They were living gods, and gods did not ask twice.

  Grace went in because refusing felt impossible.

  The Machine God’s voice rolled over her like warm honey. “Bzzz… Forgive my companion, Lady Grace. His bark is worse than his bite. Please, come inside.”

  She crossed the threshold.

  Lights woke along the walls (soft gold, gentle as dawn). The metal was warm under her fingertips, humming faintly, as though the whole craft breathed.

  She climbed the short stair, trailing her hand along the wall, half-afraid it would burn or vanish.

  It didn’t.

  An archway opened into a small cabin. A single chair waited, buckled and ready.

  Grace sat.

  The chair fit her perfectly, as if it had been waiting centuries for her exact shape. She sank into it and felt the metal warm to her touch, like a living thing saying welcome. The harness straps slid over her shoulders on their own, clicking into place with a gentle snap.

  Her breath caught. Grace didn’t question it. She would be a fool to, if the Gods were treating her with such care.

  The viewport in front of her was solid yet perfectly clear. Beyond it, the woods of her island home.

  She was inside the sky-chariot of legends.

  A leprechaun’s daughter, riding with gods.

  The ramp sealed behind her with a whisper of steel.

  “Great One,” she said, voice small, “what’s changed? Why now?”

  The Machine God’s answer came soft but heavy.

  “Bzzz… The world is in grave danger. My fiery friend saw this in his dreams. And the man you helped, he stands at the heart of it. He may be the match that lights it… or the water to douse it.”

  Grace looked at the trees outside. They looked so lonely. She felt their sadness reaching out to her through the glass.

  She swallowed.

  “I think I understand,” she whispered.

  But she didn’t. Not really.

  She understood that Mereque was important. She understood that the world was in danger. She understood that the gods had come for him.

  What she didn’t understand was why it pained her to see him go.

  She had known him for only a few hours. Less than a day.

  Yet the thought of him alone out there, at the mercy of Gods-only-know-what, made her chest ache in a way she had not felt in a long time.

  She closed her eyes.

  Please be safe, star-man. Please.

  She pressed her palm to the glass. It felt like she was saying goodbye.

  Silence settled.

  Then the Machine God spoke again, voice all around her like warm rain.

  “Bzzz… One last question, Lady Grace. Do you still want to help him?”

  She didn’t hesitate.

  “Yes.”

  “Bzzz… Then we are agreed. Let us save him together.”

  The craft lifted (no roar, no lurch, just a gentle hum and the world falling away beneath her).

  Grace pressed her palms to the viewport.

  Trees shrank to toys. Clouds became solid enough to walk on.

  The dragon appeared (crimson mountain with wings), circling once, smoke curling from his jaws.

  His roar rattled the hull.

  “Quit yapping and fly!”

  They banked south, skimming endless ocean.

  Hours blurred.

  Grace never took her eyes off the horizon.

  The ocean below was endless blue, broken only by the occasional whitecap. She searched for any sign of land, any sign of Mereque.

  Nothing.

  The Machine God’s voice had fallen silent. Even the dragon’s roars had quieted to the occasionally grumbling.

  She felt small. Smaller than she had ever felt in the Fairlands.

  There, she had been free, unconstrained, a leprechaun’s child with magic in her veins.

  Here, she was just a girl in a metal box, watching the world turn at the whims of the Gods.

  She thought of Mereque’s bright eyes. The way he had looked at her like she was real. Like she mattered.

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  The craft banked slightly.

  Grace’s stomach flipped.

  Then the dragon dove.

  Straight into a shoreline crawling with the horrific Blanched Knights.

  Grace’s breath caught. Her skin felt like it was crawling with frosted caterpillars. Her palms slick with fear sweat.

  The Machine God’s voice was almost gentle.

  “Bzzz… Hold tight, little one.”

  The dragon fell like judgment.

  He pulled up at the last heartbeat and opened his jaws.

  Fire poured out (white-hot, hungry, alive). Knights vanished in the first breath. Their screams climbed the sky and died in smoke.

  Grace couldn’t look away.

  Hexabulous carved the beach with that impossible cleaver (a blade longer than a ship’s mast, edges glowing from pure speed). He swung once.

  A dozen knights shattered like porcelain dolls.

  Black-white fragments rained into the surf.

  He rose again, met the winged ones in the air, and broke them with the same casual violence a man might use to swat flies.

  Less than an hour and the beach was gone.

  Only craters, burning trenches, and the stink of cooked metal remained.

  The beach had been scoured clean of life in a way no storm or tide ever could. Where hundreds of fractured knights had swarmed in ranks, now only scars and smoke marked their passing—sand fused into black mirrors by heat that rivaled the sun.

  Crater after crater pocked the shore, each one a perfect bowl where the dragon’s lance had bitten deep, edges glowing dull red even now, hours later. Trenches zigzagged like lightning frozen in earth, walls vitrified and dripping molten glass that hissed when waves lapped at them.

  The air itself felt wounded. It shimmered with residual heat, distorting the stars above into wavering streaks. Every breath carried the acrid bite of vaporized armor and something worse— the faint, sweet rot of whatever passed for flesh inside those unholy shells. Trees that had stood for centuries at the treeline now burned from the inside out, trunks split open like overripe fruit, sap boiling and popping in the dark.

  Broken weapons lay scattered: swords twisted into corkscrews, shields melted into slag puddles, helms crushed flat as if stepped on by a giant indifferent to their existence. Here and there, fragments of black-white armor still twitched, edges flickering in and out of reality as if refusing to accept death.

  The dragon had not fought a battle. He had erased an army.

  One pass of fire, one swing of that impossible cleaver, and the Blanched were reduced to ash and memory.

