The Age of Ash

by TheDox234

The war against Malefor is long over. 364 years has passed, Spyro and Cynder diverged long ago but fate has them cross paths again. They will face enemies and allies new and old. Something has disturbed the natural balance, pulling back forgotten history. Only one thing is constant in life; war. "Blood Souls" inspired. Forgive the earlier chapters. They get better.

13. Chapter 13

The Helgœrün

Chapter 13

"It boils hotter than molten steel, turning the air into a soup of cloying fog. Edwig boasts that he saw a mole fall into a crucible of it not but three harvests past, claiming the poor creature never even bothered to scream. Later… When the ingots were being cast, old Hursey said he could hear the metal speaking to him in tongues. Sometimes when I'm alone too long at the hammer and furnace, I start to hear them too. Old Hursey was put to the ax five moons ago for tearing the throat out of another mammal's neck. Am I going mad? Or is this rutting metal pulled from the realms of Helbrim itself? If I die here, it'll be from desertion, not madness."

~A letter found within the records of Smelterbreach; Name & Date Unknown

Mütallium—developed by the great forgers of Smelterbreach during an age forgotten by all but the dead—is concocted from a combination of mana-depleting dark crystals and an impressively rare mineral known as Brutafane. Once thought to be a useless alloy, seeing as how it was incapable of being imbued with magic, and suffering from an overall insufficient amount of resources, the recipe for Mütallium was a blemish on ingenuity that was promptly swept under the rug. And so it would remain until many years later when Droganian warlord Plaedius Drothwin would discover the metal to be a useful negator to a dragon's magical capabilities. He would order an impenetrable citadel built from it, situated along a valley in the Cather mountains. This fortress would brutalize the southern kingdoms for millennia, provide Drothwin with the ability to monopolize river trade routes on both the Northern and Southern continents—and wage war against those who would oppose his tyrannical rule. It wouldn't be until many years later that the citadel would fall out of his control and be used for far more nefarious purposes. There are things worse than tyrants, my friends. Things that make even dictators shiver in their beds.

---

Cynder's wings were soaked. Not just wet; better had they been wet than soaked. The difference between the two terms being measured by the amount of misery they brought her.

Wet, Cynder's wings felt chilled, but still functioned without issue, sheeting water off with ease. Forty minutes ago, which might have been an overestimation of time—exhaustion has a way of doing that to a mental clock—if someone had asked Cynder how her wings were, she would have told them as much with a moderate amount of annoyance behind her words.

Soaked, on the other paw, her wings turned to lead, every gust of wind sent ice-cold shivers down her spine, and flying at any altitude higher than four digits became impossible. As a result, had the same question been posed to her now—not that anybody cared about the condition of her wings—Cynder might have combusted into a furnace of un-lady-like swears and snarls.

Flying with soaked wings meant flying with what felt like an additional two tons of weight hanging from both tips—and being this far east of Shiverum meant there was still a likely chance of upping the ante from soaked wings to drenched.

Cynder stifled a groan, the muscles in her back and neck practically pleading with her for relief. Better to have soaked wings than drenched and better to have wet wings than anything else.

How do Guzal and Daheel do it?

She shook her head at the males in their full sets of Paladin regalia which, she knew, were anything but light. They flew just ahead of her, on either side of Poetry. If they were experiencing any of the exhaustion Cynder felt, both drakes did an excellent job of hiding it. Poetry seemed to be having a much easier time of flying than her, as well.

Why did I leave? Why did I have to agree to follow along with his idiotic plan of yours, Poetry?

In addition to Guzal and Daheel were eight other paladins, their rank and elemental alignment engraved on the pauldrons of their armor. Three winds, four ice, and an extra earth to match Daheel.

Cynder had made the argument that more earth dragons should have been present in their squadron but had been shut down by Poetry mentioning that earth paladins weren't a commodity with which Shiverum was well endowed. Daheel's already enormous head had practically swollen to twice its size—much to Guzal's chagrin.

Their destination: Yarrow, sat as close to the edge of Shiverum territory as a creature could get without crossing the border into Warfang's provinces. The village lay nestled deep within a branching valley of the Cather mountains known as the Cather Finger, famous for its miserable climate and its even more miserable population. In fact, most who referred to the valley liked to simply call it The Finger for short.

In The Finger, where sunlight was about as rare as a genuine smile, rain and thunder and sour moods were none at all uncommon. Cynder didn't need any help understanding why.

The mountains of the valley, like terrific beasts that controlled the weather, acted as a funnel for Shiverum's frigid winds and Warfang's temperamental thunderstorms, stretching them on for miles along its sweeping length—or so it felt.

