Embralyne was ashamed to admit that she froze underneath the sorcerer’s attention, though not out of fear. Rather, indecision. Every instinct screamed at her to tear herself out of her half-dragon form and engage the enemy with tooth, claw, and fire, yet for however much she had dawdled and not treated an expedition into the mortal lands as seriously as she should have—a reality she could only admit now, with a city hanging under an execution’s blade—she nevertheless did obey the law of dragons. Her father’s law. And Father had made one thing clear: dragons did not interfere with the happenings of the mortal realm.

  She had always found that decree sensible. Separation protected both nations, and what occurred in distant realms did not concern her kind, doubly so when they adamantly refused her people’s rule. Prior to Father’s unification of their homeland, conflict between mortal and immortal lands had been plentiful—so to prevent further strife, a clean separation was needed.

  Even her presence in Prismarche was only excusable under the reasoning that she was investigating a rogue element. And while she was here, Father’s decrees were clear: minimize involvement and avoid being recognized for what she was.

  Certainly she wasn’t allowed to throw herself into the midst of a mad, city-consuming ritual.

  And yet.

  Her gaze drifted to the pair of young siblings slouched against a wall. The boy seemed to have, somehow and inexplicably, recognized what was happening before he’d slipped into unconsciousness. Because even as he’d fallen over, he had covered his sister with his body. It was too clear and deliberate a position to be coincidence.

  A cold sensation passed through her, and her hands clenched into fists. Her gaze slid back to the figure floating between eight bone pillars—between shards carved from the Colossus’s skeleton.

  It seems I’ll be putting Father to the test, she thought darkly. And finding out whether the Dragon King will slay even his own family for disobeying.

  Though that assumed she survived this to begin with.

  She crouched, then launched herself upward. The paved street beneath her disintegrated, and wind whipped through her hair as she rapidly gained elevation. As she climbed, she shed her human disguise. Gray wings sprouted from her back and horns grew from atop her head. Scales crept up her arms and legs to elbows and knees. Her weapons and armor came last—an enormous sword settling into her right hand, and her true set of armor replacing her previous.

  Despite the gravity of the situation, she couldn’t help but sigh in pleasure at stretching her wings. Most dragons weren’t fond of walking around in their half-dragon form for long, and that was far more pleasant than human transmogrification. She’d known she’d felt cramped inside that false skin, but she hadn’t realized how much so until now.

  The unknown mage didn’t react to her transformation—not so far as she could tell, at least. Reading an expression behind a blindfold was rather difficult. Yet his posture didn’t shift, and he kept his head tilted in mild curiosity and nothing more.

  Not afraid of a dragon, I see. She would call him a fool for that, but one of Father’s first lessons had been never to underestimate a foe. It went against her nature to treat an opponent like an equal, even when all evidence suggested otherwise. Perhaps that was why Father had put so much effort into drilling the lesson in.

  Her wings threw up a gust of air as she propelled herself toward the man. Though she itched to fling herself into immediate combat, a part of her hoped, perhaps nonsensically, that she could minimize how much she involved herself with this… situation. Whatever it was.

  He watched her approach, unworried even when—with another gust of her wings—she slowed to a stop several dozen feet away. She hovered there, between two huge bone shards taken from the Colossus’s corpse.

  “Name yourself, sorcerer,” she called out.

  He didn’t respond right away, simply studied her with that inscrutable, blindfolded gaze. Gray wisps of energy continued slithering up from the city beneath them, draining the townsfolk, and seeing them, she almost demanded an immediate answer.

  But while she wasn’t Solfirus, she was still a dragon. She could sense the flow of mana better than any except perhaps the strongest mortal archmages. The draining effect—whatever it was—was acting slowly. That much energy needed time to siphon. Prismarche’s civilians weren’t moments from death.

  “This does not concern you or your kind,” the man finally answered in a rasp. “You will not interfere. Your King will not allow it.”

  She almost snarled at the response. Personally lamenting the necessity of going against her father was one thing, but for this monster to throw that dilemma in her face? She pointed her sword at him. “I said name yourself, cretin.”

  The beastkin remained unperturbed. Despite the cloth around his eyes, his attention drifted toward her weapon. “Ashfall,” he remarked. “That blade belongs to the Mantle-Breaker. You are his kin?”

  Unease tingled through her. There were very few people not born in her homeland to have then ventured there. For one to recognize her father’s previous blade implied… she wasn’t sure what it implied. But age. And experience. Though she supposed the construction of a city-destroying ritual was proof of that by itself.

