“Magical aura is a largely theoretical phenomenon. Light is a common artifact of magic, but aura is different – it is the visibility of magic itself. It has rarely been observed, mostly in the moments before a powerful magic user’s death.”

~ Bek Trent, M.A.S.O

True chaos had descended on the world. Faces blurred. Shrieks and cries and screams, whether of men or beast, were drowned out by the grating stone rumble of the monoliths, the clash of metal on metal, and the roar of an everlasting flame. There was fire everywhere, on every horizon, spitting black smoke to the heavens. People burned. Plants burned. The remains of buildings burned. The wonder of this fire, really, was that everything burned, even the water that ran black through the city streets. Some of it was dragonfire, some of it was magefire, those magical flames thrown up by pyromancers across the battlefield, and some of it was hers.

Most if it was hers.

For every soldier that ran from the flames, there was one who turned to face Silver. Some died before she ever reached them, ripped apart by magic or by friendly fire. Others parted and ran madly towards the shelter of distance when their gazes met hers. Many never saw Silver until the last minute. They were too busy jostling or fighting to survive, their onyx armor glinting in the pale dawn light from above, reflecting smoke and magic and dark clouds.

Izathral found them, or her magic found them. One or the other. But Silver’s expression never changed. Not when she was running a woman through with her sword. Not when she grabbed someone by the throat, feeling her magic rip through them without mercy. Not when she lifted the weapons of those she had felled, and threw them with her power, scattering the masses ahead of her.

I am not done with this world…a world like this…

Her eyes burned with crimson fire, but that was all. No compassion. No pity. Sorrow. The wrath she had felt moments ago – all gone, lost in the magic that leapt through her arms, her bones, her entire being. Izathral sang with her power, alive as the Castle of Divides was alive, but it obeyed her as it should.

If it cannot be fixed, it must be destroyed.

Terror swelled around her – the terror of others. She saw it in the way their eyes met hers. She smelled it in the scent of their sweat, felt it in the breath that they breathed.

If I cannot live as someone good…

Her thoughts were calm in the face of the tumult in front of her, rational truth at the heart of a tempest. Her crimson eyes glittered as her magic mounted in the air around her, oppressive and suffocating

…then I will be evil.

Silver kicked the soldier in front of her, sword sliding from his chest in a spray of blood. Anything that turned to face her was her prey. Any creature that dared to threaten her, however inconsequential, threatened its own doom. All those who had conspired to kill Illian would soon find themselves no more. Which meant there was a beast whose attention she needed; the dragon who had killed Cevora’s mother and plotted this war. He was the one, most of all, that she needed to kill.

For the first time, Silver paused, head tilting back. In the maelstrom, reaching into the pulsing magic that beat in time with her own heart, she could sense him…her head turned, and her eyes, bright with the scarlet fire of her mingled blood and magic, narrowed. Only a little more.

He was coming this way.

Her booted feet found purchase against the fine-grained soil as she swept her sword up with demonic strength and slit a man from leg to shoulder when he charged at her. The distant dragon was her only goal, and he blazed against her senses as if she forged a path to the sun. Perhaps she did. A part of her still hung at the bottom of forever, staring up into the light of a world she had left behind.

It was that part of her that raged with impatience as she turned back to the battlefield, charging into the ranks of chaos ahead of her, slashing, kicking, throwing her magic outward. Passed the great stone monoliths that were like robots in the MASO’s army; passed the selurnal kivgha, who met with wild beasts within the blackened skies; passed the soldiers who no longer turned to do battle, but fled from her; passed the living trees that straddled a gurgling stream that might as well have been fed by blood rather than water. Flames leapt up around her, tasting liberation, cast with the same pallor of life as those she had once used to fight the Zara. The earth cracked beneath her feet, and mended in her wake. Blood blossomed wherever the air met her sword, and the ground drank it greedily. If ancient legend told of reapers, now the men before her wished they had paid more heed to such tales. Her movements were fluid, perfectly timed, utterly merciless. The clang of her sword was the tick of a clock, sharp, methodical, and precise. It never stopped.

Not even when she felt the burn of dragonfire as the acrid scent of smoke filled her nostrils, and turned just in time to feel it stream past her face, licking at the smooth skin of her cheeks. Not even when a flash of purple and gold movement caught her eye, and Silver brought Izathral back to feel it pass through the intangible phantom body of some great, snarling beast whose ghostly breath warmed her back and neck.

The ticking of the clock was more than the wail of her sword. It was the pulse of the land, of magic, of her heartbeat.

And then, finally, a cold thrill shot through her. He was here, so near she could almost touch him. His magic reverberated within her, echoing her own, and his heart beat the same time as hers. She threw up her face, staring to the sky and the dark shadow that blotted out the sun and the clouds and the black smoke that wreathed the Grand Castle of Altiannia.

A dragon with scales of the deepest black. His hide shone with the reflection of weaponry and the dawn’s golden sunlight. Gleaming within the powerful, hard curves of his skull were two golden eyes as bright in themselves as stars against the night’s sky. When he spread his wings to land, it appeared that night had truly fallen. His talons gauged the earth as he threw his weight against the ground, silver bracelets around his paws tinkling melodiously. Then the dragon turned to eye Silver warily and readily. He was so young, so beautiful, but so terrible to behold. A dragon; a dragon like no other.

Then the far older, wearied form of a man slid from his serpentine back, striking sea-blue eyes trained on her. Silver knew the king’s face because it was reminiscent of Cevora’s, but she hardly glanced at him. Her eyes were all for the dragon at his back.