To Cynder, the valley was an ordeal, one that Spyro, her, and Eliesia had circumvented when they had first been on their way to Shiverum. They had flown above the clouds, riding the thermal wind channels, effectively cutting their travel time to a quarter of what it should have been.

"That's not an option this time," Guzal had told her. "Flying that high runs a risk of discovery now. Fly that high, and anything can see you coming for miles."

So they had kept low, following the Chagra River, using the rain and the billowing river mist as natural cover for their movements. Eventually, the valley widened, the rushing waters of the Chagra slowly dissolving into trickling veins through a wide expanse of mudflats. From Poetry's brief explanation of the area, Cynder understood that Yarrow would be coming into view at any second.

It was a fishing hamlet, built along a particularly swampy stretch of the Chagra river locals had come to name as The Mirk some odd centuries ago. In Yarrow, the water was fouler than the weather and the denizens put together, made sour by the excessive amount of filth and refuse dumped into it.

Coincidentally, this helped boost Yarrow's reputation as a suitable fishing town for two reasons. For one, the fish that swim in the Chagra are disgusting creatures that live to grow to a considerable size, feasting on anything they can fit into their mouths. Secondly, Gutter Bait—the odorous and most effective bait for catching any number of fish—spawn in filthy waters. As a result, Yarrow was named the fishing capital of the United continents, capable of self-perpetuation and replenishment of its most valuable resource.

"They must be so proud," Cynder had joked.

"I'm sure they are," Guzal chuckled, "in their own grumpy kind of way."

Still, even after learning all of that, Cynder couldn't see the importance of reclaiming such a place. Shiverum was a port city, capable of catching its own fish even without Yarrow's import of Gutter Bait.

Poetry had only shaken her head and smiled when Cynder had pointed out as much.

Now, with all twelve of them hurtling through the din of rain and mist, Cynder wanted to ask Poetry what she wasn't sharing with her. There must have been a greater reason for coming out all this way, something that would make all this effort worth it.

Abruptly, shadows began to fade into existence, blurred by the rain and fog but steadily growing larger. Cynder saw Poetry make a gesture with her paws, pointing somewhere off to the left along the western bank of the Chagra. Only once did Poetry glance back to look at her, and it was to make sure she had understood. Cynder nodded. Poetry grinned.

Their team landed in a coppice, stumps, and shrubs cut down to their roots, surrounded by a dense forest. Through the trees, Cynder could just make out the grey outline of Yarrow where it stood in the mist.

Poetry nudged Balka, one of their wind Paladins, and the female put up a protective silencing barrier with her element. It was a handy tool, one Cynder had come to appropriate into her arsenal, especially for scenarios where stealth was crucial.

Daheel gave a burst of air, sputtering and coughing like he had been holding his breath. "Another minute"—more heavy breathing—"and you'd all have been dragging me through the mudflats."

"You idiot," Guzal laughed. "No one said you had to hold your breath."

"I know," was Daheel's plain reply. "Just thought I'd give it a try." Both dragons chuckled while Poetry simply shook her head. Everyone else, including Cynder, audibly sighed.

"Johagun," Poetry started, "I want you and Hiengar to scout out the perimeter of the town. Report back if anything inside moves. Don't stick around to investigate. Just reconnaissance for now." Both dragons flew off with an affirmative nod. "Everyone else, take a minute to rest your wings but don't get comfortable. I want us to move in on the town while the fog is still thick."

Daheel, still breathing hard, grunted. "I don't think the fog's going anywhere, PT."

"All the same, I'd like to get moving sooner rather than later."

Cynder watched everyone nod before collapsing to the ground. One by one they fell, crushing the grass in heaps of quivering limbs and shuddering breaths; until the only two that remained standing were her and Poetry.

Fighting off the urge to join them as they laid in the lush grass left her with not enough energy to drag Poetry into privacy away from the group. She stood on shaky legs, unable to neither move nor lay down.

When she spoke it was with none of the gentle quietness she had been aiming for, more of a hoarse yell. "We shouldn't move so soon," She gasped. "It was a long flight and everyone's tired. Let Johagun and Hiengar rest, at least for a while after they return."

Poetry's gaze was hard when it met with hers, but the smile on her lips refused to fade. "We can't risk lingering. Every minute spent stationary means a minute longer we spend in potentially hostile territory."

Cynder wanted to push further but all chance of argument died when exhaustion finally caught up to her, making her knees wobble and her wings sag until she too fell to the ground in a mess of scales and wings.

"Say, Balka," Zirin, a long-limbed female, and the group's Third ice, spoke up. "Have the construction moles gotten around to fixing the roof of your house yet?"

Balka nodded. "Just this morning. No more leaky ceilings for me."

