The white dragon breathed.
Cold fell out of the sky.
It did not resemble winter.
Winter had softness somewhere inside it. Snow gathered. Frost crept. Wind carried cold across distance.
This was violence given temperature.
The dragon’s jaws opened above the fortress and a white torrent poured downward, freezing moisture in the air as it came. Ice spread across the tower stones. Soldiers below threw themselves behind walls they already knew could not protect them from everything.
Hexen rose to meet it.
The pit fiend’s wings opened.
Fendor watched from the flying carpet as the great red-black devil climbed toward the descending dragon.
“I am never going to get used to that.”
Kaylor did not look away from the living wave battering the tower.
“You got used to the mammoth.”
“The mammoth didn’t look like it ruled a layer of Hell.”
“Give him time.”
Nethnarel heard neither of them.
She had been staring down at the water.
The dragon had arrived.
That was important.
The thing striking the tower was more urgent.
It had drawn itself upright again, a living wall of water forty or fifty feet high, gathering itself for another blow. Behind the translucent body she could see broken stone where the outer tower had already begun failing.
She raised both hands.
Fire descended.
Not one sphere.
Not a line.
A storm.
Flame appeared across the living wave in separated columns and squares, wrapping its upper body in a lattice of impossible heat. Water flashed instantly to steam.
The creature screamed.
Nethnarel had not known water could scream either.
The night had become educational.
Steam exploded across the northern wall.
For a moment the tower disappeared inside it.
Then the wave emerged.
Smaller.
Not gone.
Nethnarel stared.
“Fine.”
Above her, Hexen reached the white dragon.
The Pit Fiend did not possess Hexen’s ordinary repertoire of carefully selected druidic magic.
It possessed something considerably less subtle.
Fireball.
Hexen threw one into the dragon’s chest.
Flame rolled across white scales.
The dragon banked.
Hexen followed.
Another sphere of fire crossed the sky.
The white dragon twisted between tower and clouds, Hexen pursuing on infernal wings until the two enormous shapes began circling one another above the keep.
Fire against frost.
Dragon against devil.
Under almost any other circumstances, everyone below would have stopped to watch.
Then the red dragon arrived.
Fendor heard it before he saw it.
A roar behind him.
Wings.
Heat.
He turned the carpet.
A red dragon descended from the darkness with its jaws already glowing.
“Oh.”
Flame engulfed him.
The carpet vanished inside the fire.
Fendor held his position because there was nowhere useful to fall.
Heat found every opening in his armor. His cloak blackened. The smell of scorched leather reached him even through the dragonfire.
Then the breath passed.
Fendor remained.
The red dragon looked almost disappointed.
Fendor looked down at himself.
“You ruined my coat.”
The dragon roared.
Fendor reached inward and pulled strength back into his battered body.
Wounds tightened.
Breathing became easier.
The reserves of vitality he had learned to call upon in the worst moments of battle flooded through him, followed by the smaller instinctive recovery of a veteran fighter refusing to stop because stopping was inconvenient.
Then Fendor drew the Oathbow.
“Try again.”
He fired.
Kaylor had his own dragon-sized problem.
Except it was made of water.
The living wave rose before him.
Without the pegasus, Kaylor might have simply stood his ground and let the thing come.
The pegasus deserved better.
The celestial mount beat its wings beneath him while Kaylor drove the Hammer of Thunderbolts into the wave creature. Each impact sent water outward in sheets.
The monster recoiled.
Then gathered itself.
Kaylor felt the air change.
The living wave pulled backward.
Not retreating.
Drawing.
Water collected behind it.
More than it should have possessed.
More than existed anywhere on the mountain.
Kaylor looked past the creature.
Something enormous was forming behind it.
“Move.”
The pegasus responded instantly.
A wall of water rose above the fortress.
Two hundred feet.
Perhaps more.
The scale became meaningless once it towered above the keep.
The wave rolled forward.
Kaylor hauled on the reins.
The pegasus climbed.
For an instant they were both beneath the shadow of water.
Then it struck.
Kaylor escaped the center.
The pegasus did not.
The edge of the flood caught one wing.
The celestial creature spun.
Water crashed over it.
Kaylor felt the body beneath him go limp.
Then vanish.
Celestial light dissolved beneath his legs.
For one ridiculous instant Kaylor remained suspended forty feet above the fortress.
Fendor saw him from across the battlefield.
