The battlefield moved again and sounds were the first that came to life, boars screaming, elk shrieking, men shouting through smoke.
The boy stood on the dead blue dragon’s neck with the Beastmaster’s Spear sunk to the haft, his boots planted on cold scales that were already losing their heat. Smoke slid over the corpse in slow ribbons. Ash and dirt clung to the edges of the plates like soot on a stove lid.
Across the torn prairie, the green dragon’s rider lifted his cleaver and roared, the sound ripping through the chaos. The greenskin was still up there.
So was the green dragon.
It had turned when the blue one went limp. Its head swung wide, broad jaw working, saliva and acid stink spilling into the air. One eye tracked the knot of fighting. The other locked on the bo.
The boy’s fingers slid down the spear shaft and yanked it free.
The weapon tore free with a wet, grinding sound.
The green dragon’s wings snapped open once, bracing. The rider leaned forward, cleaver raised as if he meant to point the blade at the boy and cut the whole world along that line.
The boy’s rifle strap dug into his shoulder as he reached back and pulled it around.
Bandages tugged under his coat. His ribs lit with a sharp complaint. He ignored it and dropped to one knee on the dragon’s neck ridge, using bone and scale as a rest. The rifle came up. His cheek pressed to the stock. Smoke stung his eyes. He blinked it away until the sight picture settled.
The green dragon’s left eye was a pale coin in a swamp-colored face—wide and lidless, rimmed with thicker scale. It moved, tracking. It blinked once, a slow membrane slide like a lizard’s. It didn’t hide behind anything. It didn’t flinch from bullets.
It hadn’t learned yet, but it will soon.
The boy drew a breath in, held it, and let the rest of the world narrow to that circle. Time, for a moment, seemed to stand still.
And then, he squeezed.
The rifle cracked.
The recoil punched his shoulder and jarred his bandages hard enough to make his teeth grind. Smoke burst from the muzzle and tore sideways in the wind.
The bullet flew.
For half a heartbeat it looked like nothing happened—then the green dragon’s left eye ruptured like a rotten fruit smashed under a rock. Dark fluid and a string of pale tissue sprayed out and vanished into smoke.
The dragon screamed, a grinding, tearing shriek, like iron dragged across rock. It convulsed, head snapping back, wings flaring wide as if to lift—
And then one wing caught wrong in churned ground and broken bodies.
The whole massive thing tipped.
It crashed into the prairie with an impact that shook the earth under the boy’s boots, tossing dust in a ring. Grass flattened. Rock teeth snapped. A boar rider vanished under the falling bulk with a wet crunch that didn’t carry far enough to matter.
The greenskin rider pitched forward, cleaver arm flailing. For a blink he hung there—huge, armored, screaming—and then he slid off the dragon’s neck and hit the ground like a dropped anvil.
He didn’t pop back up.
The dragon thrashed, blinded on one side, claws digging trenches, tail whipping and scattering elk and boars alike. Acid breath hissed out in wild spurts that smoked where it hit.
Still alive.
Still dangerous.
The boy worked the rifle without looking, fingers moving out of habit. He didn’t fire again.
He didn’t need to. Not like this.
The land had too many enemies in too many directions. His allies were out there—horses and lances and rifles—mixed in with elk and boars and leaf-shields and scrap armor. The smoke made everything close and far at once.
The boy’s mouth went dry.
He lifted his head, eyes scanning through the haze.
On the far edge of the chaos the winged lion wheeled, its broad shadow cutting across the ground. The silver rider sat straight-backed on its shoulders, helm catching light. Even from this distance, the boy could see the way that head turned—how the rider’s attention kept pulling back toward him, like a hook set in the mind.
Bring me the Hollow.
“Here I am.” The boy reached inward.
[Bestiary].
Six lines now.
Five familiar.
One new, burning bright as a star.
[Blue Dragon].
The boy grabbed it.
And yanked.
A shape slammed into existence midair with the sound of thunder and blasting winds.
Massive wings unfolded.
The [Blue Dragon] came out in a rush of cold radiance, scales catching the light in hard flashes, a crown of horns swept back along a long angular skull. Its body was massive—big enough that it stole space from the sky—and it rose on one heavy wingbeat that shoved smoke away in a rolling wave.
The dragon climbed once and cleared the smoke like an arrow punching through cloth.