"Send 'em on down my way if you can." Zirin laughed, "I got a hole in my back wall that's replaced my door."

Hikono, a bulky ice drake, grunted. "How's your mother been Zirin?"

"Bum ankle, cracked horn, and some loose scales but she refuses to let that stop her from working at the clinic. I'll tell her you asked."

"Tell her I was wondering if she's still got any of that world-famous fried Pink Stripe left. She makes a glaze to die for," the male begged, the rest of the group humming their agreement.

"That pink stripe makes living in the barracks just a touch bearable," Finch, a twitchy wind drake, drooled. More unanimous humming.

"Any left?" Keza giggled, voice like a wind chime. "I doubt she ever runs out. I swear she has a dealer down on Clement's that keeps her full."

From where he sat on lookout, Daheel snorted. "Probably pays him with Fried Pink Stripe."—quiet laughter— "I'm serious."

"Well, you just tell her to send some of that on down to my house," Hikono cut in.

"Every one of you ought to have your necks cuffed, abusing Nana Brin like this. You should all be ashamed, " Poetry sidled in from where she leaned up against one of the half-dead trees marked for chopping, a big "X" carved out of the bark.

Cynder lost track of the conversation after that point, the restlessness of her head drowning out everything else.

She stared up at the lumber trees. Leafless and old, their limbs creaked in the cold, rain-laden breeze of the mountainous valley—like ancient creatures from a bygone age, too proud to crumble even in death.

How deep do their roots go? Cynder wondered. Why did they suddenly fail where others thrived?

Looking at the Poetry, Guzal, Daheel, as well as the rest, Cynder wondered what made them so different from her. What makes them so at ease with themselves—and why can't I be the same?

We shouldn't be out this far. No one else knows we're here. Something could happen to us and no one would learn about it for only a chronicler knows how long.

Every worry was a physical presence in her chest begging to be voiced aloud.

Again, the question of "What would Spyro do?" bit at her like a viper. She kept telling herself that she didn't care—or that it didn't matter. Kept telling herself that Spyro didn't want her here with him. Round and round she chased her thoughts, ferreting them out of her head until all that remained was the poke of the questions teeth and the frustration of her disquiet mind.

What would Spyro do? The question became something to spite, serving only to spur her onwards, careless of the danger.

I can be confident, she told herself. I don't need Spyro to hold my wing.

It was Poetry's indefatigable suave that Cynder tried to harness when she stood back up on shaky legs. The others must have sensed a shift in her mood because when she looked at them, every one of them blinked at her like she had grown a third horn. Even Poetry, usually unflappable, gave her what might have passed as a quizzical stare.

No one had time to question her about it, however, before Johagun and Hiengar burst out through the trees, startling everyone into action. Balka, who had kept a good hold on her focus of the silencing barrier during their rest, tumbled over her paws in the haste to stand up. The barrier wavered for a moment, flickering in and out while Balka regained her footing before eventually returning to effective strength.

"Report," Cynder and Poetry demanded at the same time, the latter smirking deviously at the former before turning to regard the scouts.

"Nothing," Johagun sputtered.

"Not a soul," Hiengar finished, head nearly touching the ground from how low he hung it. "The town is quiet. Nothing stirs. Nothing at all."

"Good," Poetry said but Cynder felt unease settle in her stomach like a stone dropped in a pond.

The rain had slowed to a drizzle. Thunder rumbled somewhere in the distance, a faint flash cutting the sky off towards the north. The deluge was persistent as it worked its way down through Cynder's scale, tearing her to the bone as a cool wind whipped through the trees. Everyone shuddered, even the ice dragons.

"Wish that Fire dragoness of yours could have joined us, Cynder," Daheel muttered through numb lips.

"Certainly not," said Cynder. "She's too firm—as likely to bite your head off for asking her as she is to warm up to you."

"You think she would have said no?" Poetry asked, mockingly curious.

"That and a great deal of many other things." Quiet laughter rose up from the group.

Poetry led the party out of the coppice through a particularly thick portion of the forest. Brambles and barb weeds bit at Cynder's paws and ankles. Stinkweed—with its foul aroma for attracting insects—littered the ground, crushed underfoot.

"We shouldn't be out this far," Cynder heard someone whisper behind her, voicing her own earlier worries.

Poetry's lips tightened, clearly having heard the voice as well. Cynder wanted to reach out to her, rest a wing on her shoulder. It's not too late to turn back. We can still leave this place. But the stubborn part of Cynder that had slowly been wresting control of her actions refused to oblige; she said nothing.

Not faltering, Poetry led the team onwards, stopping them just shy of the tree line at the edge of the forest. Here the ground was softer, covered in moss. Cynder relished the feeling of it under her paws.

