Hrazfel didn’t attack again right away.
He stood in his diminished form, the green fire still smoking off his shoulder where Ebony’s fist had landed, and Ebony watched the exact mont his eyes changed — not with fear, but with the slow click of a man assembling a picture he didn’t like.
He looked at the fire on her hands. He looked at the place on her body where, minutes ago, his fist had pulped her organs, and where now there was a girl standing and grinning at him.
The pieces fell into place behind his eyes.
"A Visitor," he said.
He said it quietly, almost to himself, but the clearing heard it. Every trafficker still standing — the humans untangling from Lucian’s roots, the dwarves circling — went rigid at the word, the way a room goes still when soone says a thing that changes what everyone is willing to do.
The hunt had been about money a second ago. Now it was about sothing older.
Hrazfel’s gaze cut to Lucian, still mid-chant, hands still moving through the soft whistling syllables of the elven tongue.
"You sick bastard." The disgust in his voice was real, and that was the strange part — it was the first honest thing he’d said all night. "How can you stand beside a Visitor? You, of all things. That’s low even for a half-breed."
He spat into the dirt.
"We steal dragon younglings from their nests. We saw the horns off living beasts and sell them by weight. We are bad n, elf, and we know it. But not even we would shake hands with sothing that wants to end the world. You’ve found a way to be worse than dragon traffickers. Congratulations."
Lucian finished his spell.
He looked up, and the soft thing in his face was gone. "The only thing in these woods that wants to end a world," he said, "is the one cutting horns off children for coin." He brought his palms together. "You don’t get to lecture about limits."
"Forest Invocation: Guardians of the Wood — Hounds."
{{Forest Invocation: Guardians of the Wood: Watch-Hounds}}
The trees answered him.
From the trunks around the clearing, shapes pulled themselves loose — hounds, built of interlaced wood that braided itself into the shape of muscle and sinew, no larger than a mid-sized dog but moving with a low predatory smoothness no real dog had.
Their eyes burned a soft green, the sa green as the fire in his roots, the sa green as Ebony’s fla. Twelve of them dropped to the forest floor in a loose pack and didn’t wait for a second command.
They hit the traffickers all at once.
The clearing dissolved into a brawl — wooden jaws closing on arms, n shouting, the dwarves swinging at things that were faster than they were. Lucian moved through it with his silver sword drawn, calm, conducting his pack like a man who had done this a hundred tis.
Ebony left them to it.
She had one target and it wasn’t the rank and file.
She crossed the clearing straight at Hrazfel, and when she swung, he t her fist with his own — and the green fire bit into his magic the instant they touched, eating the thunder before it could discharge, and Hrazfel ripped his hand back with a hiss.
"(There it is.)" Ebony pressed in. "(He can’t trade blows with . Every contact costs him mana he can’t get back.)"
He retreated. She didn’t let him.
She drove him backward across the churned earth, fist after fist, the fire forcing him to dodge what he couldn’t block, and she could see the calculation happening behind his eyes in real ti — is this girl worth it, we were only passing through, cut the losses, run. He’d already decided.
He was looking for the exit.
She had no intention of giving him one.
Hrazfel slamd his fist into the ground.
The thunder went into the earth instead of into her, and the clearing floor erupted — a wall of dirt and stone blasting upward into a churning curtain, debris flung in every direction. Ebony didn’t slow down. She put her arms up and went through it, straight through the flying rock, taking the hits on her forearms and trusting her healing to sort it out, swinging at where he’d been —
He wasn’t there.
The dust hung thick. She turned in it, fire low on her hands for light, scanning. "(Where — )"
She found him at the wagons.
He’d dropped the giant form entirely, shrunk back to an ordinary white-bearded dwarf, and he was digging through a pack in the bed of the cart they’d arrived in, throwing aside cloth and tools with frantic hands. Then he stopped. And turned. And in his fist, lifted up so she could see it, was an egg.
Silver, the shell of it bright as polished steel, veined with cracks that glowed a hot electric yellow, sothing restless and humming pulsing inside the dark of it.
Ebony let the fire on her hands go out.
"Easy, old man." She raised both palms, open, slow. "We can talk about this. It doesn’t have to end the way it’s going."
"Now you want to talk." Hrazfel laughed, low and ugly, the egg trembling in his grip. "Now. Filthy Visitor." His thumb pressed against one of the glowing cracks. "Before I’m done with you — let ask you sothing. Do you know why the Demon King made it holy law to put your kind to death on sight?"