Below it, its own corpse lay in the grass—slumped, torn, already cooling—an enormous blue carcass the living version passed over without hesitation, like stepping over a dead animal in the road.
Every head on the battlefield turned.
Boars slowed.
Elk stumbled.
Leaf-shields tilted up.
Greenskins froze mid-swing, mouths open, tusks bared.
Even the green dragon’s thrashing faltered for a beat, one ruined eye rolling up toward the new shadow overhead.
The boy stood on the dead dragon and lifted the spear like a pointer.
“Burn them,” he rasped.
His voice was small under that sky.
The tether in his chest pulled tight anyway, answering.
The [Blue Dragon] banked. Its wings angled. Its head dipped. Its throat swelled once as something gathered behind its teeth.
Skill activated: [Dust of Azure Inferno]
The dragon opened its mouth.
What poured out came as a flood of shimmering blue particulate—dust so bright it looked like ground starlight, packed into a roaring breath. It hit the air and spread, like a storm, carrying heat so intense it made the world warp around it.
The first line of elves vanished.
Leaf-shields liquefied.
Grown wood sagged, then flashed into blackened shapes and broke into glittering fragments. Mail ran like wax. Helms went soft and collapsed. Gold blood burst into steam.
Greenskins in scrap armor had time to scream once—raw and furious—and then the scream cut off as their skin blistered, split, and burned away in the same breath. Boars became falling shapes wrapped in blue-white flame. Elk dropped mid-stride, legs folding, fur igniting without smoke.
The breath went into the ground.
Prairie dirt glowed. Grass became a sheet of light. Stone teeth along the ravine edge softened and slumped, their sharp angles rounding like melted candles.
The boy’s eyes watered from heat he wasn’t even under.
The blue dust breath kept rolling outward, a widening front, swallowing the battlefield from center to edge.
It reached the green dragon.
The beast tried to lift, wings beating once in panic. It got half its chest off the ground before the dust hit it full.
Blue flame wrapped its scales.
The remaining eye bulged.
Its jaws opened in a silent bellow as the air around it turned into an oven.
Its wings sagged and curled. The edges of the membranes crisped. Its throat spasmed and a spurt of acid hissed out, turning to vapor before it hit anything.
It slammed back down, thrashing, and then the thrashing stopped.
A long, heavy tail jerk.
Then stillness.
Where the breath passed, the land changed color.
The blue glare faded into a hard, glossy black.
Glassed earth.
A sheet of fused ground cracked in thin spiderweb lines as it cooled. Blue light pulsed under some fractures, trapped heat bleeding through like a dying coal. The breath finally hit the outer edge where bodies had thinned and the fighting had spread.
Peta’s riders were there—Comanche, Kiowa, Lipan, Cheyenne—horses rearing as the heat wave slammed them. Lances dipped. Rifles lowered.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Peta’s voice cut through, sharp as a whip.
“Back!”
The cavalry broke away in a lurching wave, dragging the wounded and pulling their mounts sideways toward rock cover. Hooves skittered on dirt that was suddenly too hot, too slick.
The blue dust front stopped just short of them, as if the dragon had chosen a line and honored it.
Or as if the tether in the boy’s chest had yanked the head back at the last possible breath.
The [Blue Dragon] flew through the end of its own breath like a comet.
Blue particulate clung to its scales and burned away in bright sparks as it beat its wings.
Then the boy saw it.
The dragon’s flight wasn’t steady anymore. Its wings started to sag between beats. The edges of its scales dimmed from hard blue to dull slate. The light in the seams between plates thinned like embers running out of fuel. The tether in the boy’s chest went tight—then hotter—like a rope drawn across skin and pulled until it burned.
The dragon gave one final exhale, the last of the blue dust spilling out in a shimmering sheet.
The battlefield below had become a grave of glass.
And then the [Blue Dragon] faltered.
Its wings missed a beat. Its body dropped a yard, caught itself, then dropped again. It tried to climb. It couldn’t. It began to fall.
The dragon hit the air like a dying star, spiraling down, and then—
It broke apart. Its scales turned to glittering blue particulate, peeling away in a rush like sand stripped off a dune in the wind. Wings shredded into shining dust. Horns crumbled. The long head became a spray of luminous particles that scattered across the sky.
Blue dust rained over the glassed plain and spun into the wind.
For a heartbeat, the world looked like it was snowing sapphire.
Then the light faded.
The dust turned dull.