Behind her, Guzal and Daheel bounced on the flats of their paws, anticipation like an exposed circuit. They seemed to feed off one another—Poetry, Daheel, and Guzal—amping each other up when one of them flagged. Cynder felt a small prick of envy.

Spyro and I used to be like that.

Regardless, the effect was contagious, seeping into the rest. It wasn't long before everyone felt the crackle of energy passing between one another; only Cynder seemed to be aware of it.

When she looked back at Poetry, it was to see the female's eyes alight with an enthusiastic intensity that had Cynder sucking in her breath. Yellow and wide, Poetry's eyes practically glowed in her head. Rain sheeted off the female's scales, encasing her in what looked like a brilliant sheen. Her snowy white main, damp and sodden along her neck and back, draped itself across her body like pale serpents.

Seemingly unaware of her obvious staring, Poetry muscled forwards. Cynder followed, as did the rest and soon the tree cover vanished, replacing itself with a vast blanket of fog that seemed to stretch on endlessly across the valley.

There was a small stretch of land, just before the fog when the view of the sky was unobstructed, allowing Cynder a brief glimpse of the Chagra valley from the ground level but it did little to ease the churning of her fluttering stomach. She felt exposed out here, the mountains on both sides of the valley looming over her like giant monsters. To them, they were just ants.

Wading out into the brackish waters of the Mirk was no easy thing. Beneath the muddy, foul-smelling surface water the soil was like quicksand, clinging to everyone's talons and scales as it tried to drag them down. Occasionally the group would come across a small island of semi-solid soil that offered momentary relief, and everyone could take a moment to rest among the tall cattails and water reeds that stuck out from the ground like poorly groomed hair.

The Mirk was thick with a haze that made seeing anything beyond a tail length ahead of a near impossibility. And even of what could be seen was little more than passing shadows. Every once in a while she would pass by the corpse of a tree—like a specter drifting through the fog—and her scales would ripple with unease.

The fog made the air thick with misdirection, playing tricks on her mind—conjured images of something moving beneath the water, stalking her, of bones and bodies floating down the river streams, or terrible venomous things waiting to pole, or bite. It turned every sensation into something haunted and grueling.

Somewhere behind her, Cynder heard Balka squeak, jumping through the water like something had spooked her. Cynder could only pray it had been a fish and not something worse.

But worst of all was the silence.

There was no sound—no croak of frogs, no splash of fish, no ambient noise—only the shocked quiet that follows a terrible violence. It was as if nothing in the world beyond the fog existed.

Only silence and mist, and fear.

So much fear. Not just from her, but everyone—even Poetry.

A lump settled itself inside Cynder's throat. This isn't right.

Suddenly the world fell under a shadow and Poetry stopped the group to direct everyone's attention upwards—to the giant looming structure that hung above everyone's heads, darkening the ground where they stood underneath it. Even the fog couldn't block the sight.

A bridge: larger than any Cynder had ever seen, crafted from stone and metal and waterlogged wood that looked like it had spent years submerged in the depths of the ocean before it had been used.

Dangling above their heads, however, strung together and across, woven and knotted, large and small, were fishing nets. There were too many to count, and looking at them for too long made Cynder feel like she was swaying on a pendulum. The view might have been impressive if not for the inescapable stench of tar and fish.

"Be stealthy," Poetry ordered, not bothering to keep her voice down thanks to the silencing bubble around the group. "Even if it appears abandoned, keep prepared; nothing is certain."

There was an air of unrest among the group as they all nodded their heads. Even Poetry, for all her enthusiasm, almost sounded concerned.

They took turns going up in pairs, with Balka being among the first to go up and leave the rest of them to wait in silence. After several long agonizing moments when no alarm or signal of warning was raised, the rest of the groups proceeded as planned.

Until it was just Cynder and Guzal standing alone, a smile pressed across his lips while hers tightened into a grim frown.

Both dragons hunched, vaulting into the air as they took off. Cynder hissed against the pain that shot through the roots of her back, muscles spasming in protest as her wings took on air. Falteringly, she kept herself airborne, afraid to be the weakest member of the group.

Curse you Poetry. We should have rested, Cynder thought acerbically. We shouldn't be here in the first place, another part of her mentioned.

The flight up to the bridge revealed much of what Cynder had thought she had seen from below. Up close, the nets were even more impressive than they had looked from down below, a few of them large enough to cover an entire mountainside.

There were houses as well—nesting burrows constructed from wood, clay, and pitch—that dangled from ropes that crisscrossed like vines. Scaffolding, rough and unstable as they swayed in some ghostly breeze, arced through the open spaces like suspended bones in a spider web.

