"ARCHMAGE!"

  The roar rattled windows across the capital, shook dust from rafters and sent dogs howling in streets half a city away as Sael flew to meet it.

  Below him, the city sprawled in miniature. Thousands of lanterns flickered in windows, candles held by hands that had been sleeping moments ago and now pressed against glass, faces turned skyward. The bells had stopped ringing. Even the riots seemed to have paused, the distant shouting fading to silence as an entire capital held its breath.

  Sael could see them all. The mother pulling her children back from the window. The old man on his roof, bottle in hand, watching the sky like he'd been waiting for this moment for a long time. The guards who'd abandoned their posts, the people who'd fled their homes, the beggars, the thieves and honest workers all standing in the same streets, all looking up at the same burning light descending from the sky.

  The dragon was coming in fast. Too fast.

  Sael did the math without thinking about it—Ozyarathes's trajectory, his mass, his velocity, the angle of descent, the point of impact—and the answer was the palace. Or rather, the palace and everything within perhaps three hundred meters of it.

  The shockwave alone would flatten buildings, shatter every window in the district, turn cobblestones into shards. Thousands would die in the first second and thousands more in the fires that followed.

  Sael wasn't sure Ozyarathes even knew. The dragon was beyond reason now, lost in a fury so total that nothing else seemed to exist for him. Just blind rage given form, hurtling toward the earth with no awareness of what he would destroy when he hit.

  Young dragons were like this. Slaves to their emotions in ways that older ones learned to temper. Sael had assumed Ozyarathes was ancient, given his power, his territory and his reputation, but this? This tantrum? He couldn't be more than fifty years old.

  Sael raised Eld, and the staff responded to his will like an extension of his own body. Mana flooded through the wood and the spell took shape in the space between heartbeats.

  It began at the edges of the city, a shimmer in the air that most people probably mistook for heat distortion or a trick of the light. Then the shimmer solidified, hexagonal panels of force clicking into place like pieces of a vast puzzle, each one interlocking with its neighbors, each connection reinforcing the whole. The barrier climbed upward, angling inward as it rose, a magical dome settling over the capital like a second sky.

  The panels weren't smooth. They were faceted, condensed and layered in ways that distributed force across the entire structure rather than concentrating it at any single point. A spell designed not for elegance but for endurance. For catching falling stars.

  The barrier sealed with a sound like a thunderclap, and for a moment the city below was painted in pale blue light, every street and rooftop illuminated by the glow of protective magic.

  Then Sael accelerated and the world blurred.

  Wind that should have torn the flesh from his bones parted around him like water around a stone. The air itself seemed to compress ahead of him, a cone of distortion that he barely noticed anymore after centuries of practice. Buildings became streaks of color. The barrier became a wall rushing toward him, and then he was through, punching past the edge of his own protection into open sky.

  Behind him, the thunder followed. A crack that rolled across the capital like an avalanche, rattling the barrier, setting the geometric panels humming with absorbed force. The sound of his passage catching up to where he'd been.

  Ahead, the dragon grew larger with impressive speed.

  His scales blazed white-hot, fire bleeding from the gaps between them, and his eyes burned with fury. His mouth opened, and flame poured forth, a strream of white fire that lit the night brighter than noon.

  Sael didn't slow down, he raised one hand, fingers spread, and the flames washed over him. They were hot enough to melt steel and turn stone to glass, and they felt like warm summer rain against his skin. The fire parted around him, streaming past on either side, unable to touch him.

  The distance between them closed to nothing.

  They met in open sky, and Sael cast [Hammerblow], hitting Ozyarathes right in the chest.

  The dragon's forward momentum stopped.

  For one moment, the two of them hung suspended in the air, and Sael could see the shock in those burning eyes. Then physics reasserted itself, and the dragon went sideways.

  The shockwave expanded outward in a perfect sphere, visible to the naked eye, a ripple in reality itself. It struck the barrier and the hexagonal panels flared brilliant blue, absorbing the impact, distributing it across thousands of interlocking surfaces.

  Ozyarathes tumbled through the sky, wings flailing, fire streaming from his jaws in uncontrolled bursts. He was falling now, not diving, his trajectory bent away from the city and toward the empty hills to the north. But he was still falling fast. Way too fast.

