Chapter 4 - The Hunt Begins
The frigid mountain wind cut through Lyra’s drenched tunic, chilling her skin until her lips turned a pale, bruised violet. She knelt among the river stones, shivering violently while the hatchling nudged her cold cheek with its warm snout. Steam rose from its pale scales, radiating a gentle hearth-like heat that slowly chased away the numbness creeping up her arms.
High upon the jagged promontory of Castle Ravenskeep, bells were tolling in frantic, discordant rhythms. Horns echoed across the forested valley, their brass notes flat and relentless. But it was not just the royal garrison that had taken to the hunt.
In the starry expanse above the cliffside, the silhouetted shapes circled. They were not wild dragons. These were Wyverns—the dread beasts bred and broken by King Ronald’s sky-riders, smaller than true dragons but faster, cruel, and driven mad by alchemical stimulants. Their shrill cries drifted down like broken glass falling through the dark.
“We have to move,” Lyra whispered, her voice trembling. The hatchling, whom she had named Zephyr during the weeks she fed him stolen scraps in the fortress cellars, chirped and scrambled into the front pouch of her soaked tunic.
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She turned away from the castle and faced the sprawling expanse of the Whispering Weald—a primeval forest of iron-wood trees so dense that no starlight penetrated its canopy. The path was treacherous, choked with briars and loose slate, but it was the only terrain where the wyvern riders could not dive.
As she crossed the boundary into the suffocating gloom of the trees, a heavy thud shook the earth behind her. Fifty yards back on the riverbank, a massive winged shadow touched down, folding its leathery appendages as a figure clad in black dragon-scale armor dismounted, drawing a jagged serrated blade that glowed with sickly green poison.
