The dragon stood in front of the rubble of the collapsed entrance, its wings half-folded. Moonlight caught on all its horrible features: putrid flesh and bone visible along the spine, rot threading through scale.

  Alexander sat astride the creature, confidence emanating from him as he looked down on lesser beings from above. His armor carried the same corruption, black seeping through the joints and etching itself along the plate in branching lines, but he was not hollow the way the soldiers had been. He was still entirely, deliberately present.

  His eyes were completely black, no iris, no white, just depth, like two holes cut through to somewhere lightless and cold. Yet the intelligence behind them remained sharp.

  He looked down at Selene and Oswald with something close to amusement.

  "What a friend that one turned out to be," he said. "She used you both rather well. As bait."

  A small smile appeared beneath those black eyes.

  "The smoke arrow was a clever touch. And using the two of you to distract Darksmoke and me?" He tilted his head slightly. "I imagine she will go far in this Ascension."

  Selene said nothing.

  She was aware of Oswald's fingers knotted in the back of her cloak, the small, trembling pressure of him against her spine. Nihil hung at her side, its fire opal dim. Before them lay open ground, nothing between them and the dragon.

  Within her, a small whisper formed, low and patient, threading itself between his words like smoke finding a gap under a door.

  This is what you get for trusting them.

  Selene's face tightened.

  Alexander's black gaze moved over her with mild curiosity. It settled on her black hair, her face.

  "Mm." He leaned forward slightly. "Are you the one I was instructed to kill? Your face…" A pause. "Yes. You are Selene, are you not?"

  His eyes moved across her again, cataloguing the differences.

  "You saved me the trouble of finding you. It seems I was not the only one who changed."

  He glanced at the black fall of her hair.

  "What happened to you?"

  He did not wait for an answer. His expression returned to something pleasant and entirely without warmth.

  "No matter," he said. "It will burn just like the rest."

  He said to the dragon simply, "Darksmoke, burn them."

  In Darksmoke, a deep light began to gather beneath the corrupted scales, building from some furnace in the dragon's core. It pushed outward through the chest cavity in slow, rhythmic pulses that grew brighter with each beat, orange deepening to white. The scales themselves began to separate under the pressure of what was building behind them.

  Oswald pressed himself closer against her back. His voice came out weak and thin.

  "What are we doing. What are we—"

  The dragon's chest split open with light.

  Selene dropped Nihil.

  She did not think about it. She moved both hands forward, palms open, fingers spread, and reached for the fire the way the Nightflares had taught her.

  The flame erupted from the dragon's throat in a column so wide it swallowed the space between her and the dragon entirely.

  And Selene caught it.

  Not with her hands. She felt it the moment the heat reached her, felt its weight and momentum and direction, felt the roaring, living chaos of it pressing against an invisible force that commanded the flame.

  She wrenched her hands to the right.

  The column of fire tore sideways. It struck the rock face in a cascading wave that melted the stone and sent a rolling wall of heat slamming outward in every direction.

  Selene staggered. Her arms burned with the effort, not from the heat but from the force, like trying to redirect a river with bare hands.

  Silence followed.

  Alexander looked at her.

  "My," he said quietly. "What an unorthodox ability."

  He straightened slightly in his seat, the amusement still there, but his attention sharper now.

  "Probably awakened through the injection. The noble blood reacting to your own, perhaps." A pause. "It seems Sebastian was not wrong after all. You do appear to be something… particular."

  He settled back.

  "Darksmoke. Kill."

  The dragon fired immediately.

  Boom—boom—boom!

  Three fireballs shot in fast succession, each one a tight, concentrated burst rather than a flood.

  Selene caught the first and tore it left. The second she drove into the ground to her right. The explosion hit the earth like a fist, and the shockwave surged up through her boots and rattled through her body.

  The third she barely caught, the redirection sloppy, the fire spraying wide instead of clean, and the secondary explosion knocked her sideways a full step.

  The ringing in her ears had not finished when the dragon moved.

  The wings came down once in an enormous, cracking stroke, churning the air into something physical, a wall of pressure that rushed ahead of the creature itself.

