Gunther led, the ruined watchtower’s single door a dark hole against the bruised purple of the eastern sky. She didn’t look back. “Keep the bluff to our right. It’ll give us some cover from the west. Move in the gullies where you can.”

  The ground crunched underfoot, a mix of shale and dry soil. Jacob’s breathing was already ragged, his arm held stiffly against his chest. Sihar brought up the rear, her head on a constant swivel, her mage-sight scanning the darkening air behind them.

  They made a hundred yards before the first tremor hit.

  It wasn’t a sound. It was a pressure change, a sudden, violent compression of the air that popped in their ears and made their lungs ache. Gunther dropped to a crouch, one hand pressed flat to the shuddering ground. Sihar hissed a single, guttural syllable, and a faint, shimmering lens of blue light flickered into existence around them, blotting out their heat signatures for three precious seconds.

  A shadow deeper than the gathering night blotted out the stars to the south. It passed over the river, silent as a ghost, a vast, serpentine shape eclipsing the last embers of sunset. Ignis was no longer circling. It was hunting in earnest, moving upriver on broad, membrane-thin wings that absorbed sound.

  The pressure subsided. The lens of light shattered like glass. “It’s using tremor-sense,” Sihar whispered, sweat beading on her brow. “Feeling for footfalls. Walk where the ground is soft. Now.”

  They ran, not in a sprint, but in a low, scrambling lope, aiming for a deep erosion cut that snaked away from the bluff. They slid down the crumbling side, landing in a dry wash thick with the scent of dust and old roots.

  Jacob stumbled, biting back a cry as his injured arm jarred against the bank. Gunther caught him, hauling him upright. “Almost there. Just a little further.”

  “A little further to where?” Jacob gasped.

  “Anywhere that isn’t here,” Gunther said, her eyes scanning the wash. It ran east, away from the river, but it was shallow. A dragon flying low would see them like beetles in a groove.

  Sihar pointed a finger, tracing a line in the air. A faint phosphorescence followed her gesture, illuminating a side channel in the wash wall, a darker slit of shadow. “There. A burrow. Badger, maybe. It’s deep.”

  It was a tight squeeze. Gunther went first, pushing her pack ahead of her, the smell of loam and animal musk thick in her nostrils. The tunnel turned sharply, then opened into a pocket of space no larger than a shepherd’s hut. The ceiling was low, roots dangling like sinews.

  Jacob collapsed against the dirt wall, his face grey. Sihar squeezed in last, sealing the entrance behind her with a whispered word and a gesture that caused the earth to slump and close, leaving only a few finger-width cracks for air.

  Darkness, complete and suffocating, swallowed them. The only sounds were their own strained breathing and the frantic drumbeat of Gunther’s heart in her ears.

  For a long minute, nothing.

  Then, the world outside began to scream.

  It started as a low hum, a vibration that shook dust from the roots onto their heads. The hum deepened, coalescing into a sound like a mountain tearing itself apart. The very air in their burrow grew hot and acrid, smelling of ozone and char.

  Ignis was strafing the riverbank.

  Through the thin cracks, flashes of violent, actinic light stabbed the darkness first a searing white, then a hellish orange. A wave of concussive force slammed into the hillside, making the earth around them groan. Dirt pattered down. Jacob curled into a ball.

  Gunther felt it, a phantom pain in her jaw where the dragon’s fire had kissed her days before. She clenched her teeth.

  The barrage lasted for what felt like an hour. The dragon was methodical, brutal, scouring the landscape where it had lost its prey. They heard the crack and sizzle of trees being vaporized, the hiss of the river turning to superheated steam, the dreadful, grinding roar of stone being melted into glass.

  Sihar sat cross-legged, her eyes closed, her hands resting on her knees. A faint, steady glow emanated from her skin, a cool counterpoint to the furnace-light flickering through the cracks. She was maintaining the cloaking spell, making their little pocket of earth read as nothing more than solid rock to any searching magical senses.

  Finally, the onslaught ceased. The silence that followed was more terrifying than the noise. It was the silence of a predator listening.

  A new sound replaced the fury: a slow, rhythmic thump… thump… thump. It was the sound of immense weight settling on the bluff above them. Then, a scraping, like a giant sword being drawn across stone. Ignis had landed. Gunther could picture it, perched on the ruined watchtower, its furnace-heat pulsing through the ground, its head cocked, tasting the air.

  A voice filled the silence. It was not a sound heard with ears, but a pressure implanted directly into the mind, a bass thrum of ancient malice and infinite arrogance.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  LITTLE SPARKS. YOU THINK TO EXTINGUISH YOURSELVES IN DIRT. I CAN TASTE YOUR FEAR. IT SMELLS OF SWEAT AND BROKEN BONE.

  Jacob whimpered. Gunther put a hand on his good shoulder, squeezing hard. Don’t move. Don’t even think.

  YOU CARRY A FRAGMENT OF MY FIRE. A SOUVENIR. I WILL COLLECT THE REST OF YOU. THE WIZARD FIRST. HER LIGHT ITCHES AT MY SENSES. I WILL PLUCK IT OUT.

  Gunther saw Sihar’s eyes snap open. The glow around her didn’t flicker, but a muscle jumped in her jaw. The mental voice was probing, searching for a reaction, a psychic flare it could lock onto.

  The scraping intensified. A shower of dirt and pebbles rattled down from the ceiling as something enormous began to dig at the top of the bluff, directly above their burrow. Stones the size of skulls dislodged and thudded against the hillside.

  “It’s guessing,” Sihar breathed, the words barely audible. “It knows we’re close. It’ll tear this whole hillside apart stone by stone.”

