toward Headmistress Lyra like a mad stonesnake. She activates her shield just in time, but the leviathan collides into it with such force that it knocks the shield back into the huge lioness, flinging her to the ground with an impact that creates a massive crack in the earth.
“Lyra!” Tailina cries.
The Headmistresses Familiar — the massive white dragon — screams, emerging from its place on the Academy roof. With a fluid motion it becomes airborne, twisting in the sky like a wisp of smoke as it evaluates its shot, and then becoming a screaming, fanged arrow, flashing forward into the larger blue monster.
There’s a cry and a sound like thunder as the giants collide mid-air, a torrent of blood as the Familiar latches onto the monster’s throat, and a sickening crack as the monster retaliates. Lyra’s dragon falls to the earth with another deafening crack.
“Gods! It’s taken down both of them!”
The four of us make for the Grand Hall, but without a beat the monster cuts us off again, tearing through the front of the building and burying a group of attacking faculty beneath rubble. The hall is inaccessible.
Tailina cries out, still directing the flame toward the dragon, but earning no more than a cry of pain and another swooping attack for her efforts. She only just manages to roll out of the way in time, but the spell is broken. The dragon has its full arsenal again.
Alyx calls forth a few feet of rapidly withering vine that doesn’t even reach the flame shooting down toward us.
“Sorry,” she mutters. But the wall of heat stops just short of burning us alive — when it clears, the dragon’s landed across from us, huge jaws open. Mages, full of mana, are a far better prize eaten than burnt. It just needed to deplete our defences first.
It crawls forward. I chance a step towards the East Tower, some fifty yards away, but a jet of flame cuts me off again.
The world fills with heat. The dragon screams, meeting our challenge with its own. Vila stands at the head of our pack, paws stretched before her, fire roaring from her wrist. “Go!” she shouts. “To the East Dormitory!”
A group of Destruction students I don’t recognise are gathered behind her, throwing everything they have at the monster. Badly burned and still bleeding, the dragon screams its fury.
With Alyx in my arms and Mae by my side I start to run, but Alyx grabs for my face and almost makes me trip. “What?” I shout.
One arm dangles near the ground. When she brings it back up she’s holding a steel mace with four green, thorny flanges around the heavy head. “Mae,” she whispers, as she passes out. Gods, I need to get her out of this heat. But first-
I had a vision: Mae, with a mace. I know she can do this. I trust her; completely and without reservation. Without room to think, without room to question if I’m doing the right thing, I drop Alyx’s body into the grass and seize Mae by the arm, thrust the mace into her hands. “From Alyx,” I say, and she nods, somehow full of understanding.
“I can’t hold it!” Vila shouts, the fire threatening to overwhelm her.
“Get me over there,” Mae hisses, and immediately I wrap my hands around her tender waist, charge forward with my muscles locked. We come at the dragon from the side, and it’s too busy contending with the screaming Vila to notice Mae flying through the air, mace raised over her head, red and blue flames dancing across the reflective metal. She crashes down, screaming “OBEY” as a flange bites deep into the dragon’s snout, crunching through scales and muscle, stuck like a railway spike. Both hands tight around the mace’s handle, Mae’s momentum carries her up onto the dragon’s neck.
Its coiling body whips up, ending its attack on Vila just before she collapses, empty and exhausted. Wineskin carries her in his mouth by the loose skin at the back of her neck, over to Alyx.
The dragon takes flight, shaking its neck in fury and roaring flame. It tries to turn its head around, but Mae’s too far up. Even when the beast tucks its wings and spins through the air she stays on its neck, shouting for it to obey.
It loops back towards the earth, hissing and screeching. It scores the ground before us, behind us, but every time it aims at our group Mae wrenches back on the mace and forces its head up. Blood drips from it’s neck as she, wait, no — is she healing it?
This is a gamble, if it doesn’t pay off, we’ll have a full strength dragon to contend with. Round and round they go until, at last, it lands before us, huffing, screaming — and then bowing its head, resting against the dirt.
On its back, dress singed and hair wild, Mae’s the sexiest woman in the entire world. The mace, spike healed in the back of the creatures neck, is the last evidence of battle on the dragon, whose fur has returned to fluffy, golden blue perfection.
“I claim you as my own,” says Mae.
We stand, in the wake of battle, outside the Headmistress’s office — a gigantic, glass domed observatory. Tailina’s attending to the aftermath outside, organising Alterationists to clear the rubble and Restorationists to repair the building. Princess Indel reclines, unconscious, across a golden velvet couch, head in Nym’s lap. Next to them, on a blue couch, Alyx snores with Wineskin curled up beneath her. Mae’s in the office, talking to Lyra — about if she can keep her dragon, if I had to guess.
“The troublemakers,” Vila says, standing in the wide archway out into the surrounding administrative hallway, as ornate as the rest of the Academy. She stalks towards me, slower than usual — feeling it as hard as us, even if she pretends she’s not. “I have to wonder if one of you isn’t responsible for this. Hundreds of excursions and nothing has followed us back. Until now. And then your friend claims the beast?”
“You can’t possibly think that.” I’ve made some mistakes, but come on.
“It would be audacious, even for you. But I would not rule-” Vila’s sneer turns to shock as she’s spun to the side by a firm grip on her tie. Holding it by the knot, Alyx reels Vila in until their bodies are pressed together; she grabs Vila’s waist with a hungry hand.
“Not he- Unhand me, or-”
“Heel, kitty.” Alyx leads Vila away as Nym and I stare at each other, mouths open.
“What was that?” she cries, in envy and surprise.
“Something unexpected.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice to know how that started?”
And suddenly, I see, vision dancing across my mind.
Fuck. I cross my legs as Nym tilts her head.
“You okay, Hattie?”
“F-fine,” I manage, “I had a head spin.” Not strictly a lie.
With a considering look, Nym disappears down the stairs after Vila and Alyx. Mae dances over to me, pink faced and triumphant.
“You can keep him then?” I ask, trying to banish the encounter I definitely, definitely shouldn’t have seen from my mind.
“If I can keep him fed. He’s too big for the Conjurers to summon food for, so I’ll have to learn to hunt.”
I try to picture Mae hunting — a tiny, fierce woman stalking through the forest, and feel a jolt through my centre. Not helping my current situation. Even through the wave of dizziness I suddenly feel though, I grin.
“You’re not going home!”
She returns my elation. “I’m not!” And then she collides into me with a hug, and I lift her off her feet, and everything is good for a moment. The awkwardness of tonight creeps back in though.
“Mae, I just need to say, I need to-”
“Apologise?” She raises an eyebrow at me from beneath her huge glasses. “I’ll say. Not here, though. You wouldn’t be able to do it properly.”
I open my mouth to speak and find nothing comes out. It’s okay, she talks for me.
“Tonight, after the party, in my room. Since my Familiar is so powerful, Headmistress Lyra wants to assess me personally tomorrow. I need help studying if I want to impress her.”
Her room? I bite my lip, take a second to find my voice.
“Tonight, then,” I say.
“You’re temporarily forgiven, then, if you’ll be my date to the party.”
I can’t help it, I break out into a huge smile. “Let’s head back to our rooms first. I need to change.”