Hrazfel hit the fortress like a dropped anvil.
He activated his magic halfway down — the storm-blue swelling across his skin, the lightning waking in his eyes — and the giant form took the impact that the dwarf alone never could have.
He struck the center of the snow-dusted courtyard and the stone erupted, a crater blooming outward, flagstones flung in every direction, a thunderclap of dust and noise rolling out across the entire mountaintop castle.
He ca up out of the crater roaring, alive, four ters of furious blue muscle — and imdiately surrounded.
They ca from everywhere at once. Monks. Dozens of them, pouring out of doorways and down stairs and off the walls, every one of them wearing the body of a child — pale, smooth-faced, terribly young, and terribly wrong once you knew what was underneath.
None of them spoke. Instead they raised curved horns to their lips and blew, a low droning blast that echoed off the peaks and called more of their brothers running, and then, in eerie silence, they threw themselves at the dwarf.
Hrazfel t them with the one-handed hamr the king had pressed on him at the door — for old ti’s sake, you ungrateful child, try not to die with it.
The hamr crackled with stolen thunder and he swung it in great whistling arcs, and child-bodied monks went flying, and more took their place.
They fought with discipline. Warrior arts blood across their small fras — fists wrapped in stone, in frost, in pressure — and they struck in coordinated waves, three high, three low, wearing the giant down by inches, until even Hrazfel’s bellowing began to take on a strained edge.
"Any — ti — now!" he howled at the sky.
High above, the red dragon dropped through the last of the cloud, and Ebony jumped.
She fell from a height her boosted body could just survive, snow and stone rushing up — and angled herself, at the last second, directly onto a monk.
She crashed down on him full-weight, driving him into the flagstones with a crunch, and rolled up out of the landing already swinging.
"Sorry I’m late!" she called to Hrazfel. "Had to watch you make your entrance. Very dramatic. Real artistry in the screaming."
"I’m going to bury you!"
"Later! Working!"
They fought back to back. Hrazfel was a wrecking ball, all thunder and reach; Ebony was sothing quieter and more precise.
She fought mostly with her fists, the green purification fire flaring up only in bursts — a flash to burn through a monk’s stone-armored guard, gone again the instant the opening was made. On, off. On, off. Surgical.
"(Conserve. On for the cut, off the mont it lands. Don’t bleed mana you don’t have.)" It was a discipline she’d been drilling herself in ever since the mana-sickness first crippled her, that horrible stretch when overdrawing her magic had nearly hollowed her out.
"(Most healers burn out because they treat their well like it’s bottomless. It isn’t. So you make every drop do sothing.)"
She ducked a horn-blast of pressure, ca up inside a monk’s guard, flared the fire across her knuckle for a single heartbeat as she struck, and let it die as the body dropped.
"(And the strange thing is — I think I’m getting better at it. Faster. Cleaner. Like the limit’s teaching sothing the bottomless well never could.)"
For a mont, fighting like that, she almost forgot how outnumbered they were.
Then the doors at the top of the castle opened, and the almost ended.
Two figures stepped out onto the high terrace. They were not children.
They were grown n, dark-skinned and bald, broad through the shoulders — and unmistakably twins, identical down to the scars, which ran across their faces in patterns that matched, one a mirror of the other.
Both wore strips of cloth bound over their eyes. Both were blind.
They spoke in unison, two voices layered into one, carrying easily over the din.
"First intruders we’ve had since we took this mountain. And strong, for trespassers. Strong enough to be worth our ti." A pause, in perfect sync. "Which ans it’s ti you faced so real weight."
Hrazfel’s giant form tensed. "Girl," he said lowly. "Those two feel wrong. Heavy wrong."
Ebony cracked her neck and grinned. "Then they can wait. I didn’t fall out of the sky and kick you off a dragon to fight the seconds-in-command." She raised her voice toward the terrace. "No offense, boys, but I ca for the big fish! You two are appetizers!"
And she put two fingers to her lips and let out a single, piercing whistle.
Far above and off to the side — kept at a distance by the monks’ arrow-fire — the red dragon banked, with little Stor still riding its shoulder. At the whistle, both dragons climbed.
