Chapter 13 - Ash Over the Lowlands
Zephyr dug his front claws into the thick, ridge-lined hide of her neck, pulling his bruised body onto the broad saddle between her shoulder blades. He anchored his rear feet into the gaps between her armored plates.
With a roar that split the low-hanging thunderclouds, Ignis launched.
The force of the takeoff slammed Zephyr flat against her scales. The wind didn't bite him this time; the intense, radiant heat rolling off her spine formed a pocket of warm, still air around him, shielding his broken body from the freezing high-altitude draft.
They rocketed through the cloud cover, bursting into the clean, starlit silence of the upper atmosphere.
Below them, the Ashlands looked like a tiny, soot-stained scratch on the face of the continent. The fires of the destroyed dwarven convoy were merely glowing orange pinpricks in the dark.
"They won't come back," Zephyr murmured, his adrenaline finally burning out, leaving him hollowed and exhausted.
"They will," Ignis replied, her rhythmic wingbeats carrying them in wide, lazy circles above the peaks. "The two-legged things always come back. They breed like maggots in the rot. When they find steel, they build cages. When they find fire, they build furnaces."
"Then what do we do?"
Ignis banked hard to the west, where the jagged teeth of the Dragonspire mountains carved into the setting moon.
"We teach them why the world was left to the sky," she said.
Zephyr looked down at his own trembling claws. The ivory skin on his forearms was charred black from the harvester's explosion, the pale scales permanently scorched by the fire he had jumped into. He wasn't pure alabaster anymore. He looked scarred, rough-edged, and dangerous.
"My fire," Zephyr whispered. "It was just smoke. It didn't do anything."
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Ignis didn't answer right away. She climbed higher, riding a thermal column that spiraled toward the stars.
"Look at your chest, hatchling."
