Chapter 8 - Iron in the Deep
Ignis went dead still. Her spines flared along her back, the violet veins beneath her hide dimming to a deep, cautious crimson.
"Stay here," she ordered, her tone shifting instantly from aloof parent to battle commander.
"What is that?" Zephyr asked, sniffing the air. A foreign, greasy scent cut through the sulfur—diesel, refined zinc, and black powder. It smelled unnatural, bitter, and cold.
"Parasites," Ignis spat, walking toward the outer edge of the nest. "They've finally breached the lower galleries."
Zephyr limped behind her, ignoring the fiery protests of his broken wing. He peered over the craggy lip of the caldera.
Two miles down the mountainside, at the mouth of the old obsidian mines, the earth was crawling. Heavy, iron-plated tracked vehicles—spiked crawlers built by the subterranean clans of the Irondeep—were rolling out of massive, steam-venting boreholes. Dozens of them. Hundreds of armored soldiers clad in dark steel marched alongside them, hauling long, unwieldy ballistas mounted with glowing, arcanite harpoons.
"They're coming for the nest," Zephyr realized, his heart skipping a beat.
"No," Ignis murmured, her slitted eyes narrowing to microscopic lines. "They're coming for the core. They think because the volcano went dormant, the bloodline weakened."
A loud, whistling screech tore through the sky before Zephyr could process her words.
From the front-most iron crawler, a massive arcanite ballista fired. The harpoon wasn't aimed at the caldera's floor—it was aimed at the sky above them.
The projectile blasted through the air, trailing a sickening green smoke, and exploded into a wide, shimmering net woven from spun tungsten and lightning-runes. The shockwave knocked Zephyr flat onto his belly, while the electrical discharge surged over the rim of the volcano, grounding directly into Ignis's front scales.
She roared—not in pain, but in raw, insulted fury.
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"Watch the sky, hatchling," she barked, her wings snapping open with the force of twin cannons. "And pray they don't have enough steel to finish what they just started."
With a single mighty thrust of her hind legs, she launched herself into the gathering dark.
