Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
The ground began to shake when they were about two hundred feet from the portal.
Ben felt it first in his feet, a deep, subsonic vibration that traveled up through his legs and settled into his bones with an intensity that made every limb ache.
The dimensional scars on his chest and arms flared hot, responding to something vast stirring beneath the earth, and he stumbled against Sidney as the forest floor heaved beneath them.
“What — ” he started to say, but the word was swallowed by a sound that wasn’t quite sound — a roar that seemed to come from everywhere at once, from the bedrock and the trees and the rain-heavy air itself.
The Dragon was waking up.
Not stirring, or dreaming. Actually, catastrophically waking up.
Sidney’s hand tightened on his with bruising force.
Her scars were blazing gold, bright enough to cast shadows in the pre-dawn darkness, and her face had gone pale beneath the dirt and rain that streaked her skin.
She could feel it, too, he knew — could feel it far more intensely than he, her connection to the ley line giving her direct access to the creature’s consciousness as it clawed its way toward the surface.
“We’re too late,” she said. Her voice was barely audible over the growing thunder from below. “Gregory’s drill — it finally hit something it shouldn’t have. The Dragon’s not waiting for the solstice anymore.”
Behind them, Finn stumbled and nearly fell, caught at the last moment by Emily and Priya.
The unicorn’s healing had stabilized him, but he was still weak, still recovering from the bullet wound that should have killed him.
Josie hovered at his side, her face tight with fear, while the two guardian women struggled to keep him upright on the trembling ground.
“We need to get to cover,” Ben said, even though he wasn’t sure what kind of cover could possibly protect them from what was coming.
The trees around them were swaying violently now, their ancient trunks groaning in protest, and he could see cracks opening in the earth, jagged lines of amber light spreading outward from somewhere to the northeast.
Toward Welling Glen…toward Julian Gregory’s operation.
“There’s no cover from this.” Sidney’s voice sounded distant, her attention clearly focused on something beyond the physical world. “It’s rising. Right now. Right where the drill — ”
She didn’t finish the sentence. A second later, an enormous explosion lit up the entire forest.
Ben watched it happen from what felt like a great distance, his brain struggling to process the scale of what he was seeing.
A column of fire erupted from the earth half a mile away, punching through the canopy and climbing toward the sky with a speed that defied physics.
It wasn’t red or orange like normal fire — it was gold and white and something else, something that wanted to sear itself on his retinas, colors that existed at the edge of human perception and maybe slightly beyond.
He was already moving, already throwing himself toward Sidney, when a wall of superheated air slammed into them with enough force to send them both tumbling across the forest floor.
He felt his back hit a tree trunk, felt the impact drive the breath from his lungs, and then everything was noise and chaos and the smell of burning air mixed with something that reminded him of volcanic rock and ancient seas.
When he could see again, the world had changed.
The column of fire had resolved itself into a shape, a shape so massive that his brain initially refused to acknowledge it.
Wings that stretched across the sky, blocking out the stars.
A body covered in scales that glowed like cooling lava, deep red shading to black at the edges.
Eyes that burned with an intelligence so vast and alien that meeting them, even from this distance, made Ben feel like an insect confronting something that could crush it without noticing.
The Dragon had risen…and it was very angry.
Ben had thought he understood anger. He’d experienced it himself — the cold fury when Rosenthal had pointed her weapon at Sidney, the hot rage when he’d learned how DAPI had manipulated them both.
He’d seen anger in others, too, the small human varieties that drove people to harsh words and regrettable actions.
This was nothing like that. This was the anger of tectonic plates grinding against each other, of forces that had shaped the world long before anything resembling humanity had crawled out of the primordial seas.
The Dragon’s rage wasn’t personal. It was elemental, a fundamental response to violation that transcended anything as simple as emotion.
And it was directed at the thing that had woken it.
Ben watched, unable to look away, as the Dragon turned its massive head toward Julian Gregory’s drilling operation.