  Sael extended his will and cast [Inversion].

  The gravity around Ozyarathes flipped. What had been pulling him down now pushed him up, and the dragon's plummet became a violent deceleration. His organs would be pressing against his ribcage now, blood rushing to his head, every instinct screaming that up was down and down was up. Disorienting enough for a man. For something Ozyarathes's size, falling at that speed, it would feel like being crushed from the inside.

  But a dragon was still a dragon. It would take more than internal damage to kill him.

  As if to prove his point, Ozyarathes fought the spell. The dragon twisted in the air, fire erupting from every scale, claws raking at nothing. His roar shook the hills below, scattered birds from trees a mile away, and still he fell, slower now but inexorable, dragged down by forces beyond even a dragon's ability to resist.

  The ground rushed up to meet him and Sael watched him hit.

  Even with the deceleration, the impact was catastrophic. The dune cratered, sand fountaining upward in a column that rose fifty meters before gravity claimed it, glass forming where the heat of the dragon's scales met the silica. The shockwave flattened everything in its path, a ring of destruction expanding outward across the desert until it finally spent itself.

  Sand and smoke billowed into the sky, and for a long moment, nothing moved.

  Then, slowly, a shape began to stir in the crater below.

  "[BIND]"

  From Sael's fingertips unspooled threads of light.

  They threads shot downward like living things, pale gold against the night sky, dozens of them racing toward the stirring shape below. They moved like serpents: twisting, seeking, finding their marks with unerring precision. The first wrapped around Ozyarathes's throat, cinching tight. The second and third caught his wings, pinning them flat against his flanks. More followed, looping around his legs, his tail, each one anchoring itself to the earth the moment it made contact.

  The dragon thrashed. Sand exploded upward as he fought the restraints, fire pouring from his open jaws in wild, uncontrolled streams that lit the dunes for hundreds of meters. The bindings held. They stretched, hummed with tension, but held.

  Sael watched for a moment, and concluded the dragon was still too lively. He raised one hand and pressed it downward, fingers splayed.

  "[Stillness]."

  The spell sank into the earth like water into sand. For a mile in every direction, the ground simply... stopped. There were no vibrations nor tremors nor resonance. Whatever happened in this crater would stay in this crater. The capital wouldn't feel so much as a shiver.

  "ARCHMAAAGE!"

  Fire roared skyward with the word, a geyser of white flame that climbed fifty meters before dissipating into the night. The dragon's struggles redoubled. The bindings around his wings began to crack.

  Too lively indeed.

  Sael considered his options. Sealing the mouth again would be the simplest solution. That was how he had felled Ozyarathes in the first place, when the dragon had tried to breathe fire with his jaws locked shut. The resulting shockwave had rattled his brain hard enough to knock him unconscious.

  It took a great deal to knock a dragon unconscious. That fact alone said enough. If one truly meant to kill them, this was by far the surest method. Like a colossal sneeze turned inward, pressure and heat trapped inside the skull, hammering through bone and brain with nowhere to escape.

  Once was enough to stun. Twice might cripple. Three times would kill.

  And Sael hadn't come here to execute a child throwing a tantrum. No, he had a better idea to calm him down.

  Sael raised Eld, and a ring bloomed behind him.

  It was vast. Sixty meters across, burning white-gold, light folding in on itself in slow, inexorable patterns that hurt to look at directly. The light it cast made every shadow within a quarter mile simply cease to exist. The dragon's fire looked dim by comparison. The stars vanished. The moon vanished. There was only the ring, blazing like a second sun had risen at Sael's back.

  Ozyarathes screamed and thrashed away from the light, eyes squeezed shut, but there was nowhere to go. The bindings held him fast.

  "[The Thousandfold Strike]"

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  And from the circle, a fist of light emerged.

