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There’s an angry lilt to his voice that makes me want to cheer. Call all you want, I feel like screaming. She’ll never come to you. That dragon is gone. She’s free.
Wings beat and ripple above me, echoing the hissed murmur moving through the dragons who sit uneasily on the mountain’s flank. Rensivar’s neck arches toward the tiny grove of pine trees that lines the cliff. The grove that did strange things to the light yesterday, making it shimmer like a mirage hovering above a sun-baked road. I’d dismissed it as exhaustion, but perhaps—
“Ah,” Rensivar booms. “My Champion.”
Disappointment punches me through the gut, as strong and cold as the crossbow bolt that pierced my wing. I sway, and it’s only Nyrgin’s claws on mine that keep me from lunging forward.
Rayne walks slowly out of the shadows beneath the pines. Her neck droops forward, and her eyes are on the ground. Her wings fall so low they almost drag through the scattering of pine needles, and her tail cuts a path through the dirt. She doesn’t look up; not at me, and not at any of the wounded dragons on the stones or the dragons whose wings still churn the night sky.
Rayne. My brilliant, fiery dragon. The woman who upended every part of my life, dragged me from Cairncliff, and showed me the world. The woman who found my heart, even after I’d buried it so deep and for so long that I’d forgotten it still beat.
“At last,” Rensivar says.
Rayne drags her claws across the ground, then stops at the edge of the tarn. Her nostrils flare, the only part of her that moves. Every scale on her body droops, and she looks like she needs to brace herself against the ground. My heart aches in my chest, throbbing with every pulse of pain radiating from the hole in my wing.
She looks utterly defeated, my beautiful Rayne. Whatever her plans were, they’ve clearly been abandoned.
“No,” I whisper.
Nyrgin’s claws tighten around mine once again.
“This is Rayne,” Rensivar announces, flaring the spines along his neck as if he needs to point out the fact that a beautiful crimson dragon just materialized at his feet. “She will serve as my Champion.”
I have never seen a dragon look less like a Champion. Rayne’s wings shiver, then pull in close to her body. She looks terrified, or like she’s been beaten. Rage tightens my throat. Rayne has only been a dragon for a handful of days, damn it! How could Rensivar expect her to fight for him?
Rensivar turns toward Rayne with a strange, predatory glint in his eyes as his tail twists and tightens around the sharp angles of the Throne of Claws.
“She is my daughter,” Rensivar says.
Voices rise all around me. Another strange shiver moves through Rayne’s body, rippling her scales. There’s something odd about the way her body sits against the ground, about the tilt to her legs and the pitch of her wings—
And then Rayne leaps.
She’s silent, and she’s so swift her body might as well be a bolt fired from a crossbow. The streak of crimson flies across the ground, barreling directly toward Rensivar.
The two dragons collide with a sound like a cannonball shattering a slate roof. There’s a flurry of motion, wings and claws and scales flying. And then the Throne of Claws begins to tip backward.
Someone screams. I break free of Nyrgin’s claw, dragged forward by my heart. Because what in the nine hells is she doing? There’s no way Rayne can defeat Rensivar. This is suicide.
The Throne of Claws sways, pivoting on its back legs as Rayne throws herself against Rensivar like a rabid wildcat attacking a giant. Rayne’s wings shoot out, beating fast against the night sky. Rensivar snarls. Black claws streak forward, glinting in the starlight. Blood flies in an arc, splattering the grass.
Rayne screams. Her left wing hangs in tatters, but still she beats the air with her right wing. Rensivar reaches forward again, growling as his coiled tail twists inside the sharp nightmare metal of the throne as it tilts further and further—
The Throne of Claws falls over backward.
I hold my breath and wait for the boom of nightmare steel hitting the mountain.
And wait.
The throne falls, and falls, and falls. Instead of hitting the ground behind it, the twisted curves and arches of metal just keep falling, down and down as they sink into a hole cut straight through the center of reality. Delicate purple light pulses through the hole and lends an unearthly gleam to the throne’s sharp edges. Rayne’s hatching prophecy sings through my mind as the throne vanishes.She will destroy the Throne of Claws.
The hooked tips of Rensivar’s wings beat, straining upward, and then disappear into the same strange violet-tinged emptiness that just decimated the human army. Rayne’s crimson wings spread wide above the abyss, stretching toward the stars. Blood flies in a haze from the jagged remains of her left wing; her neck strains forward as her right wing beats against the night.
Black claws shoot out of the hole in the world. They close around Rayne’s neck, dragging her under. The last I see of the woman I love is the fluttering tip of her scarlet wing, still beating frantically as it falls into the darkness.
And then the world is completely silent. Save the scrape of my claws against stone, and then the delicate tearing sound made by the grass beneath my feet as I race across the ground. The hole in the world that must have been hidden in the shadows behind the Throne of Claws seems so obvious now, with its strange purple light and its ragged edges pulsing like the heartbeat of some strange, horrible beast.
If it’s a beast, it’s one that just swallowed Rayne. I’m so close now that I can smell it. A strange, thick, verdant scent rises from the tear in reality, almost like the hole opens into some otherworldly swamp. Rayne’s left wing flashes through my mind, bloodstained and useless. Her neck arched toward the sky. The black claws closing around it.