And the last of the [Blue Dragon] vanished into the air like it had never been alive.
The System spoke again.
Summoned beast spent!
[Blue Dragon] returned to [Bestiary].
Recovery time: 72 hours.
Seventy-two.
Three days.
The boy stared at the words.
Then the other thing that he’d been ignoring hit him.
The souls.
All the souls of all the dead all around him.
It started as a tug.
A cold pull behind the sternum.
Then it became a storm.
Gold ribbons tore loose from the glassed plain—dozens, then hundreds—thin streaks snapping toward him like strings pulled tight. Darker strands followed from where greenskins had burned, heavier and dirtier, like smoke with weight. They didn’t drift.
They lunged.
[The Hollow] opened.
It yawned inside him like a trapdoor kicked loose.
The pull became a suction that stole the air from his lungs in one sharp gulp. His knees unlocked. His hands spasmed on the spear shaft.
The System flooded him with notifications.
Soul Consumed!
+2 Strength
+2 Dexterity
+2 Vitality
+2 Magic
Soul Consumed!
+2 Strength
+2 Dexterity
+2 Vitality
+2 Magic
Soul Consumed!
+2 Strength
+2 Dexterity
+2 Vitality
+2 Magic
The words stacked, hundreds of them over each other, until they blurred. They became noise—cold numbers hammered into his skull in rapid succession.
His vision tunneled. His heart kicked hard enough to bruise.
More messages hit.
Level up!
Level 13 achieved.
All attributes +1
Free points awarded: 4
Level up!
Level 14 achieved.
All attributes +1
Free points awarded: 4
He couldn’t read any more.
He shoved the points where he always shoved them—into the one thing that kept him breathing when the world tried to stop him.
Vitality. Vitality. Vitality. Vitality.
Then again.
The flood didn’t slow.
The Hollow kept drinking.
The shadow-man’s voice—calm in an ash wasteland—slid across his memory.
Pieces.
The boy’s jaw clenched so hard it ached.
He couldn’t afford losing any more.
Not now.
Not with Lily waiting somewhere.
The last wave of mist hit him in one heavy rush and then—
Silence.
The System’s voice cut out as if someone had slammed a door on it.
The boy stood there on a dead dragon’s neck, spear planted like a staff, chest heaving, eyes wide.
Heat shimmered off the glassed plain below.
The battlefield—what was left of it—had become a black mirror broken by cracks and half-melted rock teeth. Here and there, a leaf-shield lay fused into the surface like a pressed fossil. Boar tusks stuck out of the glass at odd angles. Antlers had melted and bent, frozen mid-curve.
There were no greenskins moving.
No elk standing.
No boars running.
No organized elven line.
There was only smoke, heat, and the stink of burned flesh riding the wind.
On the far edge of the glass—where the blue dust had thinned—figures still moved.
Elves.
A handful of them.
Some on foot, some dragging wounded, some stumbling beside elk that had survived by being far enough away.
They were running.
The boy watched them for half a heartbeat.
Then his legs decided the work was done.
The strength he’d stolen held him upright for one more step, one more breath.
Then the world tilted.
His boots slid on the dead dragon’s cooling scales. He tried to brace with the spear, but his hands didn’t close right. The shaft slipped through his fingers like wet wood.
He went down.
Hard.
He hit the edge of the glassed ground with his shoulder and ribs, the impact ringing through his bones. Heat pressed up through his coat. The smell of hot stone filled his nose.
He rolled onto his side, breath rasping in and out, and stared at the sky without seeing much of it.
Hooves thundered.
Shouts tore through the air.
Peta’s riders broke past him in a wave, staying on dirt and grass where they could, skirting the worst of the glass. Lances leveled. Rifles cracked in short, controlled bursts.
The retreating elves tried to scatter.
Horses ran them down anyway.
One elk rider caught a Comanche lance through the ribs and went off the saddle with gold spraying in a bright arc. Another tried to loose an arrow backward and took a Kiowa shaft through the throat before the string fully drew.
Some elves threw down shields and ran on foot.
They lasted three breaths.
Three elves didn’t die with the rest.
They went down hard under lassoed ropes.
A Cheyenne rider looped a lariat clean around an elf’s neck and dragged him off his feet like pulling a sack. Another elf was knocked off an elk by a thrown club and hit the dirt hard enough to stop moving for a moment. Hands were on him immediately—knees on his spine, rope around wrists, a gag shoved into his mouth.
