A Shade of Dragon 3(36)
“No!” I rebuked. “We can make it! It won’t last for long.”
Our wings beat the air, and one, two smaller dragons spiraled out of the squad, down to the ground below with wings cramped and locked in the cold. “They’ll be all right,” I exclaimed, fixing my eyes straight ahead as we pushed through the thin sheet of snowfall. “We have to keep going!” I could see the walls of the city on the horizon. It wouldn’t be long now.
Descending to the city entrance and frozen moat, we landed in the deep snow. I wondered if the ice dragons had been made aware of our presence yet. Knowing how lazy and overconfident they were, it was possible that the patrols had been slackened after the shelter had been raided. But it was impossible to say. We had no time to waste.
I shifted into my human form in order to use my hands, and the other fire soldiers followed suit. As it had been before, the city was left open, a vulgar display of the perceived superiority of ice forces. I unsheathed the satchel from my neck and dug inside for the salty wood and foliage, dried to the bone in the sun of the ogres’ beach. “Show no mercy,” I instructed my men. It was a phrase I never would have uttered before. “We are not trying to save anything. No ice dragons, and no structures within the city. Let it, and let them, burn.”
At the entrance of the city was the same abandoned inn where Nell and I had spent our first night as husband and wife. I gazed at it with longing and remorse for only an instant before exhaling a plume of white-hot fire into its windows.
Posted nearby were horses and donkeys, draped in heavy quilts, attached to bridles, awaiting their owners. I unbridled one horse, loosely attached a bundle of kindling to its tail, and breathed some sparks into the mass. The horse neighed and took off into the city, but before it lost the bundle attached to its tail, the snow that it kicked up extinguished the flame.
I extracted a quiver and bow from my satchel. The quiver was stuffed with arrows whose feathered fletching had been replaced, wrapped in dry reeds instead. I exhaled some sparks again and took aim at a distant building. It had once been our cobbler’s shop. But now… now it was just an empty building, or perhaps the hideout of some lowly ice dragon who hadn’t the courage to remain on his or her own land, the Obran peninsula.
The arrow arced into the sky like a teardrop of fire, descending perfectly onto the cobber’s shop.
Archery was a lesson I’d never missed.
A dim flicker began in one window. Too slow. If our fire all started with natural speed, the ice dragons would have plenty of time to extinguish them.
“Men,” I commanded. “Our sparks will not progress at the speed we require!”
“What of our fireballs?” Charis called back.
“They are exhausting,” Einhen replied.
“War is exhausting. The fireballs it is. The thicker, the better!”
Einhen sagged—not a warrior by trade—but acquiesced. The lot of us heaved and belched, vomiting streaks of white lava into the depths of the city.
They landed and exploded, creating immediate wildfires amid the kindling of our town square. The temple sparkled like a firework, its bejeweled statues and fountains, fed with the gaseous ground waters of The Hearthlands, shooting into the sky. The apothecary’s station fumed with the smoke of sage, while the physician’s office was practically vaporized by the variety of chemicals harbored therein.
I stared out across the blanket of destruction… so many of our buildings, our landmarks, gone in an instant… one of the fireballs slammed into a statue of my grandfather, melting it almost instantly into the snow below…
Wild-eyed ice dragons, still half-asleep and half-naked from their beds, came staggering out into the snow. Some of them ran in their bare feet or stockings toward the open exits of the city wall. Some of them transformed into dragons, all shades of blue and white and silver and black, then fled into the sky and over the walls. Some of them yodeled from within burning buildings they had taken to inhabiting, spewing shards of ice out windows in an attempt to blanket the blaze. But the assault was too fast, too much, too unexpected.
It wouldn’t be too long before a discerning ice dragon stepped from his or her abode and scanned the streets, not for the flaming horrors around them, but for their cause. And when that happened, we would be forced into ground combat. Soon. But it would be too late. By the time we were targeted and forced into defensive mode, forced to relent and even recede, the entire city would be aflame. Even now, we had fanned out at a distance of several blocks from one another, and our fireballs assaulted different quarters of the city. And when we fled, then… then we would tap into the gaseous moat and set it aflame, encouraging the remaining ice dragons to flee rather than walk the full length of the moat, extinguishing its waters to resuscitate a ruined city.