Chapter three!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok, this chapter is still in rough draft phase...let me know what you think!

Chapter 3: A Bloody End

-As narrated by Charnil Esgilioth Perenefor Iskiil.

It was a deranged kind of night. Wild and breathless like a plunge into icy water. A contest was under way, like nothing any of us had ever seen.

Seven dragons.

Seven men.

In a roughly circular canyon that was all jagged heaps of rock scorched white by the minimal moonlight, we sat. Seven dragons. All waiting on our haunches for the word. I shivered with excitement, a ripple running down my body from snout to tail, every scale seeming to vibrate.

It was a near-primal contest that had stood the test of time for ages, despite being outlawed recently in the last thirty years. Seven men. Each of us flew with our Rider upon our back, linked by mental connection to weak men wrapped in frail pink flesh, little better than flowers exposed to winter’s frost. And yet, men had something strange inside, something they called heart, and cunning. Apart we were dull and unscrupulous, and they soft and vulnerable.

Together we were as gods.

The rules were simple. All we had to do was use our tail to knock the men off each others’ backs. On the surface, this meant nothing more than disgrace, but this was a deadlier game than appearances revealed. Accidents were common and usually fatal. A rider who came dislodged from his dragon had to be caught before he hit the rocks below, or both and he and his rider would die. Mistakes of judgment by mere millimeters could be fatal here.

My rider’s name was Matthias. From birth we had been closer than eggs in a nest, or twins in a womb. He was wiry and wild, a youth of incredible passion and energy. I could feel his body tense against my back, his knees tighten against my waist. I could feel the grim smile light up his narrow features. Sturdy callused palms pressed against my shoulders.

Are you ready? I whispered mentally.

His only reply was a wordless burst of eager, jubilant thought.

And then the word, just one. Almost too simple and monosyllabic to represent what felt like the most epic moment of our entire lives.

“Go.”

With the easy grace of a prizefighter I leapt into the air and spun lazily above the cliff for a moment. And then after a second of appraisal we were off like a shot, a burst of light, surely too fast to be seen. The fourteen of us wheeled and rolled in midair, searching for a weak point, a place to strike. Long muscular tails flashed in the moonlight, most strikes failing to land a blow, or else they harmlessly struck the dragon rather than the rider, accomplishing nothing. One great black dragon named Bellias struck at Matthias but I flew backwards in an arc, so that his strike hit my belly, barely stinging. My claws seemed to clutch at velvety, starstudded darkness for a moment as I flew upside down, the sky suddenly beneath me for one disorienting moment.

I flew downwards in a tight corkscrew, out of the mass of scaled bodies. I heard a cry pierce the night above me and watched as a rider plummeted for the bottom of the canyon. One down, six to go. As the fight spread further throughout the echoing walls of the canyon, I selected my first target, a slender silver colored beast whose name I couldn’t recall. For a beat I kept my body tilted towards her, as if we were locked in a game of chicken. I challenged her with my eyes as strongly as I could, urging her to see this as a test of bravery, till at the last possible second, I tilted left flew and flew right into the cliff wall behind her. I tilted my body and pressed my claws into the rock, springing back at her and knocking her rider off with a light, almost gentle smack.

A grin lit up Matthias’ face. Two pair down. Not taking more than a second to exalt, I prepared to soar back into what was left of the battle proper when a vicious strike nailed Matthias in the back, hurling him into my neck and nearly cracking his skull. Both of us began to fade in and out of consciousness as he struggled against the darkness threatening to pull him in. I flew downward erratically, all but falling. I didn’t need to look to know our attackers. Saul and Miran. Once the closest of friends, now the bitterest of rivals.

My eyelids seemed to grow heavier by the second, the tilt of my flight more pronounced, I tried to will Matthias awake, urge him to grab on and hold tight, but I was losing him. And worse, I was losing myself. My thoughts were transforming into a mixed perception jumble, to where I could barely tell what was me feebly attempting to regain control of our erratic descent, and what was Matthias, feebly attempting to hang on.

I knew two things. Miran was still there, in chase. Ready to strike again the second we showed any sign of regaining control.

And I knew the rocks were about to kill us.

Slowly, as if peeling a layer of lead off of my scales, I pushed back the dark of unconsciousness. And yet, I did not stop our fall just yet. It was going to take all our combined wits to beat these two.

I began to listen closely, and time seemed to slow. I heard Matthias pulling in deeper breaths as my clever rider subtly took a tighter grip on my neck. I heard the wind whistling quietly past Miran’s icy blue wings. I heard the sounds of battle far above as the contest ran on. I had just barely registered the eerie fact that I couldn’t hear Saul breathing when the time came to act.

In a matter of seconds I twisted my body around twice, once to strike at Saul with my tail and send him flying, and again to land on the rocks of a slender outcropping, safe and triumphant. In the seconds that followed those quick darting movements I soon realized that this was about more than the contest. As Miran swooped back to catch her rider before he fell father into the canyon, I caught a strange look she threw my way, filled with hatred.

It was not the first time I had seen her look at me that way, but it had a feeling of finality to it, like it would be the last.This was no friendly contest to them. It would be a duel. It saddened me that our friendship had fallen this far, but I was determined to stand and do whatever necessary.

When they returned, the battle above was over. There was no sign of the other dragons or riders, as if they’d sensed the violent storm threatening to break beneath their feet. Matthias and I stood tall on the cliff together, he perched high on my neck.

No more pretense.

“Where is it to be?” I called defiantly, already half suspecting I knew the answer.

A beat. Silence reigned.

“The Hollows,” Saul replied with his strange, raspy voice, no longer the timbre I remembered from our youth, nor what it seemed it should have grown into through adolesence.

But then, as if they simply couldn’t resist the opportunity to fight then and there, they struck. A quick darting attack centered on my rider. Matthias ducked low behind my neck and we swooped for the sky, into the air and over their heads. Despite their refusal to honor the standard code of conduct, I refused to give in so easily. Instead of turning and engaging, I kept flying, straight out of the canyon like a firework on New Year’s.

We must make for the Hollows, Matthias thought, putting a picture in my mind of the great mountain everyone simply called the Hollows, honeycombed as it was with hundreds of tunnels. I nodded without speaking, thinking only of flying faster than our would be attackers. The treacherous mountain terrain beneath us flew by in a blur. The mountains of Tarn had been our home for all our lives. I didn’t need to think about how to get there, I just flew.

The first gentle halo of pink shone on the horizon when we passed the dragon rider compound without slowing. An immense walled fortress, it was set into the face of a small mountain at the foot of a slender, treacherous pass that eventually led down into the endless plains of Tarn proper. Taller mountains, the tail end of a range of massive crags called the Taori Spine rose high above the fortress.

Draconian legend held that the spires were the remains of dragons who had grown too large to fly and fallen into a deep slumber, eventually transforming into mountains. It was well known that any dragon never paired with a rider would continue growing their entire lives, but it had been hundreds, if not thousands of years since such a dragon had existed. Although some believed there were massive dragons out there hidden in the mountains still.

Matthias sighed wistfully as we passed the castle far below, thoughts of hot cocoa and warm, clean blankets filling his mind. It was only June, but in the mountains the nights are always cold.

In due time, the Hollows were before us, growing larger with each passing second. This particular mountain was the last of the Spire, a sacred place to dragons and men alike, for it was where we went to die, and where we commemorated major events.

We flew close and landed in one of the tunnels. Miran and Saul were only a few beats behind, and soon the battle would begin, and our longstanding feud would come to its tragic, bloody end.