Chapter 15
HAILEY
The wind tore at our wings, sang in our mouths, hammered at every joint with a malice I’d never felt on earth.
The sword strapped across my shoulders was the one thing in all worlds that might end this.
Jax’s scales were scorching against my stomach and thighs.
He was running hot, maybe from nerves, maybe adrenaline.
The velocity was enough to make my eyes water, but I didn’t dare look away.
Ahead of us, Adalinda split the sky. She still wore the new claws.
Each curve glinted in the twin suns, runes flickering with every subtle change of angle.
Her flight wasn’t beautiful. Nothing about her had ever been merely beautiful.
It was efficient, implacable, and terrifying.
If I’d been Vaelog, I would have turned and run. But Vaelog wasn't the running type.
We saw him first as a distortion in the light.
A shadow that moved against the pattern of the wind, a black so dense it canceled out the colors around it.
He didn’t travel alone. Three smaller dragons flanked him, one a sapphire blue so dark it was almost purple, the other two a matched set of silver-grey, their wings lit at the edges by the static of overcharged magic.
They kept their distance, never closing to within a tail’s length of Vaelog’s body.
I guessed even his soldiers knew exactly how many seconds they’d survive if they caught him on a bad day.
Corvus’s mind-voice hit like a starter pistol. “Now. Close. Keep formation. He will try to scatter us, hold the line, and do not break, no matter what he does.”
Solenne’s command rode on the back of it. “Adalinda leads. The rest, maintain intervals. Hailey, you know your signal.”
I braced, locked my thighs tighter, and tried not to think about all the ways this could fail.
The first clash came faster than I expected.
Vaelog rolled up from his position, slicing a vertical spiral through the updraft, and slammed into the side edge of our wedge.
The force of it sent three dragons spinning out of the air, not dead but definitely out of the fight, and their shrieks left a cold stripe up my spine.
Adalinda met him head-on, claws out, jaws wide, and when they collided, the sound was thunder.
Vaelog’s claws met Adalinda’s, and for a moment the world just…
paused. Every wind, every current, even the sunlight itself seemed to wait for them.
Then Adalinda feinted left, slashed with her new claws, and caught Vaelog across the face.
The runes on her talons burned a white so pure it looked like she’d dipped her hand in a nuclear forge, and where she struck, scales and blood fountained off Vaelog in a glittering, iridescent spray.
He didn’t flinch, not even a little. He drove forward, ignoring the wound, and locked his jaws around her left forearm.
The bite should have shattered bone, but the claws protected her, and for a second, the two of them spiraled through the air together, more like lovers than adversaries.
They broke apart with a crack that I felt in my back teeth.
Jax banked hard, taking us into the lower edge of the melee.
Around us, the air was full of telepathic noise, warnings, curses, tactical updates, half-formed prayers.
The formation was working, but just barely.
Every time Vaelog tried to break out, three or four dragons closed in, harried him, and forced him back toward the center.
Corvus swept past us, a missile of obsidian and orange flame, and raked Vaelog’s wing with his claws.
The cut was deep. A membrane tore, a thread of blue-black blood spinning off into the void.
Vaelog’s mind-voice hit us then, not words, but a psychic scream that made my brain feel like it was on fire.
It was Solenne who damped the psychic shockwave.
She poured her will into the collective link, a pulse of cold water through the electrical storm, and steadied the formation as Vaelog tried to use our confusion to escape upward.
He couldn’t. Adalinda was waiting, claws crossed, wings flared, her whole body a wall of ferocious maternal intent.
“Hold the cage!” yelled Corvus. “Rotate attack, every three seconds. Do not let him pick the tempo. Hailey, prepare yourself.”
Jax’s body tensed, a signal more obvious than any words.
We banked up and right, taking a new vector that put us parallel to Vaelog’s left flank.
Adalinda and Vaelog crashed together again, this time with Adalinda using her whole body to pin him while the others darted in and out, slashing at his underbelly and wings.
Every attack left a mark. Every mark bled, or at least leaked some version of dragon ichor, but nothing seemed to slow him down.
The sword on my back felt heavier with every second. It was as if the blade had opinions about the situation and was communicating them through my spine.
Jax sent. “Almost time. Remember the angle. Under the foreleg, through the seam. No hesitation.”
I nodded, even though I knew he didn’t need to see it.
Vaelog roared again, this time with words. “You are all insects. You are all less than insects. You think I am alone? I am legion, I am the beginning and the end, and you—”
He didn’t get to finish. Solenne hit him in the throat with a fire-breath so intense it incinerated the air in front of her.
The blue dragon from Vaelog’s side darted in, trying to intercept, but Corvus blocked her, his jaws closing around her tail and whipping her aside.
The two silver-grey soldiers tried to break the formation, but Solenne’s guards caught them, drove them off with precise, coordinated attacks.