Landing proved to be more difficult than taking off. And as the others watched her make a terrible show of it, Cynder found herself resisting the urge to sink into her shadow. No one commented, however, not even Poetry.

Everyone was too busy with their surroundings to pay attention to anything else. Up here, the fog and mist were just as thick as it had been below, shrouding everything in an otherworldly haze.

They appeared to be on a public boardwalk of some sort, stitched together from stacked houses and narrow plank walkways with even more nets, fishing gear, and other miscellaneous items connecting those.

It was all so haphazard and thrown together. There were lighthouses, ships, upside-down bungalows, and nests; all mixed in with one another until it became difficult for Cynder to tell where one structure ended and another began. The bridge stretched on in either direction, fading off into the grey so that it might continue infinitely.

"Ancients prick me," Cynder gaped, drawing an amused grin from Poetry.

"Look," Heingar said, "We have a tourist."

Jaw flapping, Cynder coughed, dragging a talon through the soft wet wood.

"I almost envy her," Virga'al—the other earth dragon—huffed, smiling ruefully.

Cynder frowned, not sure what he meant, but he wasn't the only one; others agreed with the sentiment. Everyone seemed to share a mutual understanding of the town and spoke of it like a moldering memory. Guzal and Daheel especially.

"I don't understand. Did all of you grow up here?" She asked.

"You could say that," Daheel answered.

But before Cynder could ask for further explanation, Poetry broke up the huddle, splitting the teams into equal groups: Cynder with Poetry, Guzal, Virga'al, Zirin, and Finch; Daheel with Keza, Balka, Johagun, Hikono, and Heingar.

"Stick together, stay safe," said Poetry. "If you find something, wind channel to us. Ice flare if there's an emergency."

"Don't worry PT," replied Daheel. "We haven't forgotten BASIC."

"Good," she smiled, tapping her tail on his horns. "Just try to think with your head. Not with these."

"They're one and the same with him," Guzal said as Cynder watched them dissolve into grey; it came with an uneasy feeling.

Cynder couldn't help but shiver as she turned back to face her group, already heading in the opposite direction. Galloping to keep up, she made an effort to keep her voice level as she asked, "Do we even know what we're looking for?"

There was a moment where Poetry looked stunned as if she hadn't thought about an answer to the question. "...No," she said slowly. "But Skral seem to have been through here. It's too quiet to be otherwise."

"Skral?" Cynder asked.

Guzal cleared his throat. "It's what people have started calling them" —he paused— "the dead ones."

"It's from the old dialect. Shadow speech; stands for Torn," clarified Finch. Everyone stared at him. "I studied linguistics."

"Since when did people start calling them that?" Cynder asked.

"Since someone heard that dead friend of yours mumbling about it in the streets," answered Zirin.

"Eliesia? She likes to talk to herself is all. She called them that?" Wait. Was she almost defending her? She may have saved her life, but she still didn't trust her. That dragon has secrets even she doesn't know about.

"I figured you of all people would have heard. Isn't she with you guys?"

"We haven't talked much," Cynder began. "Her and I… well, we're still strangers." I'm strangers with a lot of people, she thought bitterly.

"I don't care what you call them." Virga'al cut in. "Because I'm not seeing anything, alive or dead, in this town."

It was as he said, Cynder realized. Yarrow was silent, devoid of life. The lack of noise would have been torturous if not for the soft patter of rain, only occasionally drowned out by the echoing growl of thunder.

All around, houses and stores watched with what felt like lingering horror, as if the buildings themselves were creatures that had gone cold and silent. As the group moved quietly through the river hamlet, Cynder made a point to keep an eye out.

They passed homes, lopsided and crippled and abandoned. There was more than one bait and tackle shop, hooks dangling from display racks boasting "Catch of The Day!" as well as a plethora of butcher stores; the stench of fish and rotting scales always worsened as they passed.

Occasionally the team would pass an odd clothing store, still stocked with goods—leather boots coated in tar for waterproofing, deerskin coats with tarnished copper buttons, along with a rare but limited selection of stylish suits and blouses with elegant, flowering brocades—each article of clothing seemingly untouched and forgotten.

Fishbones and rotten eel carcasses littered the wooden streets, cracking and crunching under paws. Fetid and stagnant, Yarrow no longer felt like a province of the living, but someplace outside of reality reserved for sorrow, the way a graveyard stops feeling part of the world when you cross its gates.

While she couldn't think of the town looking any better, Cynder tried to imagine what it would have felt like with people living in it—but the image kept slipping from her mind.

The quiet sensible part of her thoughts was slowly creeping back. We shouldn't be here. Something isn't right, it said.

