Dragon's Fire

The valley of Ironpeak had been a graveyard for three days. Below, the vanguard of the rebel army clashed with the emperor’s iron-clad legions, a tangled mass of steel and blood obscured by rising dust and the miserable weep of a storm. Lightning tore through the bruised, dramatic bellies of the clouds, but the thunder it brought was nothing compared to the sound that shook the earth next.

Vaelen, huddled behind a jagged outcropping of dark stone, felt the heat before he heard the roar.

With a deafening crack of displaced air, Ignis burst from the swirling tempests above. The great beast was a masterpiece of lethal grace, its massive wings spread wide to catch the gale, catching the amber light of glowing embers that drifted like dying stars from its jagged crest. Every detail of its obsidian scales rippled with ancient power as it banked hard over the battlefield, its dynamic, predatory pose commanding the very sky.

Below, the frantic blare of brass horns cut through the rain as the emperor’s commanders realized their doom.

Ignis drew in a breath that sucked the oxygen from the surrounding peaks, its chest swelling like a furnace door pulled wide. Vaelen pressed himself flat against the mountain, shielding his face as a torrent of blinding, white-hot fire erupted from the dragon’s jaws.

The flame cascaded down the mountain slope in a roaring wave, turning the battlefield into a sea of incandescent light. It was not mere destruction; it was a reckoning. When the fire finally receded, leaving behind a smoking trench of fused glass and ash, the grand army of the empire was no more.

With a slow, powerful beat of its colossal wings, *Dragon's Fire* still echoing in the thermal updrafts, the beast climbed back into the churning storm clouds, leaving the silent mountain and its new era to the wind.