  Selene felt it coming. The ground trembled beneath her boots. Behind her, Oswald’s fingers were still knotted in the fabric of her cloak, his breath ragged against her spine.

  She reached back with one hand, grabbed him by the front of his uniform, and shoved him sideways with everything she had.

  "Move!"

  Oswald hit the ground hard, rolling across the dirt as the wall of displaced air caught him mid-tumble and sent him skidding further, away from the dragon's direct path. He came to a stop against a low ridge of stone, winded, bruised, but clear.

  Then the neck swung low and fast, and the dragon’s head slammed into Selene with its full weight.

  The impact struck her with full force.

  She was moving before she understood she was moving, lifted completely off the ground, the world rotating around her in long, weightless silence. She crashed into the trees. The first trunk caught her across the shoulder and spun her further. The second stopped her entirely. Bark. Impact. All the air was driven from her chest.

  She finally hit the ground.

  Nihil lay somewhere behind her in the dark, far away.

  For a moment there was nothing. Just the cold earth against her cheek and the distant sounds of the mountain.

  Then darkness took her completely.

  Light returned slowly, but not entirely.

  The black water stretched in every direction, glassy and still, reflecting a sky that held no stars. The obsidian throne rose from the surface ahead of her, jagged and slick, and the divine was already seated upon it, one leg draped over the armrest, silver hair falling in long, liquid lines.

  She extended her hand.

  "Let's try this again," she said. "Shall we?"

  Selene stood at the edge of the black water.

  “Choose,” the divine continued, her hand still outstretched. “Do you wish to be free? You cannot change the world. Not alone. With me at your side, everything changes.”

  Selene looked at the hand.

  She thought about Alice. The way she looked at them for the last time before collapsing the entrance. The way she had said goodbye. Something shifted inside Selene.

  She reached out and took the divine hand.

  The divine's fingers closed around hers. Something moved through Selene like a current, not violent, just present.

  "Two conditions," Selene said.

  The divine raised an eyebrow. Faint amusement.

  "You will save Oswald," Selene said. "And we will never kill humans."

  A silence.

  The divine looked at her for a long moment with those silver eyes.

  “Conditions.” She laughed softly. “You come to me on your knees and you still think you get to dictate terms.” She tilted her head, studying Selene with open curiosity. “Fascinating.”

  “Do you agree or not?”

  The divine’s smile did not waver. She leaned forward on the throne, her fingers still wrapped around Selene’s hand.

  “The boy lives. Fine. He is nothing to me.” A pause. “And humans… very well. I have no interest in ants unless they bite.” Her grip tightened, just slightly.

  “Agreed?” Selene said.

  “Agreed,” the divine replied.

  The word carried weight, settling into the black water like a stone.

  The black water surged upward all at once, consuming them both.

  Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  The first thing Oswald saw when he opened his eyes was the night sky.

  Red and vast, the blood moon hanging enormous above the mountain, and below it the dragon, massive and wrong, its corrupted bulk filling the space in front of him.

  He had thought for one second that it had been a dream. The dragon, Selene.

  He tried to track the path Selene flew, but his body would not obey. He was paralyzed with fear.

  The dragon lowered its head toward him with a slow, grinding movement of its corrupted neck. The orange light in its chest cavity began to gather again, the scales separating with the pressure building behind them.

  Oswald's face went pale.

  The sound came from somewhere below thought, below fear.

  He sang low and clear and heartbreakingly steady, pure and unwavering in the cold air beneath the blood moon.

  It carried.

  Above, on the dragon's back, Alexander went still.

  He listened for a moment. His black eyes moved to the boy standing alone in the open with his eyes shut and his hands at his sides, singing into the face of death.

  "What a pathetic way to go," Alexander said. He laughed, a short, genuine sound. "You're going to sing? That is remarkable. Truly." He shook his head. "Burn him."

  The dragon exhaled.

  The fire took Oswald completely. A column of it, sustained and total, driving down from above with full force. The sound it made was immense, a roar that consumed all other sound, that pressed against the rocks and the trees and the sky.

  And beneath it, for just a moment before the roaring took everything, echoes of the melody could still be heard in the distance, the mountain holding the sound as if the stone itself remembered it.

  Alexander breathed in slowly through his nose. His expression settled into something contented.

