Chapter 7 #2
Morgrith existed as contradiction—shadow given draconic form, his edges bleeding into darkness that moved wrong.
Looking directly at him made my eyes water, made my brain insist he wasn't there while my instincts screamed he was everywhere.
His scales seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it, creating a void in the shape of a dragon that suggested terrible things waited in the spaces between what we could see.
Caelus whirled in as silver wind and hail, not quite solid, not quite gas, but something between that changed with each heartbeat.
His form shifted constantly—now serpentine, now classical, now something that had too many wings and not enough body.
The temperature plummeted where he passed, frost forming on surfaces that had been warm seconds before, my breath becoming visible clouds that he seemed to breathe in with pleasure.
But it was the figure on Davoren's shoulder that made my stomach drop.
Kara—it had to be Kara from the way she sat with perfect balance despite the molten heat beneath her—rode the Fire Lord like she belonged there.
Her golden bonding marks blazed war-bright across exposed skin, creating their own light that competed with Davoren's magma glow.
She held a spear of condensed flame that looked more real than reality, its point focused to atom-sharpness, and her expression was harder than I'd ever seen on someone so young.
The collar at her throat—dragon-scale that matched Davoren's hide—marked her as thoroughly claimed, thoroughly transformed, thoroughly dangerous.
The traders had gone beyond panic into a kind of vacant terror, their minds simply refusing to process what they witnessed.
One had fainted, crumpling into the furs.
Another had wet himself, the sharp ammonia scent cutting through the smoke and ozone.
The youngest—the one who'd shown the contract—was praying in a language I didn't recognize, eyes squeezed shut, rocking back and forth.
Sereis moved before I could process the danger, his hand closing on my wrist and pulling me behind him as he rose.
Ice formed around us instantly—not a shield but a statement, black ice so pure it looked like frozen void.
Through it, I could see the other Dragon Lords distorted into nightmare shapes, their fury turned into something even more terrible by the refraction.
"Sereis!" Davoren's voice wasn't meant for human throats—it was the sound of mountains exploding, of pyroclastic flows that buried entire civilizations. "You will face judgment!"
Even through the ice shield, I felt the accusation like a physical blow. Judgment. They thought Sereis had orchestrated the theft, the betrayal. They'd come for war.
"You bring destruction to my domain based on a lie.
" Sereis's voice carried absolute zero, the kind of cold that stopped atoms from moving.
He stood perfectly still, but I could feel the power gathering in him, winter itself preparing to defend its master.
"Whatever fiction has been fed to you, I demand the right of explanation before you violate sacred hospitality. "
"Explanation?" Davoren's massive head swung toward us, and I saw death in those molten eyes. "Your servants tried to slay my consort. They used your colors, your authority, your weapons. You think words will undo that betrayal?"
"I think," Sereis said with deadly calm, "that someone has played us all for fools. But if you insist on combat before conversation—"
Davoren attacked mid-sentence. Not a warning shot or testing strike but a full commitment of power.
The blast of superheated magma he expelled could have leveled a city district, turned stone to glass, made the very air combust. It came at us like a horizontal volcano, all that molten fury focused into a stream of destruction.
Sereis raised his hand almost lazily, and winter answered.
Not ice—ice would have vaporized instantly.
This was cold as a concept, as a fundamental force, compressed into a shield that absorbed heat the way black holes absorbed light.
The magma hit and simply stopped existing as heat, transforming into something else entirely.
The impact sounded like a thousand bells shattering in harmony, like music made from destruction.
Caelus was already moving, using the distraction of the frontal assault to dart around our flank. "My property!" he shrieked, and I realized with sick certainty he meant me. "The thief who cost me my servant! She's mine by right of debt!"
Sereis pivoted without looking, his other hand creating a localized blizzard that manifested from nothing.
The temperature differential was so extreme that ice crystals formed from the moisture in Caelus's own breath, creating a cloud that blinded the Wind Lord completely.
At the same time, Sereis maintained the shield against Davoren's continuing assault, defending on two fronts with an ease that spoke of centuries of combat experience.
"Yours?" Sereis's voice had dropped to something beyond cold, beyond winter.
This was the voice of entropy itself, of the heat death of the universe.
"Nothing in my domain is yours, wind-dancer.
Not the girl, not the air you breathe, not even the possibility of your continued existence if you persist in this foolishness. "
The other Dragon Lords were positioning themselves for attack, surrounding us with mechanical precision.
Five against one, even in his own domain, even with all his power—the odds were impossible.
My transformed body, strong as it had become, trembled with the need to help, to do something other than cower behind Sereis's protection.
But I could feel his will through the bond we'd begun but hadn't sealed, his absolute command that I stay hidden, stay safe, stay out of the path of dragon warfare that could unmake me with a stray thought.
The real battle was about to begin.
The shift happened between one heartbeat and the next, Sereis's human form dissolving into something that my transformed senses could barely comprehend as real.
He didn't change—he revealed, as if his human shape had been a polite fiction he maintained for our comfort.
What emerged made my understanding of dragons seem like a child's drawing compared to the actual sun.
His scales rippled with aurora colors that shouldn't exist in nature—not just the greens and blues I'd seen in northern skies, but colors that made my brain invent new names.
Each scale was a prism that split light into spectrums human eyes weren't meant to see, creating halos of impossible beauty that hurt to perceive directly.
He was massive but lean, built for speed rather than pure strength, with wings that seemed to exist in more dimensions than three.
When they moved, they left traces in the air, afterimages that suggested he could fly through time as easily as space.
The confrontation erupted properly when Davoren lunged, his magma form moving with speed that something that massive shouldn't possess.
They collided in the center of the ruined parlor like natural disasters given intent.
Where Davoren's superheated claws raked across Sereis's flank, the aurora scales flickered and went dark, actual wounds that bled light instead of blood.
The droplets froze before they could fall, becoming tiny stars that hung in the air for moments before shattering.
Sereis's tail came around in a sweep that caught Davoren's legs, the impact like glaciers colliding with volcanos.
The Fire Lord went flying, his massive form crashing through three pillars of eternal ice that had stood for millennia.
They shattered into fragments that sang as they fell, each piece holding a note of some cosmic song I couldn't understand.
Davoren was already rising, magma blood dripping from his maw, when Caelus struck from above.
Lightning breath should have been white-hot electricity.
What Caelus expelled was something else—pure storm given form, not just lightning but pure energy.
It hit Sereis's raised wing and conducted through those impossible scales in patterns that made reality hiccup.
For a moment, I saw Sereis in multiple positions simultaneously, as if the lightning had split him across possibilities.
He recovered by becoming winter incarnate.
The temperature in the entire palace dropped so dramatically that frost formed on my eyelashes, made my transformed body shiver despite its new resilience.
Caelus banked hard to avoid being frozen solid, but ice still formed on his silver wings, making his flight erratic.
I pressed myself against the black ice barrier Sereis had created for me, my hands flat against its surface, feeling the combat through vibrations that went soul-deep.
Every instinct screamed at me to help, to do something, but what could I do against beings that treated physics as suggestion?
My transformation had made me more than human, but this was warfare between gods.
I could only watch and try not to let my terror show through the bond I shared with Sereis—he didn't need that distraction.
Garruk had been patient, waiting for his moment.
When it came, the floor beneath Sereis suddenly wasn't floor anymore.
It became liquid stone that reached up with fingers of granite to wrap around the Ice Lord's claws.
Sereis tried to pull free, his wings beating hard enough to create a localized hurricane, but the stone followed him up, growing with intent, adding weight that even a dragon couldn't ignore.