Brindle Dragon Omnibus 3

by Jada Fisher

  “So why did you bring us here?” Ain continued. “Just wanted to have a chat with your old pals?”

  “Not quite.” Yacrist stood, and she could tell that he was absolutely enjoying the drama of it all. Was that his own natural inclination, or the Blight’s, or was it a combination of the two of them feeding into each other? “You see, I brought you here to prove something to Eist. If it weren’t for her, all of you would be swept away. But I want to prove to her that I am merciful, and I only care about rescuing her world from the usurpers.”

  He turned to look at her, and to her great horror, he knelt beside her, pulling her good hand into his grip. “Eist, I know that you’re still struggling with shaking all the false truths you’ve been raised under, the slander against me, but I want to prove to you how much you mean to me.

  “Your friends here are the backbone of everything that could threaten us. If I was smart, I would make sure that none of them lived past this day. But I know that you love them, care for them. So, even though I know it’s foolish, even though I know that it’s risking my entire plan, I will let you choose one of them to live.”

  For a moment, Eist was just sitting there, existing above the moment rather than in it. After all, it just didn’t feel real. Like she was in some sort of weird nightmare that shouldn’t have been possible.

  “You…you what?” She blinked at him slowly, tearing her eyes away from her friends and looking up at Yacrist.

  “I have been fighting to save your planet for thousands of years, and any of these three could threaten that. And yet I’m willing to let one live. For you. And only for you.”

  It felt like ice spilled down her spine, biting through her skin and bone alike. “Y-you want me to choose which of my friends you’ll murder in front of me?”

  He huffed. “Why must you always say things so negatively?”

  “Because you want me to choose which of my friends you should kill!”

  “No, I’m giving you the gift of life! A gift that threatens our success. That is how much I love you!”

  Suddenly, she was on her feet, her teeth once more clicking just under his face. She wanted to hurt him. To tear and rend. “Don’t pretend this is some mercy! This is just another form of torture you’ve cooked up. A way to exert your power and try to rein me in. Well, I won’t play your insipid little games, Yacrist. I won’t choose. And you can take your mercy and shove it right up your—”

  He grabbed the collar about her neck and yanked her up on her very toes. “Do not test me, Eist,” he hissed, teeth clenched.

  “Then don’t test me,” Eist snapped right back before a bellow sounded from behind them.

  “Don’t touch her!”

  That was Athar, fighting to get to his feet and rush forward again. The guards set on him more quickly, but even their blows couldn’t make him sink to the ground. He roared, grabbing two of them and slamming them together, but Yacrist just sighed.

  “Kneel,” he said, reaching a hand out.

  The result was instant. One moment he was brawling, berserk like a wild animal, the next he was flat on his back, the floor crumbling and warping to cover his fists and feet.

  Suddenly, Yacrist was moving, but he never unwrapped his fingers from Eist’s collar, dragging her across the floor as he strode to her friends. He stopped just short of them, jerking her forward so she had to look down at the trio.

  Dille was still gagged, Athar was pinned, and Ain was just looking up at her with a level of protective rage that she had never seen in him before. It was a truly sorrowful scene, one of absolute defeat, and she couldn’t believe that she was the one who had caused it all.

  She really had failed them.

  “So, what will it be, Eist? Your best friend? The stuttering idiot who’s been in love with you for years? Or the man who bullied you for so long? Tried to kick you out of your dream?”

  “Don’t do this,” Eist said, shaking her head. She couldn’t decide which of her friends would die. Losing Yacrist had torn open a hole in her that still burned every day. There was no way she could be responsible for that kind of loss.

  She had to save them! But how? She had no idea what she could do. She was bound, with her magic locked within her and her arm broken. What was she to do?

  He was trying to break her, she knew that, but she felt powerless to stop him and that was so, so much worse than anything else. She wasn’t just going to stand by and watch as he killed two of her friends. He was going to force her to participate.

  “I won’t,” she gasped, trying to wrest herself away, but he held onto her collar tightly. “I won’t do this!”

  He yanked her closer again, forcing her to look at them. “If you don’t choose, I’ll kill them all right now.”

  “No!” The word was out of her mouth like a punch, leaving her breathless. “You can’t! You can’t do this!”

  He nodded and his soldiers closed in, their spears held in a way to use the sharp tips rather than the wooden butts. “If you don’t want my gift, then…”

  “NO! No! Just…just give me a moment! Just give me a moment to think!”

  She closed her eyes. In all of her life, with all of the terrible things she had survived, she didn’t think she’d ever been so terrified. She tried to slow her breathing, the frantic rise and fall of her chest, but everything was spinning away from her. She needed Fior. She needed magic. Suddenly, she was so small and weak in a way she hadn’t been in years.

  But that was what the Blight wanted. For her to crumble. The best way to work that situation was to give him what he wanted.

  “Please,” she murmured, putting as much quake into her voice as she could. “Please spare them.”

  “So greedy, little E—” He trailed off as she suddenly pushed herself forward, pressing into the front of him and looking up with lidded eyes.

  “I know it would be foolish of you, but if you did this, if you let them live, I think… I think that I would be ready.”