  "I do love that smell," he said. "Burning—"

  "I really hate fire."

  He was interrupted.

  The voice came from behind him. From the ground. Darksmoke turned.

  She stood there. Right there.

  The injuries were gone. Every one of them. She stood straight, black hair falling past her shoulders, her eyes holding an expression that was almost pleasant. Almost calm. The smile on her face was small.

  Alexander looked at her for a long moment.

  He went very still. “You… should be dead. Every bone in your body should be broken.”

  This was not the same person who had stood there moments before. He could not have said why. Something in her presence had changed, the space she occupied heavier… and her eyes. What had happened to her eyes? Luminous silver.

  “I also hate those filthy creatures… dragons,” Selene said. “Fire-spitting beasts. Degenerate things. They should have vanished long ago.”

  She extended her right hand.

  Sparks appeared along her forearm. Small at first, then rapid, crackling outward from the skin in sharp branching patterns that spread to her fingers and jumped between them in quick restless arcs.

  Nihil lifted off the ground.

  It crossed the distance in less than a second and slammed into her palm with a heavy sound. She closed her fingers around the hilt.

  The fire opal pulsed once, deep and slow, flooding the space around her in waves of crimson and gold.

  She smiled.

  Alexander drew a dagger and threw it at her without hesitation.

  It crossed the distance in a fraction of a second, the red crystal at the blade's center already fracturing outward in hairline cracks, and struck Selene dead in the chest.

  The detonation was immediate and violent, a concussive burst that punched outward in all directions, the kind of force that shattered rock. A crater opened in the ground around where she had been standing. Smoke rolled outward in a thick grey wave.

  Alexander watched it settle. He relaxed.

  That was odd. How had this person’s aura changed so much in just a few moments? And her eyes. Not that it mattered anymore.

  He started looking away—

  "Hey."

  The smoke was still clearing.

  "I'm still here."

  She was standing in the dissipating cloud with a hole in her chest, the edges of it already closing, already gone, like water filling a shape pressed into it. She looked up at him.

  Alexander went still, his eyes widening.

  “That was disrespectful. Who do you think you are to look down on me,” she said coldly, “with that hideous face of yours?”

  She moved.

  Nihil swept in a single, instantaneous arc, clean, total, and the dragon's head parted from its body like a hot knife through butter. No resistance. No drag. The blade passed through scale and bone as though none of it existed.

  Before, Nihil had moved like an anchor. Now it moved like an extension of her arm.

  The head struck the ground with a wet thump, dark blood flooding outward from the severed neck in a spreading tide. The body's muscles seized and spasmed, enormous corrupted limbs hammering the earth in violent convulsions before the full weight of the creature came crashing down all at once.

  Alexander leaped from its back as it fell.

  He landed in a low crouch on the open ground, absorbing the impact, already rising. He looked at Selene.

  “Better,” Selene said, smiling. “But far from enough.”

  Alexander did not respond with words.

  He moved fast, his hand already pulling a dagger from the harness across his chest. The first blade flew straight for her throat.

  Before it could reach her, his other hand moved, more daggers flashing into the air. He struck the first blade mid-flight, then struck it again, each impact altering its path. The dagger ricocheted through impossible angles, its direction changing again and again, no longer a straight attack but a storm of shifting intent.

  Steel rang against steel in sharp, consecutive notes.

  By the time the blade reached her, it no longer came from the front. It came from everywhere.

  The rest of the daggers followed, embedding themselves in the ground and rock around her in a loose circle, each placed with deliberate spacing.

  Then they detonated all at once.

  The explosions came from every direction at once, overlapping, the shockwaves crossing and reinforcing each other. There was nowhere within the circle untouched by the combined force of every blast.

  Smoke swallowed the space where Selene had been.

  As the smoke settled, Alexander allowed himself a single thought: I got you this time.

  His eyes widened completely.

  Selene stood at the center of it, unharmed, one hand raised, a dagger held between two fingers. She turned it slowly, examining the crystal embedded near the guard.

  "How curious," she said softly. "The vampires of this era cannot even channel their power correctly."

  Her gaze flicked to him.

