32. Quill #2
The next moment, the two dragons collided with a force that sent shockwaves rattling through the marble floor beneath my feet.
I pressed myself tighter against the pillar, watching in horrified fascination as claws raked against scales, as teeth snapped inches from throats, as two bodies the size of houses grappled and tore at each other in the wreckage of what had once been an elegant foyer.
Chandeliers shattered. Support beams cracked.
Somewhere above us, I heard the groan of the ceiling itself beginning to protest the violence being done beneath it.
Thaddeus was faster than I expected, his age lending him a brutal, practiced efficiency that Aeron’s raw fury couldn’t quite match.
He caught Aeron’s foreleg between his jaws and wrenched, and I heard Aeron’s roar of pain echo through the chamber, felt it resonate somewhere deep in my chest through whatever bond connected us.
“Aeron!” I was moving before I even realized it, ignoring Elias’s hand grabbing for my sleeve, ignoring every instinct screaming at me to stay hidden. I didn’t have magic worth anything. I didn’t have claws or fangs or centuries of experience. But I had to do something.
Aeron wrenched free, his blood, golden and glimmering, spilling from the wound as he staggered back. But instead of retreating further, he opened his jaws wide, and I watched something building in his throat, a light gathering, orange and white and furious.
I’d never seen him breathe fire before. I didn’t know if he could.
The flame that erupted from his throat was blinding, a column of pure heat that turned the air itself shimmering and distorted, that made the marble beneath Thaddeus’s feet crack and blacken instantly. Thaddeus didn’t bother moving. He puffed his chest out, letting the fire strike him head on.
For a moment, I wasn’t sure what happened. But then, as the flames began to die back, I realized Thaddeus was laughing. The flames had destroyed everything around him, but his scales remained unmarked. Dragon fire hadn’t touched him at all.
“Is that the best you’ve got?” he cried, his voice deep and booming in his dragon form. “You are nothing but a pup, barely able to produce flame.” He pulled his head back, fangs gleaming as his lips pulled into a cruel smile. “Let me show you what true dragon fire feels like.”
Thaddeus reared back, his mouth opened wide.
In his throat gathered not white-hot heat, but dark purple flames, like his magic, coalescing into a black sphere in the back of his throat.
His front feet lifted off the ground, wings spread wide as he prepared to eviscerate his grandson.
And I, slipping out of Elias’s grip, ran across the ruined marble to Aeron’s side, throwing up a thin magical shield in some vain attempt to save him.
Just as Thaddeus was about to unleash the corrupted torrent that would destroy us all, he stopped.
His eyes went wide before the flames died in his throat.
For one brief moment, I thought he had a change of heart, that he finally understood he was killing his only family just to exact revenge on witches that had long been dead.
But then I saw them creeping across the thin membranes of his wings. White filaments.
The mushrooms, up until that point, had only affected the undead.
But somehow they had found their way into him too.
Maybe from the spores still hanging thick in the air, drifting through the ruined foyer like ash after a fire.
Maybe some of it had clung to his scales when he’d barreled past his own collapsing army without a second thought.
I didn’t know. And I didn’t care. All that mattered was that they were there, crawling across the thin membrane of his wings like frost spreading across glass, and his limbs were freezing into place before he could destroy us.
“What—” His booming voice cracked, panic bleeding into it for the first time since I’d laid eyes on him. He twisted, trying to look at his own wing, trying to bat at the creeping white filaments with a foreleg that wouldn’t quite obey him fast enough. “No. NO—”
The fungus didn’t care about his centuries of power any more than it cared about Morgana’s.
It didn’t care that he was a Pyre, that he’d built his entire life on the foundation of being untouchable, unkillable, and the strongest thing in any room he walked into.
It just spread, patient and relentless, decomposing everything it touched into soil.
“There’s one crucial detail you overlooked, Thaddeus,” Wild said, his voice filling the room as he stepped forward.
“Practicing necromancy comes at a cost.” Wild shifted his weight onto one hip, that cocky smile filling his face.
“Your life force drains away with every spell. That means, after all these decades of using dark magic to exact your revenge, you’re just as undead as your soldiers. ”
Thaddeus screamed. It wasn’t a roar anymore, not the terrible booming sound that had shaken the chandeliers moments before.
It was something smaller, something desperate buried under those impenetrable scales of his, tearing its way out of him as the fungus climbed higher, past his wing joint and down across his massive chest.
“This isn’t possible,” he choked out, his golden eyes wide with a terror I’d never expected to see on that face. “I am a Pyre. I am—”
“Dead,” Wild finished for him, almost gently. “Have been for a while now, I’d guess. You just didn’t know it yet thanks to your dragon hide. But you’ve been rotting from the inside for far too long. Necromancy doesn’t come free, old man. Somebody always pays the price. And this time, it’s you.”
I stayed pressed against Aeron’s side, my thin shield still trembling in the air between us and the collapsing dragon, though I didn’t think we needed it anymore.
Thaddeus’s massive body swayed, his wings seizing up entirely now, frozen mid-spread like a moth pinned to a board.
Mushrooms sprouted from the corners of his eyes, delicate and white and utterly obscene against the golden scales that had seemed so invincible only minutes before.
“Aeron.” His voice had gone soft, pleading, and for one terrible second I saw something that looked almost like the man who’d embraced his grandson in that study, who’d poured brandy and asked about my family with something like genuine interest. “Aeron, please. I did this for you. For us. Everything, all of it, I did it to protect our kind—”
“You did this for yourself,” Aeron said, and his voice beside me was low and shaking, but steady. Steadier than I expected. “You did it because you couldn’t let go of your grief long enough to see what it was turning you into.”
The fungus reached his throat. His booming voice cracked into something wet and broken, the same rattling non-sound Morgana had made in her last moments.
His enormous body began to list sideways, the joints of his legs buckling as whatever held his massive form together started to give out beneath the weight of decay eating through him from the inside out.
I felt Aeron tense beside me, his whole body coiled like he might lunge forward, might try to catch his grandfather even now, even after everything. I grabbed for his foreleg without thinking, my hand small and useless against his red scales.
“Don’t,” I said. “Aeron, don’t. There’s nothing you can do.”
He didn’t move, but I felt the tremor running through him, felt the grief and rage and love all tangled together in a knot he probably wouldn’t be able to untangle for years, if ever.
Thaddeus Pyre, leader of the Elder Council, the man who’d raised him from an egg, collapsed to the ruined marble floor in a heap of steaming compost, golden scales shattering as they hit the ground.
A moment later the massive crystal sphere hanging in the air fell, exploding into a million tiny pieces clattering across the marble floors.
The silence that followed felt like it would never end.