  Gunther’s hand went to the hilt of her sword, a useless gesture in the confined space. Her mind raced, discarding one desperate plan after another. They couldn’t outrun it. They couldn’t outfight it. Hiding was about to fail.

  Another psychic blast, laced with impatience and cruel amusement. COME OUT. I PROMISE THE WIZARD’S DEATH WILL BE QUICK. THE REST OF YOU… WE SHALL SEE HOW LONG MORTAL FLESH CAN BUBBLE BEFORE IT POPS.

  The digging stopped.

  A new sensation washed over them not heat, but a profound, sucking cold. The air in the burrow grew instantly frigid. Frost spider-webbed across the dirt walls. Their breath plumed in the darkness.

  Ignis was inhaling.

  Gunther knew what came next. Not fire, but vacuum. A breath that would pull the air, the warmth, the very life from their lungs, before a final, cleansing blast of flame incinerated their frozen corpses.

  “Sihar,” Gunther said, her voice a dry crack.

  The mage was already moving. She placed her palms flat against the burrow wall opposite the entrance. Her lips moved in a silent, frantic chant. The glow around her skin intensified, concentrating in her hands until they shone like two blue suns, painting the terrified faces of Gunther and Jacob in stark relief.

  “Hold your breath,” Sihar commanded, her voice strained. “And brace.”

  Outside, the inhalation reached its peak. The world seemed to hold its breath.

  Sihar slammed her palms forward.

  The earth didn’t explode outward. It flowed. A six-foot-wide section of the burrow wall liquefied into a slurry of mud, stone, and root, and shot down the steep slope of the erosion cut like a launched battering ram. At the same moment, Sihar threw her will outward, not at the dragon, but at the geography.

  The base of the bluff where they were buried was undercut, eroded by the river over centuries. Sihar’s spell targeted that weakness.

  As the slurry of earth shot into the open air, a deep, groaning crack split the night. It was the sound of thousands of tons of rock surrendering to gravity.

  Ignis, poised on the bluff’s edge, ready to exhale its killing frost, had a split-second to register the tidal wave of liquefied earth shooting toward its chest, and the more imminent threat of the entire cliff face beneath its feet shearing away.

  The dragon recoiled, wings flaring. Its exhale, meant for the burrow, was unleashed prematurely a cone of absolute zero that flash-froze the slurry-missile into a solid spear of ice and rock that shattered against its scaled breastplate.

  Then the bluff collapsed.

  It fell not in a slide, but in a single, massive slab. The roar was apocalyptic, drowning out even the dragon’s furious shriek. A cloud of dust and debris bloomed into the sky, visible even in the darkness.

  Inside the burrow, now exposed as a shallow scar on the newly-raw face of the landslide, the three were thrown violently forward. Gunther wrapped herself around Jacob as they tumbled out onto a chaotic slope of shifting rubble. Rocks pummeled them. Choking dust filled their mouths and noses.

  They slid, rolled, and skidded down the mountain of debris, coming to a rest amidst the still-settling destruction at the landslide’s base, half-buried in dust and smaller stones.

  Gunther coughed, spitting out dirt. She shoved a rock off her legs and looked up.

  Where the bluff had been was now a jagged, smoking scar. The river, choked with debris, was already backing up, its murmur turning to an angry roar. And rising from the settling cloud, shaking rubble from its wings like a bird shaking off water, was Ignis.

  The landslide hadn’t buried it. The dragon was too fast, too powerful. But it had been hit. A deep gouge ran along its left flank, leaking not blood, but a glowing, magma-like ichor that hissed where it dripped onto the rocks. One wing membrane was torn. It was hurt. Angry.

  And its eyes, two smoldering coals in the dust-clouded night, were fixed directly on them.

  Sihar staggered to her feet beside Gunther. The mage looked drained, her face ash-white, the glow around her guttering like a dying candle. She’d spent everything on that one cataclysmic spell.

  Ignis’s neck arched. Its maw opened, revealing a building inferno in its throat. This time, there would be no breath of frost. This would be pure, annihilating fire.

  Jacob struggled to his knees, his good hand fumbling at his belt. He pulled free not a weapon, but the small, clay whistle he’d taken from the ransacked village days ago the one carved with crude wings.

  He put it to his lips, his eyes wide with terror and desperate hope, and blew.

  No sound came out that Gunther could hear. But she saw Ignis flinch. The building fire in its throat stuttered. Its head twitched, as if listening to a distant, irritating frequency.

  Jacob blew again, his cheeks puffing, his face turning red.

  The dragon let out a roar not of fury, but of frustration and something else… confusion? Pain? It took a step back, shaking its massive head. The fire in its maw died.

  In that moment of distraction, Sihar moved. She grabbed Gunther’s arm and Jacob’s cloak, her face a mask of desperate focus. “Run! Now! To the tree line!”

  She didn’t conjure a shield. She didn’t attack. She poured the dregs of her power into their legs. Gunther felt a surge of unnatural strength flood her muscles. She grabbed Jacob, and the three of them ran.

  They weren’t sprinting; they were bounding, each stride covering ten feet, leaping over boulders and fissures in the broken ground. They were a blur, streaking away from the river, away from the wounded, disoriented dragon, toward the relative safety of the dark, thick forest that marked the edge of the lowlands.

  Behind them, Ignis’s roar of rage shook the very stars. But it did not immediately follow. It stood amidst the ruins of the bluff, one wing half-furled, head still cocked, listening for a whistle it could no longer hear, watching the three specks vanish into the consuming dark of the trees. The gouge on its flank pulsed with angry light.

  It had been outmaneuvered. Hurt. It was not a creature that forgot.

  The hunt was no longer a diversion. It was a vow.