  Judging by the look on his face, it seemed like the rest of the world fell away. His strong arm wrapped around her back, crushing her to him. “What are you saying?”

  She swallowed, bringing up her good hand to clutch at his shoulder. “I’m saying that letting them live, even though they could be a threat, would be all I needed to eliminate the last of the doubt in my head. I don’t think there’s anything you could do that would make me trust you more.”

  “Do you really think—”

  “It would be a wedding present,” she rushed hurriedly, not wanting him to get his dissent out. She would do anything to save them. Anything. “It would have to be, right? For such a romantic gesture?”

  “Eist, no!” That was Athar, but she ignored it, looking only at Yacrist. She needed him to believe her. She needed his strange obsession with her to beat out his lust for power.

  “You would be my bride?”

  She nodded, swallowing again. “We’re destined for each other, aren’t we? That would prove it to me.”

  One of his hands came to her face, his fingers gently tracing over her features until his thumb gently pressed against her lips. Eist let her eyes flutter closed and leaned into him. She didn’t care that he made her skin crawl. That he made her heart hurt. That he was full of everything that she had been fighting all her life and the one that had made her so sick that she almost died.

  “So your friends’ lives for yours? That’s what you’re saying?”

  Eist nodded, unable to open her eyes lest he see the tears and hate inside of her. She felt his breath across her face first, and then he was kissing her again, all heat and demands and things she didn’t want to think about.

  It was embarrassing, him claiming her mouth like that in front of her friends, and she knew it was yet another possessive display of power. She resolved that somehow, someway, she would pay him back in full for every wrong he rained upon her.

  But not now.

  Not until her friends were safe.

  When the
y finally parted, he looked down at her, gaze heady and face flushed. He stroked her face once more before looking to the guard. “Execute all three.”

  “WHAT!?”

  He smirked, the normally charming Yacrist expression looking so sick and twisted now. “I gave you a choice, and you chose none of them. I know you’ll eventually see the light, but I’m not so foolish to think that you’ve suddenly been illuminated in this moment.”

  The guards closed in on her friends, and Eist couldn’t say quite what happened. All she knew was that she whipped her head forward, and thrashed her entire body in a wild attempt to stop what was happening. She managed to hit the floor, but then Yacrist’s foot was right on her middle, pinning her in place.

  “Watch this, Eist. Know that you could have saved one of them, but you chose to fight me instead.”

  “Let her go! By the Three, let her go!”

  Yacrist just rolled his eyes as Athar tried to fight against the guards and his bonds. “You really want that to be your last words? Don’t want to throw a stutter in there for old time’s sa—”

  There was a thundering rumble from above, cutting Yacrist off. He swore and stumbled, releasing Eist from her hold just as a huge chunk of ceiling gave away in a rush of dirt and stone.

  “What’s going on!?”

  Before anyone could answer, dragons poured through the whole. Some of them Eist recognized, some of them she didn’t, but nothing could distract her from the familiar cry of a certain brindled dragon.

  “Fior!” she cried out, reaching up as her beautiful boy came streaking in like a bolt of lightning. She felt the sticky touch of the Blight trying to grip her, trying to pull her to him, but the next moment, she was scooped up in Fior’s jaws, carried up, up, up, past all the dragons pouring in.

  She saw Veralda and Fjorin’s dragon, and Ale’a’s girl, and Gauis. Pretty much every dragon she knew and several she didn’t. It was a regular old ambush, and the guards were scrambling for cover.

  She barely managed to tilt her head back far enough to see her friends all being caught up in their dragon’s holds, climbing up their legs to ready for a fight. Yacrist was standing in the center of it all, and Eist could see a dark, shadowy cloud beginning to form around his body.

  Her friends ignored him, however, all of the dragons going straight for the ceilings and walls instead. She knew exactly what they were doing, weakening everything to cause a cave-in.

  Her friends had set a trap.

  Eist’s heart swelled with pride. Perhaps that was a strange reaction, but she couldn’t help it. Her friends had somehow found out where she was and did enough recon to know how to set a trap. They had all grown so much since that first day in the academy.

  “Fior,” she said, trying to reach up so she could clamber onto his back. A more difficult task than she expected with just one hand. “Fior, we have to do something.”

  He let out a grumpy sort of rumble that told her absolutely not, but she pressed it. “Fior, there’s a storage room full of gas that he’s going to use to collapse the entire old kingdom. We have to destroy it.”

  He perked up at that, curious. His jaws loosened just enough for her to wiggle out and swing herself upwards.

  She didn’t quite make it, unsurprisingly, but Fior just smoothly did a barrel roll and caught her right on his back. Her thighs went around his shoulders and she felt like she was right back at home.

  All those feelings of powerlessness, of futility, of being just a prisoner in the hold of someone so much stronger than her, it all fled in one moment and she sat up straight and tall. “Let’s do this, Fior.”

  Pressing her knees into him, he moved in an arc, going straight down and then out of the wide, double-doors of the room.