“Kaylor?”
Gravity answered first.
The dragonborn fell.
He hit hard enough to crack stone beneath one knee.
The Hammer of Thunderbolts struck beside him.
Kaylor remained there for a heartbeat.
Then stood.
Fendor called across the fortress.
“Graceful.”
Kaylor looked upward.
“I landed.”
“That is technically true.”
Behind Kaylor, the tidal surge hit the tower.
Stone failed.
Massive sections of the outer structure tore away.
For the first time the hidden core beneath it became clearly visible.
Nethnarel saw it.
Hexen saw it from above.
Kaylor turned.
The tower they had been defending was shedding its shell.
Beneath the later stonework glowed something much older.
Smooth surfaces.
Impossible seams.
Architecture unlike the masonry around it.
The same ancient design they had found in Oslan.
The fortress had not been built as a tower.
It had been built around one.
Something ancient stood inside the mountain-top keep, wrapped in generations of stone and fear.
And the attackers were tearing the wrapping away.
Kaylor tightened his grip on the hammer.
“That cannot happen.”
The living wave answered by attacking him again.
The sky filled with dragons.
The white one remained locked with Hexen.
The red remained on Fendor.
Then a third came screaming down toward Kaylor.
Blue.
Its wings cut through the steam above the fortress.
Lightning gathered along its jaws.
Kaylor saw the flash before he heard the roar.
The bolt struck.
Blue-white energy crossed the courtyard and hit him squarely.
Kaylor staggered.
The power should have stopped his heart.
Instead resistance built into years of impossible blessings, divine changes and accumulated power absorbed enough that he remained upright.
He looked at the dragon.
The dragon landed.
Of course it landed.
Kaylor glanced toward the hammer.
Then at the wounds across his armor.
He did something he had once been much worse at doing.
He healed himself.
Deep reserves of restored life rushed through him.
His hand moved across the worst wounds, pouring more divine power into damaged flesh.
The blue dragon watched.
Kaylor finished.
“Now.”
The dragon lunged.
Kaylor met it.
Fendor’s battle had become personal.
The red dragon attacked him in the air.
Flame passed close enough to turn the night orange around his carpet.
The Oathbow answered.
Arrow after arrow crossed the space between them.
One missed.
Several did not.
More importantly, Fendor reached into the old magic carried by the bow and released healing across the battlefield.
It was not enough to undo the night.
Enough mattered.
Kaylor felt some of his strength return.
Nethnarel steadied.
Even Hexen, somewhere above them in infernal form, received a small portion of the bow’s restorative power.
The red dragon came again.
Fendor put the bow away.
The Vorpal Longsword came free.
“Fine.”
The carpet climbed.
Dragon and elf met above the fortress.
Fendor had fought things larger than himself for most of his life.
Eventually size stopped being impressive.
It became geography.
The sword opened the red dragon’s flank.
Fendor banked the carpet.
Came around.
Cut again.
The dragon snapped at him.
Fendor moved beneath its jaws and carved another line through red scale.
Fire illuminated them both.
Far below, Gildan’s surviving soldiers stopped attempting to understand what they were seeing.
A white dragon fighting a pit fiend.
A red dragon sword-fighting an elf on a carpet.
A blue dragon engaged with a dragonborn wielding a giant’s hammer.
And the night was still producing new problems.
One soldier looked toward the central tower.
Perhaps, for the first time in two weeks, he decided the heroes might actually be as unreasonable as the stories claimed.
Hexen did not fear the white dragon’s cold.
That was one of the advantages of becoming something forged by Hell.
The dragon discovered this repeatedly.
Claws tore across the Pit Fiend’s body.
Its teeth closed.
Its breath washed over him.
Hexen stayed in the air.
Then attacked.
Claw.
Claw.
Bite.
Tail.
The fight became too close for spells.
They rolled above the tower in a knot of white wings and red-black flesh.
The dragon bit.
Hexen struck.
The dragon slashed across him.
Hexen’s tail hit hard enough to turn the dragon in the air.
For several moments neither creature seemed capable of giving ground.
Then Hexen caught it.
The Pit Fiend’s claws opened the dragon’s side.
His jaws found the throat.
The tail struck again.
The white dragon lost the rhythm of its wings.
It fell.
The body struck the mountain below the fortress with enough force to send a dull tremor through the walls.
Hexen hovered above it.