  It was massive; twenty meters across, blazing with the same white-gold light, knuckles the size of boulders, fingers thick as temple columns. It pushed through the circle's surface like something rising from deep water, slow and deliberate, trailing wisps of light behind it. For a moment it simply hung there, suspended in the air above the crater, casting its own shadow across the dragon below

  But for some reason, Ozyarathes had gone still. His eyes were still squeezed shut against the blinding light, but his wings stopped straining against the bindings, his tail lay limp in the sand, and even his breathing had slowed, chest rising and falling in shallow, careful movements, as if any sudden motion might bring that hanging judgment down upon him.

  Sael's grip on Eld loosened.

  "Hmm."

  Perhaps this would be enough. Perhaps the threat alone—

  Fire suddenly erupted from the dragon's jaws. A defiant roar tore across the crater, white flames licking at the night sky, and Ozyarathes thrashed against his bindings with renewed fury. "I WILL NOT BE COWED BY THE LIKES OF YOU! I AM A DRAGON, YOU F—"

  Sael sighed.

  The fist fell like lightning: one instant suspended, the next buried in Ozyarathes's side. The crack of scales and the dragon's shriek came a heartbeat after, and by then the second fist was already pushing through the circle, followed by the third and the fourth.

  Then they stopped coming one at a time.

  A thousand giant fists of light erupted from the circle in a single, continuous barrage. They fell like a meteor shower, each one striking with the force of a thunderbolt and the speed of thought. The sand around the crater spiraled, caught in the updraft of so much displaced air, and where the fists struck, it fused. Glass pillars shot upward, twisted spires forming and reforming as each impact reshaped the landscape.

  "ARCH—" A fist took him in the jaw. "AGH!"

  Another in the ribs. Another across the spine.

  "ST—" The back of the skull. "—AH!"

  The screams grew less coherent and the thrashing slowed as the fire guttering from his jaws dimmed from white to orange to a sullen red.

  Still the fists fell.

  The crater deepened. The glass spires climbed higher, a forest of jagged crystal catching the light of the circle and fracturing it into a thousand rainbow shards. The dragon's roars became whimpers. His struggles became twitches.

  "...Stop..."

  It was barely a whisper. Sael almost didn't hear it over the thunder of the assault.

  "...Stop. Please.... stop...."

  Sael lowered his staff.

  The circle faded. The fists ceased. The light died, and darkness rushed back in to fill the void, gentle and almost merciful by comparison.

  In the crater below, surrounded by twisted glass and churned sand, Ozyarathes lay still. His scales were cracked in a dozen places. His wings were bent at wrong angles. His chest rose and fell in shallow, labored breaths.

  But he was alive.

  And he had finally, finally stopped screaming.

  Sael descended slowly, surveying the damage. It looked brutal—was brutal, if he was being honest—but it was superficial. Flesh wounds. Nothing that wouldn't heal. Sealing his mouth again would have been cleaner, but one more internal detonation might not have left enough of Ozyarathes's mind intact for conversation.

  Sael walked to the edge of the crater.

  It was deeper than he'd expected. The Thousandfold Strike had driven Ozyarathes a good thirty meters into the earth, and the walls were slick with fused glass that caught the starlight in fractured patterns. At the bottom, half-buried in sand and shattered crystal, the dragon lay.

  Sael leaned over the edge and peered down.

  "Are you done now?"

  A growl rumbled up from the depths. It was low, guttural, full of impotent fury. Ozyarathes shifted, sand sliding off his flanks, and one eye cracked open to glare upward. The fire in it had dimmed to embers, but the hatred remained.

  "Hmm."

  A hmm of resignation, this one. The dragon would not learn easily, it seemed.

  Sael sat down at the crater's edge, legs dangling over the side as he rested Eld across his knees and looked down at the dragon.

  "Do you understand what led you to this situation?"

  Silence. The dragon's breathing was ragged, each exhale accompanied by a thin wisp of smoke, but he said nothing. His claws scraped against glass as he shifted, trying to find a position that didn't press against his many bruises.

  "Ozyarathes."

  "I did nothing wrong." The words came out hoarse, scraped raw by all the screaming. "I did only what I had the right to do. That territory was mine by conquest. I took it. I held it. The humans who lived there were mine to rule as I saw fit."

  Sael was silent for a moment.

  "The right of conquest," he said eventually. "Yes. I know it well."