All the while, Vaelog was forced to fight on Adalinda’s terms, forced to keep using his injured wing, forced to bleed for every second he stayed in the sky.
I caught the signal from Jax. “Now.”
He twisted his whole body, flattening us to a pancake with the inertia, and my bones screamed in protest. He rolled so that I was directly above him, my hands and feet braced against the hard curve of his spine.
I reached for the sword, unbuckled the straps, and held it across my body like a surfboard.
“Three, two, one,” he counted, then snapped his wings wide and sent us straight for Vaelog’s exposed side.
Adalinda, who had feigned retreat, looped underneath and came up, claws aimed for Vaelog’s head. He ducked, as she expected, and in doing so, lifted his left foreleg just a fraction higher than necessary. That was my cue. I leaped.
The wind tore the scream out of my mouth.
I hit Vaelog’s scales a half-meter back from the joint, scrambled for purchase, and jammed the blade up under his arm with every ounce of vampire and dragon strength I possessed.
The blade went in clean, but I could feel the edge bite into something soft, something important.
Vaelog howled, this time a wordless sound.
He twisted and tried to bite me, but I hung on, using the crossguard of the sword as a handhold, and twisted the blade sideways.
The sound was horrible, a wet, crunching snap that I would never, ever forget.
He jerked hard, and I tumbled off, and for a second, the world was just upside down and full of blood.
Vaelog dropped, wings failing, his whole body spasming as he tried to keep aloft.
Below him, the valley’s gold-green grass looked soft enough to catch him, but I knew better.
I knew what terminal velocity felt like.
I tried to shift midair, but I was too late.
My wings unfurled, but not in time to stop the fall.
I slammed into the grass hard enough to drive the breath out of me, rolled, and for a minute, everything went white.
When I came to, I was human, flat on my back, staring up at the impossible sky. The wind still howled, but softer now.
Vaelog’s body had hit the ground three hundred meters away, raising a plume of dust and earth.
He didn’t move. Not even a twitch. The blade was still in his chest, visible even from here, the runes along the hilt flickering.
I got up, staggered, and shifted back to dragon form.
The pain was unreal, but it helped. Pain was always easier than terror.
The others landed in a widening circle around Vaelog’s corpse.
Adalinda touched down first, blood pouring from her mouth and a dozen wounds, but she held her head high.
Corvus and Solenne landed in unison, their wings mantled, their eyes never leaving the body.
The rest of the formation drifted down in twos and threes, battered, some missing chunks of tail or membrane, but alive.
The battlefield went silent. Even the wind stopped. I walked to Vaelog’s side, every step an act of defiance against the shaking in my knees. He was dead. Really, truly dead. In Ayrathys, there was nowhere left to send him. No afterlife, no other realm. Final.
Adalinda looked at me. “He will not rise again.”
I nodded. I wanted to say something, but nothing came.
That was when Luci appeared. He wasn’t there, and then he was, standing beside the corpse with his hands in his pockets.
He wore the same immaculate suit, shoes shining, hair perfect, and the smile on his face wasn't his usual one. It was smaller, sadder, almost respectful. He crouched, ran a finger along Vaelog’s dead cheek, and then plucked a single scale from the body.
It shimmered, every color at once. Luci straightened, tucked the scale into his breast pocket, and looked at me.
He bowed, not mocking, not ironic, but with a gravity that seemed to compress the whole valley.
“Good job,” he said. Then he winked and vanished.
Nobody spoke. Not for a long time.
Eventually, Corvus said, “We should burn the body. Scatter the ash. Let the world see that this is done.”
Solenne nodded, her face streaked with blood.
The formation closed in, and together we raised Vaelog’s corpse, carried it to the highest hill, and built a pyre.
The fire was blue, then white, then something even hotter.
It burned until there was nothing left but wind and memory.
When it was done, we stood around the smoking patch of earth, not knowing what to say.
Flint, who had watched everything from the terrace, scampered down and found me.
He didn’t say anything. He just pressed his head into my leg and wrapped his tail around my foot.
I shifted to human, dropped to my knees, and hugged him as tightly as I could.
Jax came over, his human form bruised, his eyes bright and wild. He knelt beside us, and for a minute we were a family again, right in the middle of the battlefield.
Adalinda came last. She looked at me, and there was no more iron in her voice, only an old, old sorrow. “You did it, Hailey. You ended the cycle.”
I shook my head. “We did it. All of us.”
She nodded. “Even so. It needed a hand to guide the blade.”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know if I could ever be okay with what I’d done.
But Flint was alive, and Jax was alive, and maybe tomorrow the world would be something better.
We stayed there a long time, the valley quiet around us, the air still trembling with what had happened.
When the sun finally set, it painted the sky with every color dragons had ever dreamed.