  "You hide it in little crystals… tucked into steel… as if the blade could carry what your blood cannot."

  She tilted her head, the small smile never leaving her lips.

  "So this is what you've become," she murmured. "Creatures measured by their weapons… like this hideous sword."

  “You can have it back,” she said. “Your pathetic trinket.”

  Her hand flicked, and the dagger flashed toward him.

  Alexander drew another dagger instantly. Steel rang against steel as the second blade struck the first, altering its path. The dagger slammed into the rock behind him.

  The explosion detonated at his back. The shockwave surged forward, whipping his hair across his face.

  He did not look away. His gaze locked with Selene's.

  Then came the sound, wet, grinding, impossible, from the dragon's corpse.

  It was standing.

  Without its head.

  The neck ended in a ragged stump, dark fluid spilling in heavy streams, the exposed trachea gleaming pale in the moonlight. The body remained upright with the stubborn persistence of something that was not dead at all. Its wings trembled half-open. Its tail swept the earth once, slow and blind.

  "What a freak," Selene said. She sounded almost genuinely impressed. "Still alive without a head."

  "Kill her!" Alexander said.

  His voice had changed. The pleasantness was gone entirely. What remained was flat and direct.

  The dragon’s chest lit again from the exposed cut in its neck. No mouth to shape it now, just raw, pressurized flame building in the open tube.

  Lava-bright fire erupted upward from the neck in a column that split the sky.

  Selene was already moving.

  She jumped straight up.

  It was not a simple human leap. She cleared the column of fire by a hundred feet and kept rising, the mountain falling away beneath her, the blood moon looming vast and close above. At the apex she hung motionless for several seconds, Nihil gripped in one hand, its fire opal blazing with the reflection of the red moon.

  She looked down at the dragon’s body. “Let me show you how to actually use trinkets,” she said, her silver eyes glowing.

  She drove the sword downward with one hand and released it, sending it like a bolt of pure kinetic force. It struck the dragon’s body dead center, the full momentum of her descent behind it.

  The explosion was devastating. The dragon’s body came apart from the inside out, a concussive detonation that turned scale, bone, and corrupted flesh into a debris cloud that rose fifty feet and spread outward in a ring that shook the entire plateau. The earth beneath the impact fractured and split, cracks racing outward from the center, stone crumbling at the edges of each fissure.

  The shockwave struck Selene in midair, and she let it, savoring the force.

  Below, Alexander saw it coming.

  It did not matter.

  The shockwave hit him like a wall. It lifted him off the ground entirely and drove him backward into the rock face with a sound like a cannon shot. Stone fractured behind him on impact, cracks spidering outward from the point where his back struck. His chest plate split along two seams, dark fluid weeping from the cracks in slow threads. The pauldron on his left shoulder sheared off and struck the ground somewhere to his right.

  He slid down the rock face and hit the earth on one knee, his right arm bracing against his left where the armour had buckled inward against the bone. His breathing came in short, wet pulls. Dark fluid dripped from his chin.

  "Now… let's see what has become of our corrupted knight."

  Her luminous silver eyes brightened a fraction. She lifted one hand and swept the debris aside in a single, effortless motion. The air cleared in a long rolling wave, dust and shattered stone and corrupted fragments scattering outward into the dark.

  Nihil hung in the earth below, buried to its hilt, the fire opal pulsing.

  She descended.

  Alexander was still on one knee. His black eyes lifted, tracking her descent. His right hand moved to the harness across his chest. Two daggers remained.

  His fingers closed around the first hilt.

  Selene landed ten feet in front of him. The ground cracked beneath her boots from the impact alone.

  Their eyes met.

  Alexander's hand stopped. His fingers were still wrapped around the dagger, but the motion died there, as though the signal between his mind and his body had been severed. His arm would not pull. His legs would not push. His chest rose and fell in rapid, shallow breaths, but nothing else obeyed.

  The weight of what stood in front of him pressed down on every nerve and every instinct until his body understood, with an animal certainty his mind refused to accept, that movement meant death.

  His jaw clenched. A tremor ran through his sword arm. He forced it. Willed the dagger free—

  Selene closed the distance in a single step.