  "Before the Golden Age, that was how things worked."

  He exhaled, and the smoke twisted into shapes. Tiny castles rose and crumbled. Armies marched across empty air, banners flying, swords clashing in silence.

  "Empires rose and fell by the sword, and whoever held the land owned it, along with everything and everyone on it. Borders were drawn in blood and redrawn the same way a generation later. There was no law between nations, only power."

  The smoke shifted. A map took form, borders flickering and changing, expanding and contracting like a living thing. With a pulse of mana from Sael, dark tendrils crept across the smoke from one edge: the Corruption, spreading.

  "During the war, when my companions and I were making our way toward the Corrupted One's domain, we passed through... seven different conflicts, I believe. Exposed flanks, you see. With the Corruption spreading, the great powers saw opportunity in each other's weakness. We lost weeks to detours, trying to avoid armies that had no interest in the end of the world so long as they could claim another province."

  Ozyarathes said nothing, but his breathing had slowed. Listening, perhaps. Or simply too exhausted to interrupt.

  "Bran found it incomprehensible."

  A new figure formed in the smoke. A young man with broad shoulders and a strange sword at his hip, shaking his head at something unseen. Sael chuckled.

  "You see this? He has three hands." He glanced down at the crater. "Well. Bran only had two, I assure you."

  The dragon said nothing. Not even a growl.

  Sael cleared his throat and continued.

  "He came from another world, you see. Earth, he called it. A world with its own wars, its own empires, its own atrocities, but also a world that had learned, eventually, to put limits on such things. He spoke of pacts between nations. Agreements that certain acts were forbidden regardless of who was winning. Rules of engagement. Protections for those who could not fight."

  The smoke Bran gestured emphatically at a group of other figures: their old companions, rendered in curling grey.

  "The other members of Pointbreak mocked Bran for it and called him naive. A dreamer prince who didn't understand how the world worked."

  Sael drew on his pipe again. The figures dissolved, and in their place, a woman took shape. Tall and slender, with pointed ears and hair that fell past her shoulders. She was kneeling beside a much smaller figure: a child, looking up at her.

  He remembered her face perfectly. Even after all these centuries, he could recall every detail: the slight curve of her smile, the way her eyes crinkled when she laughed, the gentle slope of her nose. He tried to render it as faithfully as he could in the curling grey. Then he breathed a small tongue of fire into the smoke, letting it catch and glow, weaving through the figure's hair. Red-gold, like embers. Like hers had been.

  He was drifting, he realized. This wasn't strictly necessary for the lesson he was trying to impart. But somehow, talking about the past like this, in this context, made his heart feel less heavy than it had in a long while.

  "I didn't mock him. When Bran spoke of these things, I thought of my mother. She used to tell me stories of her people. The Tellems. The high elves, before the fall. Their civilization had laws much like what Bran described. Pacts of non-aggression between nations. Protections for civilians in times of war. Tribunals to settle disputes before blood was spilled."

  The smoke mother reached out and touched the smoke child's face. Then both figures dissolved into nothing and Sael's gaze grew distant.

  "Naturally, I too saw such a system as ideal. I had grown up being told about it, after all. The stories my mother told me... they shaped how I saw the world. What it could be, if people chose to make it so."

  He was quiet for a moment, the pipe resting loosely in his hand.

  "So after the war, after the Corrupted One fell and the world began to rebuild, Bran and I, as well as a few of our friends, gathered what remained of the kingdoms across all the twelve continents. The queens and kings, the clan leaders and tribal chiefs, the dragon elders and the merchant princes. Anyone with the power to wage war and the wisdom to see where it led."

  He drew on the pipe again, but this time the smoke simply curled upward, shapeless.

  "It took years. Decades, in some cases. There were those who refused, and those who agreed and then broke their word, and those who had to be convinced. But in the end, we built something. A covenant between nations. A set of rules that all agreed to follow, not because they trusted each other, but because the alternative was a return to what came before."

  He let the silence stretch.

  "Among those rules was the prohibition against conquest. No nation may claim the territory of another through force of arms. No ruler may subjugate a free people simply because they have the power to do so. Disputes are settled through negotiation, arbitration, or—in extreme cases—through tribunals overseen by neutral parties."