Higher, and higher still, until they were specks against the gray, and then they began to work — the red dragon breathing long rolling gouts of fla, Stor loosing crackling forks of lightning, again and again into the open sky.
To the watchers below it looked like nonsense. Two dragons burning empty air.
But with every roar, with every blast of heat and charge dumped into the cold mountain atmosphere, clouds began to gather. Thickening. Darkening. Spiraling slowly inward over the peak.
"(That’s it,)" Ebony thought, watching the sky bruise. "(A storm dragon doesn’t just throw lightning — it makes weather. Feed enough heat and charge into cold high air and you build a thunderhead.
Stor’s barely a day old, but the instinct’s already in him. He just needs the raw fuel, and a friend who breathes fire is excellent fuel.)"
The blind twins couldn’t see the clouds massing overhead. But they could hear that the dragon-sounds were not normal sounds, and they were not fools. As one, they dropped into a fighting stance and invoked.
{{Warrior Art: Iron Muscle}}
Their arms transford — the muscle itself turning to living iron, dark tal flexing and sliding beneath the skin like a thing still alive, and they ca down off the terrace in two great bounds, fists like wrecking balls, fast despite their blindness, homing in on sound and air-pressure alone.
Ebony stepped back and smiled wider. "(They took the bait too easy. First round’s on the house, boys.)"
She whistled again — sharper, a different note. An order.
High above, Stor folded his wings and dove into the gathered clouds, vanishing into the dark churn of them.
The thunderhead lit from within, flickering, sparking — and Ebony felt rather than saw the little dragon gorging up there, drinking the storm’s charge straight out of the air, packing it into his small body until he couldn’t hold any more.
The clouds spat and flashed. The whole sky over the mountain went taut and electric.
Then Stor loosed it.
A single colossal bolt of lightning tore down out of the thunderhead — not a breath, but the storm itself, channeled and aid — and slamd straight into the two iron-ard twins.
They threw their tal arms up and tried to take it, tried to ground it through their transford bodies — and for half a second they held.
Then the bolt overwheld them, white light swallowing the courtyard, and when it cleared the twins lay smoking on the cracked flagstones, iron arms scorched dull, both of them unconscious.
The remaining monks froze. As one, the silent child-bodied horde took a step back.
Ebony spread her arms in the sudden quiet and shouted up at the castle.
"Is that it? Co on! Send out the real monsters, or does your whole ’world-conquering organization’ run on this much noise and this few nuts? All those grand plans and you’re throwing children and a pair of light-up twins at ?"
For a long mont, nothing.
Then, deep in the castle, an enormous door ground open — a door that opened onto the lowest, darkest part of the fortress, a throat of pure black at the mountain’s heart. And out of that darkness shuffled an old man.
He was thin. Stooped. Frail-looking, his robes hanging off a fra that seed barely able to carry them, shuffling forward with the unsteady gait of soone’s harmless grandfather. He looked like nothing at all.
And every monk in the courtyard — the silent, disciplined, child-faced horde that hadn’t flinched at a dwarven giant or a lightning strike — recoiled in open terror and scrambled away from him, pressing themselves against the walls to keep as far from the old man as the courtyard allowed.
Ebony looked at him. Looked at the monks fleeing him. And, naturally, opened her mouth.
"Hey! Sobody lost a grandpa!" She jerked a thumb at the shuffling old figure. "Don’t be jerks, help the old man find the bathroom before he has an accident!"
The old man’s face deford with rage — the harmless grandfather mask collapsing into sothing twisted and furious, every wrinkle pulling tight around a hatred that aged decades off his pretense in an instant.
Ebony whistled.
Another bolt scread down from the thunderhead, the sa storm that had flattened the twins, aid dead at the old man’s stooped fra.
He raised one hand.
And caught it.
The lightning struck his open palm and simply — stopped, coiling and crackling against his skin, going nowhere. He closed his fist around it, slowly, and the bolt guttered out and died, snuffed like a candle between two fingers.
Ebony’s grin froze on her face. "(...Ah. There he is.)"
The old man lowered his hand and rolled his thin shoulders, and the air around him began to hum — a deep, grinding, tallic resonance, the sound of sothing vast and hard waking up.
"Tremble," he said, "and behold."
{{Warrior Art × Dragon Magic: Iron Dragon Fist}}
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