Ebony swallowed. She took half a step back without aning to. "You could enlighten . I’ll admit I’m short on the details."
The smile that split his beard was enormous, and the hatred behind it was the purest thing in the clearing.
"Because if we let you live, you grow. And every single one of you — every one, without exception — eventually goes looking for the sa thing." His voice dropped. "You go to wake the mad god.
To play hero. To make your little fantasy of being The Chosen One co true, and you’ll burn this whole world down to feel important for one afternoon." He shook the egg. "I’m a monster. I know it. I sell baby dragons and I sleep fine. I’m greedy and I’m cruel and I don’t pretend otherwise.
But at least I’d never put the entire world through hell over a lie — over wanting to be a Hero so badly you’d kill everyone to get the title." His grip tightened. "Even I have limits, girl. That’s more than your kind can say."
He crushed the egg in his hand.
It detonated.
The blast that ca out of that small silver shell was not the size of the shell — a do of white force and crackling light that lifted Ebony off her feet and threw her backward through the trees, a sound like the sky tearing rolling out across the clearing, and a billowing wall of dust swallowing the wagons and the n and the place where Hrazfel had been standing.
Ebony hit the ground a long way from where she’d started.
She lay still for a mont, then pushed herself up, coughing, spitting dirt, every part of her ringing. "(That absolute lunatic. What did he just — )" She got to her feet and turned in a slow circle, searching the settling dust with a dread she couldn’t na yet.
Then the system spoke.
[Presence of an S-Class dragon detected.]
The dust in front of her parted.
Sitting in the scorched crater where the wagons had been was a dragon.
It was tiny. No bigger than a house cat, its scales a clean storm-white marked with jagged streaks of yellow that ran down its flanks like lightning caught in the act of striking, and its eyes were the sa searing yellow, bright enough to throw their own glow against the dust.
It wobbled as it took a step toward her — newborn-unsteady, legs not yet sure of the ground — and looked up at her.
Ebony went very, very still.
"(Two options.)" Her mind ran it cold and fast, the way it always did when the rest of her wanted to panic. "(One: it imprints. Sees as its mother. Then it doesn’t leave my side until it’s grown — and for a dragon that’s a thousand years, which is its own kind of nightmare. Two — )"
The silver shell. The yellow cracks. The white-and-gold of the thing in front of her. She’d seen those markings described before, in reading she now wished she hadn’t done.
"(— two: it sees as its first al.)"
A Storm Dragon. A subspecies so volatile it killed its own parents as often as not — which was precisely why there were almost none left in the world.
They hatched with the power and the strength of a full adult and none of the restraint, no instinct to tell predator from parent, nothing in the newborn skull but hunger and lightning in equal, catastrophic asure.
The little dragon scrunched its face.
"(Oh no.)"
It sneezed.
Ebony threw herself sideways, and what left the creature went where she’d been standing — not fire, but a wave of raw lightning, a forking white-yellow lash that didn’t stop at her.
It tore through the trees behind her in a straight, branching line, splitting trunks and scorching the air, a glowing seam of destruction punched clean through the forest to the far side, daylight visible at the end of it where there had been nothing but dark woods a second ago.
Ebony stared at the smoking corridor. Then, far off through the trees on the other side of the clearing, a sound reached her that she hadn’t expected.
Laughter.
She turned. Half-buried in shadow at the treeline — filthy, singed, very much alive — Hrazfel was already backing away into the dark, the blast had thrown him clear and the cunning old bastard had ridden it straight to cover. He t her eyes and grinned through the soot.
"Enjoy your little present, Visitor!" he called, delight dripping off every word. Then, over his shoulder, to the n crawling out of the dust.
"Up! Up, you dogs — to the carts! We’re leaving while she’s busy dying!" And he was gone into the trees, his surviving crew scrambling after him toward the wagons that hadn’t burned.
Ebony didn’t even have the seconds to curse him properly.
"Shit—"
The little dragon shook itself, steadied on its feet, and the yellow eyes ca back up to her.
More magic was gathering around it now — she could feel it building, a deep pressure rolling out from the small white body — and the ground beneath her boots began to tremble with it, dust dancing on the stones, the air itself going taut and tallic.
It pulled its lips back, and its newborn fangs glinted in its own electric light, and in that yellow gaze the hunger sharpened into sothing with only one possible aning.
It looked at her the way a starving thing looks at at.
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