The Aetheris compound was visible now, lit by emergency flares and the hellish glow of the Dragon itself — prefab buildings scattered across the scarred earth of Welling Glen, the drilling apparatus still standing at the center like a monument to human arrogance.
He could see people running, tiny figures fleeing in every direction, their vehicles and their weapons and their careful tactical plans rendered meaningless by the thing that loomed above them.
The Dragon opened its mouth, and Ben felt the temperature in the forest drop at least twenty degrees as the creature drew in power from the ley line network, from the very energy source Gregory had been trying to steal.
Then it breathed.
The fire that poured from the Dragon’s jaws wasn’t like the column that had marked its emergence.
That had been violent, explosive. This was something else entirely, a focused beam of destruction that swept across the Aetheris compound with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel.
The drilling apparatus vaporized instantly, the metal framework sublimating into plasma before Ben’s eyes.
The prefab buildings followed, then the vehicles, and then the generators and the satellite dishes and everything else that represented Gregory’s attempt to harvest power that was never meant to be harvested.
In less than thirty seconds, the entire operation ceased to exist.
Ben heard someone crying out beside him and turned to find Sidney on her hands and knees, her scars blazing so bright that he could barely look at her.
Her connection to the ley line meant she was feeling all of this directly — the Dragon’s fury, the destruction of the drilling site, the screaming agony of the network as it tried to heal from wounds that had been inflicted over weeks of constant violation.
“Sidney.” He crawled toward her, his own body protesting every movement, his scars throbbing in sympathy with hers. “Sidney, talk to me. What’s happening?”
“They’re dead.” Her voice was a raw whisper.
“Everyone at the drilling site. Gregory, his engineers, the mercenaries who didn’t run fast enough.
The Dragon didn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians.
It just — ” She broke off there and pressed her hands against her temples, as if she could block out the images flooding through her connection. “It burned them all.”
Something cold settled in Ben’s stomach. Julian Gregory was dead. The man who had caused all of this — who had drilled into the ley line and woken an ancient creature that had been sleeping since before recorded history — was gone, vaporized along with his machines and his ambitions.
It should have felt like victory. Instead, it felt like the beginning of something much worse.
Because it was obvious that the Dragon wasn’t stopping.
Ben watched as the creature turned away from the smoldering crater that had been the Aetheris compound.
Its massive head swept across the forest, those burning eyes taking in the trees and the rain and the scattered humans who had witnessed its emergence.
For one terrible moment, its gaze seemed to fix on the spot where Ben and the others huddled, and he felt the weight of that attention pressing down on him like a physical force.
Then the Dragon’s gaze moved on, past them, toward something else.
Toward Silver Hollow.
The town was visible from here, or at least the glow of it was — streetlights and porch lights and the warm yellow windows of houses where people were just beginning their morning routines, unaware that the world had changed forever in the past few minutes.
Ben could picture all of them, families sitting down to breakfast, children getting ready for school, shopkeepers opening their doors for another ordinary day.
They had no idea what was coming.
“It’s going to burn the town.” Emily’s voice was also a hoarse whisper.
She had managed to get Finn to a sitting position against a fallen log, his face gray with exhaustion and residual pain, while Josie and Priya crouched nearby.
All of them were staring at the Dragon with expressions of horrified fascination.
“It sees the violence — the mercenaries, the weapons, everything that just happened here. It thinks we’re all like Gregory. ”
“We have to stop it.” Sidney was trying to climb to her feet, her legs shaking beneath her, her scars still blazing with borrowed light. “I have to — ”
“You have to what?” Ben demanded, and caught her arm before she could fall.
“Sidney, look at yourself. You’re running on empty.
Whatever you did back there with the mercenaries, it took everything you had.
And even if you were at full strength, that thing — ” He gestured helplessly at the Dragon, which had begun moving toward the town with a terrible, deliberate grace.
“That thing is beyond anything we’ve ever faced before.
Beyond anything anyone has ever faced. You can’t fight it. You can barely stand.”