“Who is she? You said Cevora would be the one wielding Izathral,” the man, Renzan srinn, king of Alti, asked of his great black steed.

“You will understand in time, human king,” the dragon’s voice, rich and deep and just as she remembered it from the corridor in the castle, spoke aloud to both of them. The next words he spoke, Silver knew, were for her and her alone.

“You were there when the kuirsrinn of men came to me. Then, I thought I must be mistaken, but now I see…what cruel tricks fate plays on us.”

She stared, uncomprehending, into the dragon’s eyes.

“Why do you say nothing? I have come for you…” The dragon’s golden eyes narrowed as he paused, and Silver had the distinctly uncomfortable sensation that she had just met the only other creature besides Elorian who could so clearly see into her soul. Even without knowing what the beast had said to Cevora, there was something in the subtle, sweeping curve of his bony brows and the incandescent flame of his eyes that drew boiling hatred alongside her awe of him. He must have sensed as much, because he huffed anger. Across his back, the black of his scales shifted and two enormous wings rose, unfurling and descending, catching the sun so that the dark membranes burned with the light of the sky behind them.

She saw his eyes move to the king.

“Hess,” Silver growled. The name sprang unbidden from her lips, but it carried with it all of the gut-broiling rage and sorrow of a night long ago when flames had engulfed her home. Cara had told her the name of the beast behind it all. They had never met. But still she knew, with all of her heart and soul, that the beast in front of her was the one who controlled the Zara. Hess.

And for a moment, her eyes slid past him, seeing things that she knew could not be real. The air was rich with the heady scent of burning metal and plant life, scorched flesh, the clang of metal and spitting crackle of repelled magic. There were shouts rising up around her. A trumpeted roar reminiscent of a dragon’s scream, the soft voice of a tree wolf as its breath misted the frigid air before her and dissipated into crystalline plumes. Or perhaps it was not a tree wolf. She began to turn, wanting to see the creature, but it danced out of sight. Her mind’s eye turned instead to glimpse a sky drenched in the blood-light of sunset, and it was with a start that Silver realized she was looking up at this moment to see the same sky spilling into the ocean.

Hess.

She forced her gaze back to the dragon, but he had not moved, and appeared unaware that, for an instant, she had been far away.

“What has made you hate me so,” the dragon rumbled, adding with a certain mocking courtesy, “princess?”

Had he confused her with the king’s daughter, Silver wondered, who fought even now somewhere in the vast reaches of the castle’s inner corridors? Her eyes must have given her thoughts away, because something in the dragon’s countenance changed then. His broad nostrils flared, his golden eyes darkened, and she knew from the sudden tension in the coiled muscles of his neck that he had stumbled across something that both enraged and intrigued him.

“You are the abomination that defies the Laws of the world by giving life, human. And one day, you will destroy it,” he paused, black smoke rolling slowly from his open jaws, “As will I. Remember this.”

Then the dragon turned, so quickly she had no chance to move before his neck snapped down and forwards, scales glinting darkly in the sun. His jaws closed over the king’s body. She knew then that Renzan srinn was no more, even before Hess threw his head to the sky and roared his wrath to the world.

Somehow, in that moment, Silver knew her fight was done. The magic began to drain from her, leaving only heaviness behind. Lead in her arms and legs. Ice in her throat. She was sure the image before her would be forever ingrained into her mind; the great black dragon, Hess, and the castle towering behind his winged back.

The image blurred and pitched. She fell to her knees, her nostrils flared at the scent of iron. There was liquid in her throat, bubbling up from her lungs. A deep, wracking cough shook her, and when she was done, she was surprised to find her hands and the earth in front of her bloodier than before. A great gust of wind and dirt pelted her full in the face as the dragon’s shadow rose over her head, wheeling, dipping, diving in the distance towards the Grand Castle of Altiannia. Silver slumped to the blood sodden earth with a soft, shuddering sigh, too tired, all of a sudden, to do more. The last clear images she knew were of Hess’s dragonfire slowly consuming the battlements of the castle as the king’s dragons charged against him and fell, one by one, at the fangs of their comrade and enemy.

Then footsteps were pounding towards her and voices screamed through her fogged senses. Her body was rocked skyward. Alarm sent fire through her leaden limbs, but they were immobile. Her eyelids flickered and she had the vague impression of eyes like liquid gold-tinted violet, but they were all wrong. Even with her consciousness fading she could sense the feral gleam in their depths, and the murderous presence that hovered over her. Whose? She could not recall. Cold stole through her body, weighing her deeper into her despair. Too-strong hands gripped her, but she could feel them only as a pressure against her limbs. She wanted to, had to scream, but it was too late.

She was being lifted closer to that predatory presence, closer to something that repelled every fiber of her being. Her heartbeat stuttered in her ears. The shouting outside of her body grew more insistent as it faded from her hearing, replaced by the screaming within her own mind. Relentless. It shattered her pounding skull. One word repeated over and over.

Vampire.

And then she stood, surrounded by calm. There was a blue sky overhead, clouds pale as china. Grasses tickled her fingertips, rising so high she had to fight her way through them when she walked.

But she was not fighting now.

She was simply standing, facing a vampire with eyes like hot coals and hair like raven feathers. He regarded her cautiously, and she stared back. No fear. No concern. He did not threaten her, and she knew his kind well enough that even if he had, she would not have cared. She had asked him his name, and somehow, it hung between them now.

Just one word.

One word that changed everything.

“Hess.”