"Poetry," she started, keeping her voice level. "I don't like this."

Cynder didn't think she was imagining it when she thought she heard something like genuine fear in her voice when Poetry said, "I don't either," —a pause— "but that's why we're out here. Someone has been sending dark crystal harvest teams out this way and I intend to find out why. None of this feels right but a town like Yarrow is just the type of place I'd trust to be some kind of smuggling den."

"It's one town."

"It's also the smartest move we have. Shiverum can't afford another siege without warning, and there's a precious amount of supplies to be retrieved once all of this is over with." Poetry looked at her. "We need this victory. Besides, there could be survivors out here."

"But no one kn—" Cynder never got to finish her sentence before the prickling sensation of wind on the back of her neck interrupted, a voice on its breeze.

"All clear on the western edge of town but we think we found something," Balka's wind channeled voice reported.

"What did they find?" Poetry asked aloud, directing the question towards Finch, their group's wind dragon, to repeat to Balka.

Poetry could have turned to her and gotten the same result but Cynder got the sense that she was more of a visitor than a functioning team member. So far she had done little but second guess Poetry's judgment and undermine her authority, and couldn't help but feel a touch guilty.

Only seconds went by before they received an answer. "We've discovered what looks like the remains of a corpse."

"Can they identify if it was one of the locals?"

Again only seconds. "Negative. There's," —a pause— "not much left to identify."

Beside her, Cynder felt Guzal shiver. "Ancient's above."

Silence. Poetry nodded.

"We're on our way," Finch confirmed.

It took them less than a minute to track down where the others were at. They found them by what looked like a well repurposed as a shrine. Although Cynder hadn't recognized the deity, she couldn't help but notice that everyone kept casting timid glances in its direction. There were a few candles, blue-green with mold, as well as an offering plate filled with water, tea leaves—and more than one acrolith draped with baubles of jewelry and smooth faceless pendants lain at their feet.

Once regrouped, Balka directed everybody's attention to something on the ground. At first, Cynder didn't know what she was looking for, expecting to find the remnants of a corpse or severed appendage. Instead, all she could find was a small pile of what was a full set of dragon talons, and a matching set of horns.

"That's it?" Guzal asked, voicing everyone's thoughts.

It isn't much, Cynder agreed.

"There were others," Heingar added. "In the town, along the river banks."

Johagun nodded. "Always just the talons and horns. Nothing else."

To the left of her, Cynder felt Finch shift on his paws, fear smoldering in the air around him like a doused campfire that could catch at any moment. She hated that feeding on his growing terror helped alleviate her own. The others were no different. Only Poetry's took on peculiar shades; sharp flashes of violet and blue—self-doubt and fear of failure—a mirror to Cynder's own.

It wasn't until she forcefully withdrew herself from the feast of their auras that Cynder realized they were staring at her.

"Do you always do that?" Keza asked, clear disgust in her voice. "It's unnatural."

Poetry cut the dragon an admonishing stare, albeit one without much weight to it.

"Sorry," Cynder mumbled. "I can't always help it."

"It is a little unsettling," Zirin agreed, "There's this ache, like something important is slowly being taken away."

"Speak for yourself," Guzal chuckled. "I could use a little extra courage right now."

"Extra brains more like," Poetry teased, shooting Cynder a playful wink while the others laughed.

Cynder smiled, grateful for the reprieve from their accusing stares.

When Poetry spoke again it was with an assured tone. Cynder could tell that every one of her Paladins hung onto the words. "Now that the town's been cleared, collect yourselves," she said, an edge of warning in her voice. "We move on Mirefall next."

A new, stronger ripple of unease passed through the Paladins, and when Cynder looked at Guzal and Daheel, it was to see both drakes shimmering with an aura of—distaste?—like a memory they wished they could forget but never managed.

"We'll take the old wagon road up the mountain. Flying out from the fog is too risky—and we can use the trees as cover to mask our approach," Poetry debriefed.

Despite their reservations, no one hesitated. Everyone quickly fell into formations—a defensible phalanx—that moved the team along a scarcely traveled path through the densely packed forest.

The wagon road, as Poetry had called it, was barely more than a well-traveled trail, littered with boulders and felled trees that had rotted where they fell. Stones littered the ground, some large enough to be considered boulders by smaller mammal standards, making the way treacherous enough for anything shorter than a large bear. Cynder had a hard time imagining a wagon making the same journey.

Moss vines dangled from the canopy overhead, tickling Cynder's nose and brushing the tops of her horns until she was forced to lower her neck even further. Peat and carpet grass turned the floor into a red-brown mess that reeked of wet leaves and moist soil, filling her nose with every step.

"Mirefall?" she asked aloud, looking at Guzal.