The third fought even after he was down, twisting like a snake, gold blood slicking his armor seams.
Peta himself rode in and kicked his horse sideways, boxing the elf in.
His lance butt came down like a hammer.
Once.
Twice.
The elf stopped moving.
Rope tightened around him.
Three.
Alive.
The boy’s eyelids fluttered.
His body wanted to keep falling away from itself.
Hands grabbed his shoulders—human hands, callused, real.
Someone slapped his cheek lightly, not cruel, just trying to make his eyes focus.
Rojas’ voice pushed through the haze, rough and hoarse.
“Kid—hey. Hey. You stay with me.”
The boy’s mouth moved.
Dust and heat had glued his tongue to the roof of his mouth.
A sound came out anyway, dry and cracked. “’M… here.”
Rojas let out a breath that sounded like it had been held for a year.
“You’re a goddamn catastrophe,” he said.
The boy’s eyes shifted toward the glassed plain. The air above it shimmered. The ground still looked wrong and it’d probably stay that way for a long time.
The boy’s eyelids sank.
He didn’t hear the next shouts clearly.
He did hear the hooves fading as the last of the elves were run down.
He did hear the cheering after—ragged and exhausted, but real.
He did hear, dimly, someone say in English, “Fort. We go to the fort.”
Then the world slid sideways and went soft.
He came back in pieces.
A horse’s gait.
Rocking under him.
Smoke in hair.
Sweat.
Blood that had dried and crusted.
Hot glass fading behind them into the cold wind.
Rojas arguing with someone in Spanish, voice low.
A Comanche voice answering, sharp and clipped.
A child crying somewhere close, too tired to be loud about it.
The boy opened his eyes and found the sky.
Late afternoon sun sat low enough to make everything long-shadowed.
He was slung over a saddle in front of someone—his stomach pressed to leather, his arms hanging down on either side. Every jolt tugged his ribs and reminded him that he still had bones.
He turned his head enough to see Peta riding alongside.
The Comanche’s face was smeared with soot and sweat. His eyes stayed hard, scanning the horizon like he expected new monsters to come boiling out of the grass.
Two riders behind Peta dragged something between them.
An elf prisoner.
Bound at wrists and ankles, mouth gagged, armor scraped and blackened, gold dried along one cheek like paint. The elf’s eyes were open. Too bright. Too hateful.
They watched the boy like he was the sun they wanted to spit at.
The boy held the gaze as long as his neck allowed.
Then he let his head drop again.
Fort Mason rose out of the scrub like a block of hard truth.
Stone walls.
Smoke curled from inside the fort—cook fires, forge, the normal kind.
The gate stood open, and men in blue moved on the wall walk with rifles in hand, faces turned outward.
They saw the riders crest the last rise.
They saw the blood.
They saw the bound elves.
They saw the gold-stained armor and the weird eyes.
They stiffened like dogs scenting a stranger.
A shout went up from the gate.
Then another.
The fort swallowed the returning column in a rush of hooves, dust, and exhausted men.
The boy’s mind cleared just enough to register the stares.
Soldiers paused mid-step.
Women came out of doorways with hands to mouths.
A doctor in a stained apron jogged toward the wounded with a roll of cloth in one hand.
And then—
A small figure tore across the yard like she’d been shot out of a cannon.
Lily.
Her hair had come loose from its braids, flyaways catching sunlight. Her dress was dust-stained at the hem. Bandages still wrapped her hands, but she didn’t care about them right now. Her eyes roamed the coming tide of warriors, scanning each one until she found him. And then she bolted, running so fast she left a trail of dust behind her.
She hit the boy full-body.
Arms around his ribs, careful for half a heartbeat and then not careful at all, face mashed into his chest like she was trying to make sure he was solid.
The boy grunted as pain flashed under his bandages.
He lifted one arm anyway and wrapped it around her shoulders.
Lily’s voice came out muffled against his coat.
“You’re alive,” she said.
The boy’s mouth twitched.
“Yeah,” he rasped. “Seems like.”
Lily pulled back enough to look up at him. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Soot streaked one cheek. She stared at his face. Then her nose wrinkled.
Her mouth twisted in disgust so familiar it almost made the boy laugh.
“You smell bad,” she said.
The boy blinked once.
Then he let out a breath that was somewhere between a cough and a laugh.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
