Smoke stung Finley’s eyes, tasting of ash and cooked meat. Behind him, the last of Highglen’s rooftops collapsed inward with a groan and a shower of embers. The forest air, thick with the scent of damp earth and pine, was a cold slap after the furnace of the village.

  “Keep moving,” a man rasped, shoving a weeping child forward into the bracken. “Don’t look back.”

  Finley looked back. From the tree line, the village square was a pocket of eerie calm amidst the ruin. The shield mage was on his knees, head bowed, his blue dome gone. The old mage, Jacob, stood over him, a hand on his shoulder. The other mages were fanning out, their staves glowing with a soft, vigilant light as they scanned the sky and the smoldering husks of buildings.

  A hand closed on Finley’s arm. It was Ciney, the potter’s daughter, her face smudged black, her apron singed. “Your father,” she said, her voice hollow. “We need to find him.”

  He’d seen his father stumble into the forest ahead of the main group, supporting Old Man Burren. Finley nodded, the motion feeling stiff and foreign. “This way.”

  They pushed through the undergrowth, the sounds of the survivors a low murmur of pain and fear around them. They found his father leaning against a thick oak, one hand pressed to a bleeding gash on Burren’s scalp. The old miller was pale, his breath whistling.

  “Bandage,” his father said without looking up. His tunic was already torn into strips. Finley knelt, taking the linen from his father’s shaking hands. The blood was warm and sticky.

  “The mages?” his father asked quietly, his eyes fixed on Finley’s work.

  “They’re standing guard,” Finley said. “The shield is down.”

  His father’s jaw tightened. He finally looked at Finley, and the raw terror in his eyes was worse than the dragon’s roar. “They can’t stay forever.”

  In the square, Jacob helped the shield mage to his feet. The man Hector, Jacob had called him swayed, his face the color of old parchment. “The energy… it’s not just physical,” Hector muttered, his voice thin. “Their fire eats at the will. Dulls the magic.”

  “Understood,” Jacob said. He turned to the other mages. “Gunther, Selene scout the perimeter. Half-mile out. Look for scorched earth, broken trees. Signs they circled back or left watchers.”

  A woman with silver braids coiled tight around her head Selene nodded sharply. She tapped her oak staff against the charred cobbles, and a pulse of white light shot out from the point of impact, racing along the ground in a visible wave before fading. “No immediate life larger than a deer within that range,” she reported. “But the ground is… angry. The dragon’s heat has poisoned the soil’s song.”

  The other scout a lean woman with forearms corded with scar tissue simply melted into the smoke haze near the blacksmith’s shop. Gunther. Finley had seen her move during the battle, a blur of quiet efficiency. She moved like someone who had learned that noise got you killed.

  Jacob addressed the remaining villagers who hadn’t fled into the woods a handful of the too-shocked or too-injured to move. “We will hold here until dawn,” he announced, his voice carrying without shouting. “The forest is your shelter now. Gather what wounded you can carry. Find clean water. We will send what aid we can spare.”

  An old woman clutching a singed shawl spat on the ground near his boots. “Aid? Where was your aid an hour ago? My boy is cinders because your magic was slow.”

  Jacob absorbed the blow without flinching. “The shield held for forty-three minutes against a mature Red Drake and two younger Greens. It was not slow. It was insufficient. For that, you have my regret, but not my apology. The apology belongs to the lords who sent it.”

  His words hung in the acrid air. The cult. The name everyone had heard in terrified whispers was now spoken aloud by a battle mage in the wreckage. It made it real.

  Deep in the forest, Finley finished tying off Burren’s bandage. The murmuring around them had settled into an exhausted silence, broken by coughs and the occasional sob. He counted maybe sixty of them clustered among the trees. Highglen had housed three hundred.

  “We need a fire,” Ciney said, practical even in shock. “It’s getting cold, and the wounded are going into shock.”

  “Smoke,” Finley’s father countered, his eyes darting to the canopy. “They’ll see.”

  “The mages said they’re watching the skies,” Finley said, though he wasn’t sure he believed it.

  This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

  A new voice cut through the debate, crisp and authoritative. “A small fire, deep in a hollow, will be masked by the village smoke.” It was the mage with the scarred arms Gunther. She stood at the edge of their clearing, having moved with utter silence. Her eyes, a flinty grey, swept over them, assessing. “You have two with broken bones, one with a burn that needs poulticing, and seven with minor lacerations. Correct?”

  They stared at her, numb.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” Gunther said. She walked over to where a young man cradled a clearly broken arm. Without ceremony, she placed one hand on the boy’s shoulder and the other on his forearm. A faint, amber light glowed between her palms. There was a soft click. The boy gasped, not in pain, but in surprise. His arm was straight.

  “It’s set, not healed,” Gunther said, her voice devoid of warmth. “You’ll need a splint. Find two straight sticks.” She moved to the next wounded, a woman with a nasty burn on her leg. From a pouch at her belt, she produced a handful of moss and a small clay jar. She mixed the moss with a salve from the jar and applied it to the burn. The woman’s tense shoulders relaxed instantly.