Swallowing, Guzal made a point of studying his surroundings before answering as if bracing himself for the words he was about to mutter. "It's the keep overlooking the Chagra valley. It sits up on the mountain and has guarded the Eastern Shiverum border for as long as anyone can remember."

"How much farther until we reach it?"

"Fifteen minutes. Maybe less—it's hard to tell. The old wagon road isn't used very much anymore except for emergencies. Normally we'd just fly. Smaller mammals take the basket up but…" Guzal let the explanation die on his lips. "Nothing like a pleasant stroll through the woods, eh?"

On this side of the river, Cynder noticed, the forest was clammy, slick with moisture—almost warm and humid compared to the opposites cold and damp.

Brown moss covered the ground, muffling their steps and replacing the smell of fish with a perfume of sediment and peat. Shoulder height ferns crowded her line of sight, making it difficult to see anything through their swaying drapes. Occasionally a drop of rain would manage to navigate through the thick canopy of leaves, dripping onto their unsuspecting foreheads or necks.

Even in the forest, the fog persisted. It crept across the path, making it difficult to walk in the places where the trail dipped. The same silence she had felt back in Yarrow, haunting and doleful, still lingered as if it were following them.

The others must have felt it too because no one let their guard down.

They continued on for a while, making idle banter to distract one another, aside from Cynder who listened to the surroundings.

A twig snapped, the sound like a femur cracking, followed by something that might have been leaves rustling.

She begged her ears to hear more but the overwhelming chatter around her drowned out any chance of hearing it.

"Everyone quiet," she whisper-yelled, searching the trees.

No one spoke, barely breathing for fear of alerting whatever might have lurked. The wind hummed, ears ringing in the silence, leaves swayed.

Nothing

They waited quietly, tilling the dirt with their claws. The woods remained hushed, and the fog that hung in the air made eerie figures out of shadows, playing tricks on her eyes.

Still nothing.

As if her unease had finally broken the spell of recklessness, everyone seemed to become consciously aware of what danger could be pursuing them. No one spoke louder than a whisper, straining to hear anything in the oppressive silence.

"I'm not sure I like this stroll through the woods anymore," said Finch, sniffing the air experimentally. "We're getting close."

"How can you tell?" Cynder asked.

"The smell," answered Daheel, lacking his usual warmth.

Inhaling, Cynder let the scents waft through her nose, sighing out through her mouth. There was a smell to the air, over the damp petrichor. It had given an unmistakable tang to the atmosphere. Like battery ore kept out in the open for too long—a polarized sweetness that left a film on her tongue—of metal eaten by rust.

"I'm with you on this, you know," Guzal suddenly said, surprising her when he whispered in her ear. "About coming here, I mean. Daheel is usually pretty gung-ho when it comes to these things."

"But not you?" she asked skeptically. "I seem to recall you being part of Poetry's planning committee for all this."

"Just a touch," he said, rubbing the back of his neck with his tail. "I'm a soldier. Freethinkers aren't the kind of demographic the academy produces these days. We follow orders."

"Even when lives are at stake?"

"Especially then. Someone says jump, I ask how high," he sighed. "Besides. If I didn't go along I knew Poetry and Daheel would just go on without me. At least this way I'm involved."

Cynder smiled. "And you're not just agreeing with me out of pity?"

He grinned. "Weeeelll…" Cynder scoffed quietly, a hint of amusement on her face. "I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Poetry has always had an ambitious streak. She gets it from her mother, but I blame her youth. That and being cooped up in City limits for so long"—a deft nod—"You're a nice change of pace," he finished.

She warmed at the compliment. "At least someone believes in me."

Daheel looked at her, questions in his eyes. "What do you mean?"

"I mean I'm not exactly an idol. I don't have a following and if I did, I'm not sure I could trust myself to lead it. People don't look at me and see a warrior, not like—not like if I were Spyro." It still hurt to say his name, to think of him. She wished anything could distract her from the memory of the look on his face as he told her he didn't want her with him. "Him and Poetry: they have this gravity to them that just sucks you into their orbit. It's full of charm and confidence and authority. I don't have that."

Guzal grunted, something like understanding written in the tilt of his brow. "You're out of the loop on a lot of things—I get it. But you've got experience behind you, knowledge and skill that takes years to acquire. People look up to that sort of thing. Poetry is a fighter and a diplomat. She plays to her strengths. You just need to start playing to yours."

His advice reminded her of Poetry's—days ago when the two of them had just met. They'd been a comfort then; they were a comfort now. She had listened then because she had nowhere to go. This time, she listened because something kept telling her that she needed to hear it.

