The dragon shrieked again above him and began to dive. He did not look but he could hear it, that high-pitched whistling as it fell like the moon itself had been torn from the sky and thrown to earth, some cataclysm coming on furled wings. He ran and in the street were the bodies of the dead and he could not see their faces. The great oak doors of the church standing open and burned and still thin smoke rolling from inside.
As he went up the wide steps he looked one last time and the dragon had stretched out its wings, its jaws gaping, and then he was in the church. Sprinting still and running down the scorched aisle and the banners on the wall to one god or another burned and curled and blackened skeletons fused to the pews. They'd come here to pray and there were bodies piled at the front and a sea of wax that had been candles poured down the stone steps. The dead piled and their skin like burned parchment and their faces like wax themselves, melted and ruined, and for a moment he could imagine this room as the dragon crouched with open jaws in the doorway and filled the whole of this place with liquid fire. Pews and pulpit still burning and the embers glowing red and against the far wall the blackened outline of the priest where he'd stood with arms outstretched and been entirely consumed in the single last pumping of his heart.
He ran for the far end and the burned wooden doors and the stone rooms beyond. To put anything he could between him and this horror falling and ripping the world apart. Running with his sword before him and stretching for those ten slender stone steps at the end of the room. The pews filled with the dead rushing by on each side and the sound of some gasping screams, one of these wretched souls still alive in his melted and burned body and entangled with the rest, but he could not see which.
And then the dragon came through the ceiling.
The heavy beams splintered and there was a tearing sound as if the air itself were coming apart at some invisible seams. The stone shingles cascading down and shattering around him, exploding as they rained to the floor. Running through dust and shrapnel and everywhere the sound of the dragon screaming as it plummeted to the ground. The far wall ripping from its foundations and falling in with a shattering of stained glass and the thunder as the stone blocks buried the floor and the pews and the dead.
Brack dove forward and lost his sword and picked it up again. Scrambling up the last three steps and turning back to look.
The roof entirely torn off, the smoky light pouring in. The dragon drawing itself up and beginning to stand in the piled wreckage, looking unnatural and depraved, some malevolent being hellbent on the destruction of the world, all scales and wings and teeth, cast out by gods and men alike and now rising to tear both from their place in the world and establish its own rule over all there was.
It began to turn its head to look at him and he could see the jagged hole where the eye had been, nothing but a black scar and wet, viscous redness inside. A ruin of a face on what had been a beast once beautiful in its own fashion. Now the look of some mad king or an animal caged and driven with hunger and fury.
Brack leapt down the stairs, running for it as it drew itself back up. Legs burning with each step, crashing through the wreckage and smoke. Running toward it and also to the side, keeping that ruined eye in line with him as it searched desperately for its prey. Pushing its wings out but unable to turn as quickly as it needed with the remaining walls of the church around it. Even with one fallen, this space confining and limiting.
Only for a moment. The shortest of moments in which all of life was truly lived.
Brack came up under the rising wing with both hands on the hilt of the sword and he thought he could feel for a heartbeat the tall grass against his legs. As he lived his life a second time, this endless cycle. The dragon began to turn its head and did not see him but somehow it knew, perhaps also reliving that gashing death in the field of blood and gold. Drawing in its legs, tensing to leap back into the air, that space it owned and always had, to launch itself from the pull of the world. To defy gravity and the earth itself and this man who would strip away its life and once again tear out its heart.
As the wings beat down for that savage escape, Brack slammed hard into the beast's scaled side, running headlong in desperation, and drove the sword once again into the space between its wing and its body, pushing the blade in to the hilt as the black blood poured down over his arms.
And then it was gone, throwing itself into the air, ripping the sword from his hands and leaving him drenched and shaking in the ruin of the church.
He stepped through the rubble that was left of the wall, climbing those thrown and piled stones, and stood atop the heaviest of them to watch the dragon rampant in the air. Wheeling and rending that air as it screamed in fury, the very houses shaking with it. A sound so horrible it was as if it had never been meant to be heard by man, as if these beasts were supposed to have lived their time and died and then man his and never the two at once. And perhaps that the root of all the violence and killing between the two lines, as these creatures that were both meant to rule found each other battling tirelessly for the same world.
He could not see the sword but the dragon was pitched to one side. That wing not moving properly, not getting the full extension. It could fly but there was a burning torment in each beat of the wing, in every meter climbed. There embedded this blade like a thorn to a man, but white hot and ripping apart the beast's entrails.
Then it came around again, pain or not, torment or triumph. The black jaws hanging, those rows of teeth as fine as needles. The horns atop its head and twisted. The long tail curving behind it almost like some ghastly deformity, slack with the pain.
That eye deep-set and burning, never leaving him.
Brack looked to Kayhi as the dragon swung around behind the tower, meaning to pass it one last time on its way to kill him. So that she could feel that updraft as the wings beat, could smell this foul creature with a body like a rotting corpse. Could feel the heat from the furnace in its chest. Kayhi, small and lost in that shattered stone tower, standing straight as ever, her head now turning with it.
So that he in his shaking fury could see it all laid out before him.
He knew then that he would die and he knelt and took the knife out of his boot. Six inches of steel meant for cutting out a buck's heart and tearing off the hide. A tool and nothing more. A wooden handle with gold bands, the blade beaten silver. He spun it once in his hand to get the weight of it and drew himself up. No cover now with the church destroyed. One more stand and perhaps he could find some way to sink the knife in the creature's eye as it killed him.
He looked at her once more, this last child, as the dragon raged toward the tower.
Her footsteps were fast, choppy, calculated. Two steps with power as the dragon neared, and then she threw herself into the air. The beast still behind the tower, her body small and dark and falling with her hair whipping upward in the wind. A plunging wraith almost lost in that vast gray backdrop of smoke and stone and the dead city, hurdling toward the ground.
And then it was beneath her, never having seen her jump, blocked by the tower and its eye always on him. Brack could not feel his heart and it had stopped in his chest. Wanting to scream and run and bound somehow in unseen iron. Watching his daughter fall, arms and legs outstretched, her dark dress billowing in the air.
She landed on the dragon's neck. Above its shoulders, her feet and arms wrapping it as she struck, the impact hard and silent at this distance. A speck swallowed by the black beast, consumed by it. To anyone else invisible, but he could see the way she grasped it, strong and graceful, taking the blow to her chest that must have stripped the air from her lungs, not letting her momentum throw her aimlessly around that scaled neck but letting it carry her downward, one hand gripping a single horn on the dragon's head, the other reaching forward.