A Dawn of Dragonfire

SOLINA



She walked down the tunnel, sabres drawn, and entered the library. Her lips peeled back in a smile.

The chamber was as she remembered. Its ceiling curved high above, high enough that if she wanted, she could shift into a phoenix here too, burn all the books and scrolls upon the shelves. But she was no brute, no mindless killer. Unlike most of her men, she knew how to read and write—both Old and Common Tiran, the Dragontongue of Requiem, and the High Speech of eastern Osanna. She knew that books held power—a power greater than steel, as great as magic itself. She would empty these shelves. She would take these books and scrolls back to the desert, place them in her temples, and learn from their lore.

Requiem will remain bare of knowledge, she thought, a wasteland of skeletons and dried blood.

"My queen!" said one of her men, a captain with a bloody sunburst on his breastplate. He bowed before her, fist against his chest. "The prisoners await your inspection."

She nodded curtly and walked deeper into the library. At the back wall, twenty weredragons stood in chains. Solina snarled. When she had lived in Requiem, the weredragons would taunt her. They would shift into dragons, fly above, blow fire, and she would watch from below, a scared and weak girl with no magic. In chains, they were as helpless as she had been. They had been stripped naked. Their bodies were lashed, bloody, and broken. Three were men, supposed warriors; the rest were women and children.

"Reptiles," she said to them, voice dripping with disgust. "Look at you. Naked. Filthy. Weak." She laughed bitterly. "You call yourself a noble race, an ancient and proud people." She spat. "I see only wretches."

A few of the weredragons stared back, defiance in their eyes. Others moaned, blood seeping from their wounds. The chains chafed their wrists and ankles, digging into the flesh. One, a girl no older than the princess Mori, was trying to shift. She grimaced, and scales appeared and disappeared on her body, and wings sprouted and vanished from her back. When her limbs began to grow, the chains dug deeper, shedding blood, keeping her in her filthy human form. Tears ran down her cheeks.

Solina approached the girl, a soft smile on her lips. "Precious," she said softly. "Do you still try to fight?"

The girl looked up with teary eyes, opened her mouth to speak, and Solina swung her sword. Raem, her blade of dawn, sliced the weredragon's neck as easily as a fisherman gutting his catch. Blood gushed, the girl gasped and choked, and her head slumped back. She lay still, blood spilling down her body to pool around her.

Solina grinned, teeth clenched, as the other weredragons howled.

Five years ago, this girl would have taunted me, she thought. She would have shifted, soared in the sky, mocked my lack of magic. She would have burned me too, burned me like Orin did. She snarled. They all would burn me if they could.

She ran her fingers along her line of fire, the scar that split her face and body. It still burned sometimes. She could still feel the screaming agony of fire. The rage and pain pounded through her, spinning her head. She turned to another chained weredragon, an old man with one eye, and she lashed her blade across his stomach. She stared with cold eyes as he screamed, as his innards spilled.

She turned to the next one. Her blades swung. She moved from weredragon to weredragon, ridding the world of their evil, banishing their shadow with her light.

"For the Sun God!" she cried as she plunged her blades into the last one, a child clinging to the corpse of his mother. "For your glory, Lord of Light! I banish the weredragon curse for you."

Blood washed the floor, rivers of it, intoxicating with its scent. Blood had splashed her face, Solina realized. She wiped it with her fingers and licked them eagerly.

Soon I will drink Elethor's blood too, she thought. Soon we will meet again, my love.

"Clean this mess," she said to her men. "If the blood dirties the books, I will replace the parchment with your hides."

She turned and left the library, grinning savagely, boots sloshing.