Chapter 10 - Deliverance on Broken Wings
The impact crater on the bridge smoked with pale, ozone-heavy heat. Vane’s wyvern lay in charred ruin, thrown against the volcanic spires, while Vane himself was pinned beneath the beast's smoldering wing, his ornate armor scorched black.
Hovering above the chasm was the colossal white mother dragon.
She was a vision of magnificent, bloody defiance. The massive iron collar around her throat was broken, its jagged remnants trailing severed chain links like broken silver ribbons. Her scales were blackened with soot and gouged by ballista bolts, but her amber eyes burned with an ancient, terrifying majesty. She had torn herself from the bedrock of Ravenskeep and flown on shredded, bleeding wings across the mountains to find her bloodline.
She descended onto the bridge with a crash that made the stone arch groan beneath her colossal weight. Lowering her massive head, she pushed her snout against Lyra’s tiny chest, exhaling a deep, soothing chuff that blew the child’s hair back. Zephyr hopped onto his mother’s nose, chirping in wild ecstasy, rubbing his soft scales against her armored ridge.
“Mother…” Lyra whispered, tears finally cutting clean tracks through the soot on her pale cheeks.
Bran hauled himself to his feet, clutching his fractured ribs, his lone eye wide in awe. “She came. Gods above, she tore down the mountain to reach you.”
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The great dragon turned her head toward the southern ridge. Her slit pupils contracted sharply. Across the jagged skyline of the mountains, dozens of dark dots were rising like a swarm of locusts. The royal armada was mobilizing—giant siege-barges carried aloft by clusters of tethered sky-drakes, bristling with harpoon launchers.
The mother dragon groaned, blood dripping from her torn wing joint. She could not fly far.