  Her eyes slid upward to his long, branching antlers—the most distinguishing trait, even compared to his flowing black hair and blindfold. A story told to her many decades ago bubbled to the surface of her mind, and her eyes narrowed.

  “The Twilight Celebrant,” she said.

  He seemed neither surprised nor pleased by the acknowledgment. He took it in stride like everything before. “An old name,” he croaked. “Older than most. Not the one I bear now. Your father tells stories, I see.”

  The situation was, somehow, worse than she’d expected. A mad ritualist was one thing… a member of the Selrath-Kyn another.

  Yet it also changed nothing. “Cease this madness and leave. I will not pursue.”

  “This does not involve you or your kind.” He turned away and refocused on the center of the ritual, where the draining energy gathered. “And you are no threat. Begone, whelp of the Mantle-Breaker.”

  The disregard filled her with hot and immediate fury. Dragonfire sprang up around her sword, and, with two hands, she slashed forward. An arc of brilliant orange-and-gray flame detached from her blade and hurtled toward the mage—only to wash impotently across a sphere of green mana.

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  It hadn’t even been a probing strike, merely a way of drawing his attention. A tossed handful of mud. Even so, the casual ease with which he had deflected dragonfire—her dragonfire, which even Father acknowledged as potent—didn’t bode well.

  She accomplished her goal, in any case. His gaze returned to her, and a slight frown creased his lips.

  “You break your people’s oaths?”

  “I will not stand by as you murder a city.”

  “It is not your city to defend.”

  “Nevertheless, I am here.”

  They met each other’s gazes.

  “Always complications,” the Twilight Celebrant rasped. “The Dragon King’s spawn, here to resist. Fate conspires at every turn.”

  “Reflect on why even the heavens work against you, monster.”

  His lips pulled back—a grotesque approximation of a smile. “Ah, do not misunderstand. Their desperation delights me. When even the gods are trembling, I know I walk the proper course.”

  He pointed his staff at her.

  “[Corpselight].”

  A bolt of green energy blasted out of the length of wood. Ember wreathed her sword in a dense coat of dragonfire and met the assault head-on. Starmetal alloy sliced through condensed mana. The taste of necromancy and decay filled her mouth as the energy split off in either direction, tickling at her armor and exposed skin.

  “I do not wish to draw the Mantle-Breaker’s ire by slaying his child,” the Twilight Celebrant remarked, as if he hadn’t just thrown a spell that could’ve disintegrated a lesser dragon. “But I have already drawn worse. She will be coming for me should I fail. The Work must be completed.”

  “She?”

  “[Duskpiercer]. [Sunder Anima]. [Blight Surge].”

  Ember’s eyes widened as the three spells flew at her in rapid succession. She cut the first cleanly in two; the second, she struggled to break, and much of the energy washed across her; the last hurled her backwards and engulfed her in rot and decay. Her ancestral armor—and the dragonfire in her soul—kept the magic from penetrating, kept her skin from necrotizing and her eyes from rotting into husks, but she wanted to gag at the putrid sensation that filled her skull.

  “[Release Revenant].”

  Even as she was recovering, spectral white essence oozed out of the mage's staff, congealing into a nine-foot-tall, armored creature she could only assume had been some manner of ogre… another indicator that this man had, indeed, once set foot in the lands of the immortals.

  Disgust curdled Ember’s stomach as she watched the spirit manifest. Necromancy was distasteful to start with, but this? Soul binding. Enslavement after death. Forbidden by any society that had ever existed, or near enough. Not that she was surprised.

  The incorporeal figure rushed for her, and Ember braced herself. She ducked underneath the first swing of its white-blue club and retaliated with a thrust of her own weapon. Even reinforced with dragonfire, the blade merely sizzled as it sank into ghostly flesh. The ogre-thing grunted and kicked forward. The sheer power in the blow shocked her, well beyond what she had expected. She went flying backward with a boom, a gasp tearing from her lips. When she recovered with several powerful flaps of her wings, suddenly a thousand feet away, she looked down and saw that her armor had dented.

  What is that thing? she thought incredulously, gaze snapping up to the spectral beast charging through the air at her. Not just an ogre. Though she supposed she was no expert on esoteric, forbidden magics. Its spirit had probably been empowered by its master, perhaps over centuries.