  Eist was surprised how easily she was able to recall the path they had come from, zooming down the lift shoot and another hall. Up a staircase. If Fior was any bigger, they never would have been able to fit, and it was a tight squeeze as it was. But somehow, they made it right into the large dragon room, workers scrambling this way and that as Fior let out a mighty, bone-chilling roar.

  “The chains!” she cried, patting Fior’s shoulder. “You have to break them. They’re bound with his magic, I’m pretty sure.”

  Fior nodded and swooped down, going down one row and then another. Eist could feel the rumble and brux of his power as he bellowed, snapping bonds right and left.

  Then it truly was a cacophony. The beasts went wild, snapping at the workers all around them. Eist had never such a massacre, and her stomach churned even if she didn’t have any mercy for the men and women that had been ruthlessly harvesting them for goodness knew how long.

  Screams and bellows and sounds of pain filled the room, loud enough to drown out anything else she might hear. For a moment, as Eist looked out at the carnage and death, she realized that the scene before her was exactly what the Blight wanted. The whole world just drenched in blood and misery.

  “Get them out of here.” Eist said to Fior, leaning low. “Get them all out of here now.”

  Another quick nod and he flew up to the top of the ceiling, letting out another cry. But Eist could feel that it was different than the attacking, aggressive roar he had used just moments earlier. The dragons all jerked, looking to him with surprised screeches and squawks, before flooding out of the room. Some of them seemed to have trouble flying, instead choosing to go on all fours or climb along the walls, but it seemed all of them knew how to get to fresh air.

  The whole entire place shook, rocks crumbling above them, and Eist wondered if it was from the battle above. She realized that rushing off without her friends right after they had risked everything to save her was probably a pretty inconsiderate thing to do, but if there was anything her time in captivity had taught her, it was that she needed to be absolutely ruthless with her enemy. If she had a chance to hurt him, to weaken him, then she absolutely would.

  “There,” she said, pointing down the hall and to the door she had knocked that one man out in. “That’s where they’re keeping all the venom. But, if we blow it up, it’s going to make a very big boom and we’re going to need to get out of here fast.”

  Fior wuffled then dove forward, going down the hall fast enough to whip Eist’s hair back. It felt so right to be perched on his back again, feeling his muscle as he moved. Even with one hand, she felt back in control. Capable of handling her own fate.

  “Let it blow,” she said when they pulled up within range of the thing.

  And boy, did he.

  His chest inflated, expanding outwards as he drew up onto his hind legs. It was like standing on the edge of a precipice, staring over the edge into the abyss as the power of the moment set in. It built upon itself, surging in infinite rush until, finally, he slammed down on all fours and let everything go.

  The blast out of him was impressive, picking him off his feet and sending him sliding all the way back down the hall. It wasn’t until the force of his cry hit the wall and sent it blasting in every direction that she understood his pushback had been purposeful to get them out of the blast radius.

  There was the tiniest sliver of calm after the wall was gone, but that was short-lived. There was a shattering sound that filled all of Eist’s hearing and Fior whipped backwards, shooting down the hall and up the way she had originally tried to escape.

  If the boom of the roof collapsing just before was loud, the resulting explosion was truly deafening, and Eist realized the irony of her thinking that. It was only a moment later that she could feel immense heat at her back. Glancing behind them, she saw a truly massive fireball billowing behind them, hungrily gobbling up space while rubble fell in torrents.

  If it caught up with them, Fior would be fine. He was a dragon, after all, and no mere fire was going to be able to penetrate his scales. Eist, however, would not be so lucky.

  “Come on, Fior,” she whispered, pressing herself as flat to his back as she could. “Come on!”

  It wasn’t that she d
oubted him, but the thought that she could have possibly survived all of her captivity, and her friends had found a way to rescue her, only for it all to go to ruin because of a little fire, made her heart thunder in her chest like Yacrist was right behind her.

  Wait, Yacrist.

  He was not going to take the assault lying down. And if there was one thing that she had learned during her time with him, it was that his power had certainly grown. There was no telling what he would do.

  But first, they had to survive the explosion, she supposed.

  The pressure of everything behind her continued to catch up with them, racing forward at impossible speed. But just when Eist was sure that they would be overtaken, they burst out of a cave and right into the open sky.

  By the Three…

  Eist closed her eyes at first, wincing against the brightness of it all. But she could hear the sounds of dragons flying and bellowing and roaring all around her, so she forced herself to look through the tears.

  The entire sky was full of the winged beasts, raining down fire and lightning and storms and acid onto the remnants of the old kingdom. The entire mountainside was shaking, rumbling, crumbling, and in the center of it all was Yacrist.

  He floated there in the middle, dark energy all around him. As Eist’s vision flooded back into her, she could see the faint outline of that great and terrible leviathan-like creature that she had fought in the ocean all that time ago.

  “We have to retreat,” Eist said, looking at more and more of those tentacles growing out of him. None of the others seemed to see it, all bearing down on him like they thought they could hurt him that way.

  But they couldn’t.

  Something about possessing Yacrist had changed things in a way she didn’t understand. While they had been able to hurt him before, or at least give the manifestation of its power pause as they cut off its tentacles, now it was as if its kraken-like form was completely untouchable.