  “Who are they?” Ciney whispered to Finley. “Really?”

  “The Council’s fist,” Finley’s father answered quietly, watching Gunther work with a mix of awe and distrust.

  Back in the square, Jacob was consulting with Selene, the silver-braided mage. She had drawn a rough map in the ash on the cobbles with the tip of her staff.

  “The attack vector was from the north-west,” she said, pointing. “They came from the direction of the Blackstone Peaks. The primary target was the granary and the mill the village’s economic heart. The residential burn was… secondary. A clearing action.”

  “Efficient,” Jacob muttered, a distasteful curl to his lip. “They weren’t just razing; they were crippling. Is Blackstone known for dragon roosts?”

  “Not for centuries,” Selene said. “Which means they were brought there. Housed. Fed.” She looked up, her eyes sharp. “This was not a wild strike. This was a military deployment.”

  Hector, now sitting on an overturned water trough and sipping from a waterskin, spoke up. “The Green’s flame is acidic. Corrosive. My shield wasn’t just battling heat; it was fighting decay. It takes a specific, sustained malice to twist a dragon’s natural fire into that.”

  Jacob stared at the dying fires of the village. “The cult has done more than make deals. They have… alchemists. Mages of their own, perhaps. Twisting the creatures.” He straightened. “We cannot remain on the defensive. Shield magic is draining, and they will simply bring more drakes.”

  “The Council’s orders are to protect the villages,” Selene reminded him.

  “The best protection,” Jacob said, “is to break the spear aimed at them. We need to find where these dragons are being kept. We need to take the fight to the cult.”

  “That’s a standing army mission,” Hector said, fear cutting through his exhaustion. “We are a detachment of five.”

  “Then we become something else,” Jacob said. His gaze shifted to the forest, where the survivors huddled. “We are not just shields. We are the answer to the question they just asked. The question of who fights for them.”

  In the forest hollow, Gunther had a small, smokeless fire going a trick of focused heat and air manipulation. The warmth was a profound relief. Finley found himself near the mage, drawn by a need to understand the new power that had entered his shattered world.

  “Will they come back?” Finley asked, his voice barely above the crackle of the magical flames.

  Gunther looked at him, really looked at him, for the first time. “Tonight? Unlikely. They’ve achieved their objective. Highglen is no longer a functioning community. But another village? Tomorrow, or the next day? Certainly.”

  “What do we do?”

  “You survive,” Gunther said, poking the fire with a stick. The flames bent to her will, dancing in a tight, controlled column. “You learn. You adapt. Or you die. Those are the only options now.”

  “The kings…”

  “Are traitors to their people,” Gunther finished, her tone flat. “Their pact with the cult is a surrender of their crown’s purpose. They have sold your lives for the promise of their own safety. It is a bad bargain. They will discover that when the dragons grow hungry again and there are no more ‘common’ villages left to burn.”

  Finley’s blood ran cold. “So there’s no hope?”

  Gunther finally showed something akin to emotion: a faint, hard smile. “Hope is a weak weapon. Action is better. Your people are alive. You have ground to stand on. And you have us. For now, that is your hope. Guard it well.”

  She stood, brushing ash from her trousers. “I must return. Stay here until dawn. Then, decide. Scatter to the wilds, or seek refuge in another village. But know this nowhere is truly safe.”

  As Gunther vanished back into the gloom, Finley looked around the hollow. At his father binding a splint to Burren’s head with grim focus. At Ciney dividing the last of a loaf of salvaged bread. At the faces, soot-streaked and lost, illuminated by the unnatural fire.

  Action is better.

  The words stuck in his head, a burr against the numbness.

  In the square, Jacob had gathered his mages. Hector was on his feet, color slowly returning to his cheeks.

  “Our mission has changed,” Jacob said, his voice low. “Selene, you will return to the Council at first light. Report what we have seen the coordinated attack, the twisted fire, the kings’ complicity. Request reinforcements, but more importantly, request a mandate for pursuit.”

  Selene nodded. “And you?”

  “Gunther, Hector, and I will track the dragons. Their flight path, the residue of their corruption. We will find their roost.”

  Hector paled again. “Three of us? Against a roost?”

  “We are not attacking the roost,” Jacob said, a dangerous glint in his eye. “We are observing it. Learning its defenses. Its patterns. The cult will have mages there, handlers. We learn their strengths, their weaknesses. Then we inform the Council, and we return with an army of our own.”

  He looked at each of them. “The war is no longer at the village gates. It is out there, in the peaks. And we are going to bring it to their doorstep.”

  The night deepened. In the forest, Finley finally slept, fitfully, his dreams full of fire and falling. In the square, the mages kept their watch, their staves casting a soft, protective glow over the ruins. And high above, unseen, on a moonlit crag in the Blackstone Peaks, a shadow moved against the stars a sentinel Green, its eyes like smoldering embers, watching the dying glow of Highglen, waiting for the next command.