  A flick of her attention sideways showed that the Twilight Celebrant had returned to tending to his ritual. She bristled, though she knew it wasn’t a sign of disregard. If he were so strong that he could swat her dead in an instant, he would have done so. No, magic on this scale needed to be controlled. That he was capable of splitting his attention at all spoke of near unparalleled mastery.

  Shame boiled through her as her opponent closed the distance and she found herself occupied with a mere summons. Solfirus would have been better suited to killing an incorporeal creature; dragonfire alone couldn’t suffice, and that was where Ember’s specialty lay.

  Her thoughts raced as she ducked beneath blow after blow and maneuvered through the air, slicing into the spirit and carving out bits of its essence as she worked her way back to her target. She was winning, slowly and steadily, but again, that was no mark of merit when she was fighting a summons.

  “[Rotmist].”

  The Twilight Celebrant reentered the fray while she was distracted. A cloud of dark miasma poured into the air around her, cloying and choking. Even dousing herself in dragonfire didn’t clean away its corrupting touch; skin all across her body blackened and began to bleed. She scrambled away, coughing as her eyes filled with tears. She briefly considered transforming, but her more nimble half-dragon form was more useful in this type of fight.

  The spectral humanoid’s club caught her on the flank, and she went careening sideways a second time. She wasn’t given a moment to recover from either of those attacks: the Twilight Celebrant spoke once again, distant but clear.

  “[Reaping Arc].”

  A black crescent crackling with energy carved a gouge into and through her armor. She gritted her teeth as she cauterized the wound.

  “[Grasp of the Damned].”

  Spectral limbs grabbed at her legs, arms, and wings. She struggled but couldn’t break free. The pursuing ogre spirit—though she was seriously doubting whether it had simply been an ogre—once more slammed its club downward. Having no other option, she caught the attack with her sword. As she’d suspected from the start, she was no match in a contest of strength against the hulking humanoid. The impact threw her downward toward the earth, and she only barely kept herself from crashing into the city of Prismarche as a miniature meteor.

  She recovered, spinning several times before steadying.

  I… can’t win.

  It wasn’t the first time in her life that thought had gone through her head. In fact, it wasn’t a particularly rare one, even if she didn’t count spars against her older siblings. Progressing required fighting opponents more powerful than herself, and sometimes ones beyond her ability to kill at all.

  Still, she’d rarely been in danger of dying. More importantly, she’d never had a city’s fate resting in her hands. Shame crashed through her as she glanced up at the eight pillars of bone. If not for how the Twilight Celebrant was distracted, she would already be dead. The spells he dismissively snuck in between tending to his ritual were beyond her ability to defend from—could break through her armor, magical shields, and dragonfire combined.

  Some might have despaired at the mismatch in power. Ember, naturally, only felt her blood boil in outrage.

  I can’t kill him. But I can still win.

  After all, her goal wasn’t to slay the monster, gratifying as it would be. She just needed to stop the ritual. Prevent a city’s worth of civilians from being drained to husks to accomplish some atrocity she could only begin to guess at.

  But stopping an ongoing ritual—that wasn’t wise in any circumstance. Insanity, many would argue.

  Then again, in this specific instance…

  Indecision tore through her as she weighed her options. Finally, she settled on a plan. A gamble. A stupid, reckless one, by any standards. But not suicide. And the whole city was dead otherwise.

  Outpacing the pursuing spirit, she drew deeper from the pool of dragonfire than any time so far—enough that even her draconic veins burned under the heat. She layered spells into her blade too, reinforcing the metal as much as her meager talents in the arcane allowed. She was no Solfirus, much less Father, but she was a dragon, and a Caldaros at that.

  With all the offensive might she could muster gathered into the length of her ancestral weapon, she lifted the sword with both hands—then hurled it upward.

  Even occupied with his ritual, the Twilight Celebrant sensed the sheer power pulsing in the metal. His sightless gaze turned in that direction. The green-tinted shield from earlier sprang to life to protect him, but her goal hadn’t been the ritualist.

  With perfect aim—and since it was a very large target—her sword spun end over end to land true. It slammed, point first, into the nearest colossal bone shard engraved with dense red runes. The blade buried itself two feet deep, and at once, hairline fractures splintered all through the white material.

  …cutting straight through the magical runes responsible for holding the ritual together.

  Mana all across the city wobbled. The words that floated on the wind from a thousand feet away suddenly made her doubt herself, no matter the path forward she had imagined. Because even the Twilight Celebrant sounded horrified.

  “Are you utterly mad, whelp?”

  With one final crack, the bone shard exploded.