He looked down.
“One.”
Fendor, still fighting the red dragon, heard him.
“You’re counting?”
“Yes.”
“That seems unhealthy.”
The green dragon found Nethnarel.
She had just finished looking for another angle on the living wave when a shadow crossed her from above.
Wings.
Green scales.
The dragon opened its jaws.
A cloud rolled over her.
Nethnarel recognized poison a heartbeat before it reached her.
She did not move.
The vapor swallowed her.
Then passed.
Nothing.
Heroes’ Feast.
Again.
Nethnarel emerged from the cloud looking irritated rather than dead.
The green dragon looked confused.
“I had breakfast.”
The dragon attacked.
Claws caught her.
Jaws snapped near one wing.
Nethnarel broke away and climbed.
The green followed.
Below them, Fendor loosed another pulse of healing from the Oathbow before returning to his own fight.
Nethnarel gathered fire.
Not one spell.
Several fragments.
Small meteors formed around her in burning orbit.
The first struck the green dragon.
Then another.
Then two more.
The creature recoiled beneath repeated impacts.
It came after her anyway.
Nethnarel smiled.
“Good.”
There were few things more dangerous than giving Nethnarel a target that refused to leave.
The red dragon fell next.
Fendor did not know which of his cuts finally made the difference.
That was unusual.
Most enemies told him.
A moment.
A stumble.
A sudden opening.
A head separating from a neck.
The red dragon had accumulated too much damage from too many directions across too much battle.
Fendor’s blade opened it again.
The dragon lost altitude.
One wing failed.
Then the enormous red body dropped toward the fortress and disappeared below the wall.
Fendor hovered.
He was bleeding.
Burned.
Exhausted.
His white hair had partially escaped whatever arrangement it began the night in.
He looked toward Hexen.
“Two.”
Hexen stared.
“You’re counting now?”
“No.”
“You said two.”
“I was confirming yours.”
“Counting.”
Fendor turned the carpet toward the next dragon.
“Shut up.”
The blue dragon had decided Kaylor was difficult to kill.
Kaylor considered this one of his better qualities.
Lightning tore across the courtyard.
Kaylor moved through it.
The Hammer of Thunderbolts struck the dragon.
The creature answered with claws.
The shifting magic of Kaylor’s cloak turned several attacks into near misses, the dragon striking where the paladin had appeared to stand rather than where he actually was.
The next bite connected.
Kaylor remained.
The blue dragon tried to force him backward.
Kaylor did not move.
Strength against strength.
Dragon against dragonborn.
Kaylor smiled.
The Hammer of Thunderbolts had changed several assumptions about these contests.
The dragon pushed.
Kaylor pushed back.
Neither won immediately.
Then Kaylor hit it.
That ended the argument.
The black dragon arrived last.
Hexen heard the wings.
He turned.
Dark scales passed through smoke and steam above the fortress.
Five.
White.
Red.
Blue.
Green.
Black.
Whatever had decided to break Mahi Esri had not bothered with subtlety anymore.
The black dragon descended directly toward Hexen.
Acid gathered in its jaws.
Hexen had enough time to understand what was coming.
Not enough time to avoid all of it.
The breath struck.
Acid washed over the Pit Fiend.
Infernal flesh burned.
Hexen stayed airborne.
Barely.
The magic holding his transformation strained.
The dragon came again.
A second torrent of acid crossed the sky.
This one was worse.
Hexen felt the shape fail.
The Pit Fiend disappeared.
The great red-black devil became Hexen Brew in open air.
For one terrifying instant, the druid began falling.
Then his own magic answered.
Hexen caught himself.
Fendor saw the change.
“Problem?”
Hexen looked at the black dragon.
“Temporary.”
The black dragon turned.
Fendor raised the Oathbow.
Two arrows struck.
Hexen’s summoned Barbed Devils rose toward it, wings carrying them through the broken air around the tower. Claws and tails struck black scales.
Kaylor looked up from the blue dragon.
Nethnarel looked across from the green.
For one moment every surviving hero had a dragon.
The battlefield became absurdly symmetrical.
Fendor began laughing.
Not because anything was funny.
Because there was simply no other reasonable response.
Kaylor heard him.
“What?”
“A dragon for each of us.”
“That isn’t true.”
“There are four of us.”
“There are three dragons left.”
Fendor looked around.
“Then we’re winning.”