  Her boot connected with his right knee in a clean lateral strike before the dagger cleared the harness. The joint folded sideways with a wet crack, the armour splitting at the seam where the force transferred. In the same motion, without pause, without breaking stride, her other foot swept his left leg at the knee. The second joint gave with the same sound, both lower sections of armour separating entirely and skidding across the stone.

  Alexander fell hard. He screamed, a raw, breaking sound, as if the force of it were tearing his vocal cords apart.

  His cheek struck the cold stone. The dagger he had been reaching for slipped from his fingers and clattered away into the dark.

  He lay there for a moment, gasping. Then, with effort, he lifted his head and turned it until her face came into view.

  Selene looked down at him, her gaze cold and absolute.

  "Now," she said softly. "This is more like it."

  She grabbed him by the hair using her left hand, fingers knotting into the dark roots, and she lifted him from the ground with an unhurried ease. Alexander's face came level with hers, what remained of his legs trailing beneath him, the severed joints weeping dark fluid that dripped from the fractured armour in slow, heavy beads and struck the stone below.

  His expression was pure suffering.

  Selene regarded him with mild curiosity.

  "You smell terrible," she said. "And you are even uglier up close."

  She tilted her head, studying the corruption threading through his face, the black pits that had replaced his eyes, the dark substance seeping from the cracks in his armour.

  "What compelled you to obtain this fragile new body." A pause. Her lips curled faintly, amused. "You abandoned your true blood for this."

  Her silver gaze moved over him slowly.

  "You cannot even regenerate," she observed, watching a long thread of dark fluid fall from the ruin of his knee and spread across the stone beneath him. "So you were made a fool. And you did not even realise it."

  She laughed.

  It was soft, brief, genuinely entertained.

  "You are not worthy of becoming an apostle," she said, and her voice dropped, quieter now, almost tender. "Not even close. Death would be your gift. Be grateful I am generous enough to give it."

  She extended her right hand.

  Her fingers rested against his chest plate.

  "Do you know your kind's greatest weakness?" Selene asked, her gaze distant, reflective.

  Her hand sank through the armour, the metal parting like cloth. She pushed inward, reaching the centre of him.

  Alexander's mouth opened. Dark fluid spilled over his lips, pooling at the corners, running down his chin. His jaw worked, straining against the weight of it.

  "Stop," he managed. The word was wet, broken.

  His voice died. The fluid filled his mouth completely, swallowing whatever remained.

  Selene watched him try to speak.

  "You were saying?" she asked.

  Her hand closed.

  She pulled.

  Alexander made a sound that was inhuman, raw.

  The heart came free with a sound that felt final. Dark fluid flooded from the cavity, pouring over her arm and dripping from her elbow in heavy curtains. She held it between them at eye level, its corrupted surface pulsing with a rhythm already failing, dark matter threading through it in branching veins that beat once, twice.

  She squeezed. A wet, percussive crack sent the dark fluid spraying in every direction, spattering stone, rock face, and frost. The sound struck the mountain once, then vanished into silence.

  She released what remained of him.

  Alexander fell.

  Selene looked down at her hand. The dark residue recoiled from her skin, as if fleeing her touch. She flicked her fingers once, dismissing the remnants.

  "Boring," she murmured.

  Save him, an inner voice emerged within her. The true Selene.

  "How could I forget," she said, and a smile touched her lips. "The heat of his end still lingers."

  She turned, her gaze settling on the place where Oswald lay.

  The ground was black and scorched, the frost burned entirely away. There was nothing left to identify him. Nothing left at all.

  She looked at it for a brief moment.

  Her right arm extended, hand raised, fingers parted as she pointed toward the sky.

  Finally, she spoke.

  "Rise."

  Her voice was sovereign. Her silver eyes flared, blazing brighter.

  Blood began to seep from the scorched earth. It gathered, then flowed, entering his wounds, pouring into him, filling the hollow spaces within his ruined body. It surged and coiled, shaping him, restoring him, until he lay within it like a vessel filled to the brim.

  Selene closed her hand.

  The blood surrounding him burst outward.

  When the red mist cleared, Oswald lay whole.

  His skin was restored, smooth and unmarked, pure as that of a newborn.

  Then he opened his eyes.