Chapter 13 - The Heart of the Caldera
The ground did not merely shake—it ruptured. The caustic quicklime dust was suddenly blasted away by geysers of superheated steam erupting through the fissures of the pumice field. The soldiers stumbled back, screaming as their steel boots heated to blistering temperatures.
From the cracks in the volcanic rock, a deep, crimson light began to pulse.
“The Caldera…” Bran murmured, pushing his gray hair out of his soot-caked face as he stood over Lyra. “We made it. The sleeping chambers of the First Brood.”
Zephyr squirmed out of Lyra’s tunic. His tiny body was practically vibrating, his eyes shining with a brilliance that outshone the rising sun. He scurried across the burning stones, completely immune to the heat, making a beeline toward a massive, natural obsidian amphitheater at the center of the volcanic plain.
“Zephyr, wait!” Lyra called out, scrambling after him despite the searing heat rising through the soles of her boots.
In the center of the obsidian basin lay a crystalline orb the size of a carriage—a pulsing, molten mass known in ancient lore as the Heart-Cinder, the fossilized core of the ancient dragon kings that had slept cold for five hundred years.
Zephyr leaped onto the glowing crystal, his small talons clicking against the glassy surface. He opened his jaws and unleashed his tiny flame directly into the Heart-Cinder’s core.
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The stone drank his fire. For a moment, the world held its breath. The silence was absolute.
Then, a wave of pure incandescent heat washed across the caldera, knocking every royal soldier to his knees and sending a shockwave that tore the gasbags of the hovering siege-barge above, causing the vessel to list sharply and drift toward the mountain crags in flames.