  Grace stared down at the devastation, throat tight.

  No wonder the world feared him.

  Night slid over the ruin like a shroud.

  They circled.

  The dragon sniffed the wind and growled (low, frustrated).

  No Mereque.

  Only the ghost of his scent, thinning with every wave.

  Grace felt her heart sink.

  The Machine God’s voice was soft.

  “Bzzz… He either crossed the water… or he did not survive.”

  The dragon’s wings beat once, angry.

  “Then we hunt the water!”

  They turned north, skimming black waves under a bleeding moon.

  Grace pressed her forehead to the glass.

  She refused to believe he was dead.

  He couldn’t be dead.

  ? ? ?

  Tarmour woke under a grave of his own brothers.

  Mud and meat pressed him down. He shoved (one-armed, furious) until the weight rolled away and he stood alone on a beach that stank of dragon-fire and melted steel.

  The shoreline was a ruin of craters and burning trees. A hundred knights lay broken (some still twitching, black-white sand leaking from cracked helms).

  Only he remained.

  The Wyrm would not be pleased.

  A cold that had nothing to do with missing flesh crawled through him.

  He remembered fire.

  He remembered the Red Dragon descending like the end of the world.

  He remembered the lance (longer than a ship’s mast) carving the earth, carving them.

  He remembered the heat that turned his left side to charcoal and his brothers to ash.

  He remembered screaming.

  He remembered the moment the fire touched him.

  Not pain—pain was for mortals. Something deeper.

  His essence unraveling, threads of black-white light peeling away like burning parchment. He remembered trying to hold himself together, commanding the pieces to obey, to return.

  They hadn’t listened.

  For the first time in centuries, something had been stronger than the Wyrm’s gift.

  The dragon’s heat had been pure. Old. Hungry.

  It had looked at him and seen only kindling.

  He remembered the silence after the roar.

  The way the world had gone white. Then black.

  He remembered thinking, in the last coherent moment:

  This is what it feels like to be unmade.

  Tarmour looked at the empty sky.

  The heretic was gone.

  The dragon was gone.

  Only the taste of smoke and failure remained.

  He knelt in the cooling sand and waited for the wrath that always followed failure.

  Because even monsters could still feel fear.

  Luck had kept him breathing. The Wyrm had kept him standing.

  Tarmour walked the graveyard beach alone.

  He marvelled at the devastation; it was a masterclass in ruthless annihilation. He spotted pieces of his brothers littering the shore, The dragon left little doubt on who was victory and who was vanquished here.

  He whispered a prayer.

  No pulse answered his own. A hundred brothers gone (he felt it like he was missing pieces of himself).

  Then the air tore open.

  A black-white rectangle yawned twenty paces away. Sycophants spilled out first (mewling, chains rattling, blind faces twitching). Twenty of them, tripping over one another in their haste.

  The leashes snapped taut.

  Brother Keigael stepped through last.

  Hood thrown back, mouth slit open in the cloth, cracked teeth like burnt piano keys set in a permanent sneer.

  The Priest’s blind gaze found Tarmour instantly. His mouth widened into a distorted smile.

  “Tarmour the Tarnished,” Keigael crooned, voice dry as bone dust. “The Wyrm has tasted your failure.”

  The sycophants frantically tapped on their master, chains dancing.

  Tarmour’s hand settled on his sword.

  It stayed cold.

  Keigael’s ruined smile widened.

  He shuffled toward him, chains rattling, servants cowering behind.

  Closer, closer.

  The sycophants spread around them, chains singing like temple bells.

  Tarmour remained steadfast on the cooling sand, his bearing weary.

  “Brother Keigael,” he said, voice flat. “The heretic escaped. I accept judgment.”

  Laughter followed (high, brittle, wrong).

  Keigael’s hand settled on his shoulder (gentle, almost tender).

  “Worry not, Lord Tarmour.”

  Tarmour looked at him (confused, suspicious).

  The Priest’s blind face split even wider in a black-toothed grin.

  “There is no judgment. The Wyrm is pleased.”

  Tarmour stood, unsteady.

  “We failed.”

  Keigael’s fingers tightened on Tarmour’s shoulder, not in comfort but in possession.

  “You failed perfectly,” Keigael crooned.

  “How can it be?”, he said in disbelief.

  “The Red Dragon touched ground. His fire has burned away the old chains. The covenant is broken,” he whispered, voice thick with rapture. “For centuries we have wept in silence, bound by promises made when the world was young. No more.”

  The sycophants swayed, chains chiming in ecstatic rhythm.

  Tarmour felt the words sink into him like hooks.

  The covenant—ancient words spoken between dragon and Wyrm to keep the world in balance.

  Broken now.

  By dragonfire on holy sand.

  Keigael’s ruined mouth brushed his helm.

  “Rejoice, Lord Tarmour.”

  He spread his arms. The sycophants fell silent.

  “Our God is no longer bound by ancient treaties. He is free.”

  Keigael leaned close, breath like grave-dust.

  “Free to drown the world.”

  His laughter cracked the night open.

  Tarmour felt something cold bloom inside his hollow chest.

  Not fear. Worse. Anticipation.

  He saw it in flashes: oceans splitting in twain, cities drowning in white silence, every living thing kneeling under the weight of endless sorrow.

  He had served for centuries, spilling blood to feed a god that only wept.

  Now the god would feast on the world.

  And Tarmour would be the blade that opened the veins.

  His hand flexed.

  The sword at his hip hummed, eager.

  He looked at Keigael’s blind, smiling face.

  And for the first time in centuries, he felt something almost like joy.

  The Weeping Wyrm had waited centuries for this moment.

  And it had chosen him to light the way.