  He tilted his head and looked down into the crater.

  "The right of conquest died four hundred years ago, Ozyarathes."

  He tapped his pipe against his knee.

  "What you call your right is what the rest of the world calls a war crime. "

  For a while, only silence stretched between them.

  The dragon lay in his crater and said nothing. His one open eye stared upward at Sael with hatred still burning in them. The smoke from his nostrils had thinned to almost nothing.

  Sael waited.

  The stars wheeled overhead, indifferent as somewhere in the distance, a night bird called.

  "Do you have nothing to say?"

  Ozyarathes stirred. Glass crunched beneath his shifting bulk, and when he spoke, his voice was raw but unbroken.

  "What would you have me say, Archmage?"

  The dragon's neck uncoiled slowly, until his head rose from the sand.

  "That I was wrong? Or... or that I should beg forgiveness from the cattle I claimed as my own?" A sound escaped him—not quite a laugh, but close. "I am a dragon. I am fire and fury made flesh. I am the storm that levels mountains and the flame that turns cities to ash. My kind ruled this world when your ancestors were still crawling in the mud, learning to stack stones."

  "And that," Sael said quietly, "is what makes you dangerous."

  The dragon's jaw snapped shut.

  Silence again, longer this time. When Ozyarathes spoke, the pride had drained from his voice, leaving something smaller behind.

  "...Are you going to kill me?"

  Sael considered the question. He looked up at the stars, then down at the broken creature in the crater, and let out a slow breath.

  "Quite frankly, the thought has crossed my mind more than once tonight."

  Something flickered in the dragon's eye.

  "Then damn the gods." The words came out bitter and cracked. " Damn them all and damn you and your laws and your Golden Age. What right do you have? I acted according to my nature. I did what dragons have done since the first flame was kindled in the first egg. And for this, I am to be slaughtered like some common beast?"

  His claws scraped against glass, sparks flying.

  "It is unfair. Do you hear me, Archmage? Unfair! The gods themselves granted dragons dominion over lesser creatures. It is written in our blood, in our fire and in the very essence of what we are. Why should I be punished for being what I am? Why should I—"

  "Do you hear yourself?"

  Sael tilted his head, genuine disbelief in his voice.

  "You cannot be bothered to care for the lives of the small, yet you curse your own gods when they inflict you injustices of similar indifference." Sael almost laughed, though not from amusement. "Do you truly not see it?

  Ozyarathes's eye dropped. His claws stopped scraping.

  "I..." The word seemed to cost him something. "Do not kill me. I... I do not wish to die. Not like this."

  Sael looked at him for a long moment.

  "I never said I would."

  Ozyarathes blinked. His massive head shifted, confusion cutting through the fear.

  "Then... what?"

  Sael rose to his feet. He lifted Eld, and the staff began to glow with a soft, pulsing light.

  "You know, I am starting to think this might be a mistake on the long run, and killing you now might solve a future serious problem." He said it conversationally. "I thought about it. Strongly. But death would teach you nothing, and I find myself stubborn enough to believe you can still learn."

  The light grew brighter. The dragon began to struggle against his bindings, eyes widening.

  "You have lived your entire life looking down on the small. The weak. The ones who scurry beneath your shadow and pray you do not notice them." Sael raised his hand, fingers splayed, light gathering at his palm from the staff. "So I think you need to be one of them for a while. A hundred years, perhaps. Or until you have learned what it means to be fragile, to be afraid, to depend on the mercy of those stronger than you."

  "What are you—"

  "The same mercy you were shown once, Ozyarathes. When you were small and helpless, when you could not hunt or fly or breathe fire. Someone stronger than you chose to let you live and took care for you." The light was blinding now. "Perhaps you have forgotten what that felt like. I intend to remind you."

  The dragon's eyes went wide with horror. "No. No, wait—"

  "[Polymorph:]." Sael began, "[Chicken]."

  "STOP! ARCHMAGE, WAIT, I—"

  The light swallowed him whole.

  And in the midst of it all, a single, indignant bwak echoed across the crater.

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