The blue dragon attacked Kaylor.
The green attacked Nethnarel.
The black came for Hexen.
Fendor fired at whichever presented the clearest line.
The living wave still battered the tower below them.
The shadow continued pressing over the land.
Broken stone fell.
Steam filled the courtyard.
Gildan’s defenders had become almost irrelevant to the scale of what was happening above them.
The heroes did not stop.
They had stopped for death before.
Death had failed to keep them.
Dragons were going to need a better argument.
The surviving transcript broke before the battle did.
The night did not.
What remained could only be preserved from what the next surviving record remembered.
The dragons fell.
Not together.
Not cleanly.
The direct surviving battle had already taken the white and red from the sky. The blue, green and black remained locked with the heroes when the recovered recording deteriorated into useless repetition.
By the time anyone next told the story, all five were dead.
The exact final blows were lost.
The choices that mattered were not.
Kaylor stood his ground beneath the blue.
Nethnarel remained in the air with the green.
Hexen survived the black dragon tearing away his infernal shape.
Fendor moved between battles, loosing arrows and healing his friends whenever he could spare the magic.
They fought until the fortress stopped producing enemies.
Until the living wave no longer struck the tower.
Until the dragons no longer crossed the sky.
Until the shadow began to lift.
Dawn arrived quietly.
That felt wrong after everything else.
There should have been trumpets.
Light splitting the heavens.
Some divine voice declaring that the heroes had again accomplished something everyone else had failed to accomplish.
Instead the clouds simply became gray rather than black.
Then pale.
Then morning.
The surviving soldiers of Gildan emerged from shelter and defensive positions.
Some stood.
Some sat where they had fought.
Others looked at the bodies spread across the summit and seemed unsure whether they were allowed to believe the night had ended.
Kaylor looked toward the sky.
No dragons.
The shadow was withdrawing.
For the first time since Marcus had walked into the Manticore’s Tail, the darkness over the land seemed to be lessening rather than spreading.
Fendor landed the carpet.
His knees nearly failed him when he stepped off.
He pretended they had not.
Nethnarel descended more carefully.
Hexen returned to his own shape.
The four heroes stood together in the ruined courtyard.
Nobody spoke for a while.
They had begun this trail with three missing farmers.
Since then they had fought through a landscape that changed beneath the passage of a dragon.
They had found monsters from nowhere.
A Hellmouth.
A fortress under siege.
Five dragons.
And now the shadow was lifting.
Fendor looked toward Kaylor.
“So.”
Kaylor knew what was coming.
“Don’t.”
“Five dragons.”
“Yes.”
“Four heroes.”
“Yes.”
Fendor considered.
“We are very good at this.”
Nethnarel sat on a broken piece of wall.
“We are terrible at avoiding it.”
“That too.”
Hexen looked toward the tower.
The outer shell was badly damaged now.
Whole sections had been torn free.
Beneath them stood the ancient core.
The true structure.
Oslan stone caught the morning light.
Not ruined.
Exposed.
The armies of the shadow had spent nights trying to reach it.
The heroes had kept them out.
Now there was nothing left outside to fight.
Kaylor looked toward the doorway.
Or what had become a doorway.
A portion of the ancient tower was accessible now.
After all the effort spent preventing monsters from getting inside, the heroes had reached the inevitable next step.
Fendor followed his gaze.
“No.”
Nethnarel stood immediately.
“Yes.”
“We spent the entire night keeping things from entering that tower.”
“Yes.”
“And your conclusion is that we should enter the tower.”
“Yes.”
Fendor looked at Hexen.
Hexen shrugged.
“It does seem to be how these things work.”
Kaylor stared at the ancient structure.
The shadow had lifted.
The dragons were dead.
The siege was over.
That should have been the end.
It was not.
Something inside Mahi Esri had been important enough for an impossible army to spend night after night trying to reach it.
Something old.
Something tied to Oslan.
Something Gildan had protected for thousands of years without knowing why.
Kaylor picked up the Hammer of Thunderbolts.
“Rest first.”
Fendor nodded.
“Best thing you’ve said all night.”
Nethnarel looked disappointed.
“You can wait an hour.”
“I can.”
Nobody believed her.
Behind them, dawn continued spreading across the mountains.
Ahead stood the Ageless Tower.
And for the first time in thousands of years, the Heroes of the New Beginning were going inside.