Feelings she had thought well behind her—from all the years she had spent running from them— suddenly seemed to be flying at her on a tailwind.

Life had been simpler when the only things she had time to think about were where she was going to sleep for the night, or whether or not she was going to have a warm meal before the next.

Now though, she couldn't just worry about herself anymore. There always seemed to be plenty of room for others but none for herself. Every second felt like a battle. Spyro always seemed to perform best under stress, but her… the responsibility had always felt more a burden. It had the tendency of making every moment feel like it had to be thrust upon her like she was some kind of passenger in her own life. Every decision she refused to make was made for her.

It seemed like years before the brigade encroached upon an old metal barbican and portcullis gate. It belonged to an entirely metal citadel—every inch of it flaked in wet rust, tainting the dirt around it a bloody red—that looked like it had left the world of the living ages before any of them had ever been born. Only a few overturned carts laden with rotting foods and provisions suggested recent life. The gate had been closed, and wouldn't be opened except by someone from within.

The rusted battlements, like the mountains, loomed overhead, immense and morose. All was quiet except for the wind that howled through the embrasure windows, halls dark beyond their sills. Cannon noses peaked out above the wall, mouths frozen in silent threat; vigilant in their watch.

Cynder pushed up to Poetry and Daheel. "How do we get in?"

Daheel squinted. "Can't we just fly over?" Virga'al answered with an admonishing slap of the tail. "Ow. Piss off, nobody's here."

"Oh really—Would you care to test that theory?"

"Well we can't just go in through the gate, can we?"

"No," Poetry began, letting the rest of them crowd in to hear. "The western and northern drain pipes. Those are our safest ways in, they run under the entire fort. All we have to do is follow them until we come out in a hallway or…"

"Or what?" Gazal looked like he wasn't sure he wanted an answer.

"Or a bathroom."

Guzal's shoulders slumped, a little less happy to have volunteered to come along. Agreement disclosures aside, the groups were divided again—with Cynder, Poetry, Guzal, Finch, Virga'al, and Zirin taking the west drain pipe, while Daheel and the rest took the north drainpipe.

Navigating the edge of the fortress, keeping behind the treeline, Cynder couldn't help but continue glancing at the battlements, expecting to be spotted by one of the Skral. The feeling of unease refused to fade, a tickling sensation that liked to zip from the base of her tail to the tip of her horns. The onslaught of rain did little to help.

The west drainpipe hung off the edge of the overlook, situated along a narrow cliff face. The path to it was steep and narrow, forcing them to cling to the walls, red and brown rust falling off in flakes that stuck between Cynder's scales. She grimaced at the touch of it, cold and damp against her hips, wings, and shoulders, wishing she could fling it off of her with her wind element. But every time she tried to call the winds to her, the reins seemed to slip from her grasp. A sneaking suspicion told her it was the aura of this place, acrid and foreign. Not even the air could help her here.

Out from beneath the forest canopy's protection, the rain seemed to pelt her from every angle. In Yarrow, the rain had been gentle, a constant drizzle, whereas here it stung her eyes and made the narrow path slick with silt and mud.

To her immediate right: the fortress; to her immediate left: a treacherous cliff face that dropped back into the valley. Even for a dragon, the sight brought a kernel of vertigo.

Down below, the Chagra River trickled through the valley, slow and mute. She couldn't hear it over the sound of rain pummeling the fortress, and the barest hint of an outline of a bridge could be glimpsed through the fog—but the water of the river still shimmered. Like a river viper in a murky stream waiting for its prey, Cynder felt like the river was watching them, eyeing its next meal.

They moved at a snail's pace, thunder cracking overhead; it echoed in the valley. A shadow loomed—a fortress bastion that jutted out from the main outer wall—providing a bit of respite from the deluge. The drainpipe sat beneath it, just wide enough for a dragon to fit in if they crawled.

Rusted shut and caked in filth, the barred hole cover refused to budge when Virga'al tried to pry it open. He grunted, "That's not going anywhere."

Cynder scowled. "Can't you shatter the lock?"

Poetry shook her head. "Not on this metal. This is Mütallium—Muting Metal. Elements don't affect it," she clarified.

"I've never heard of it."

"That's because it's ancient. Hardly any of this stuff exists. This fort has been around much longer than Yarrow has, might even say it's the reason Yarrow exists," Guzal chimed in.

"This is the whole reason I brought us here. With a fort like this, Shiverum can weather another siege." Poetry smirked. "Maybe two."

Cynder was surprised to realize she had to resist the temptation to smile; Poetry's enthusiasm had a way of infecting your own. "Then how do we get in?"

"Your shadow element. You can slip right through the bars and open the latch from inside."

Staring at the gate, Cynder hesitated. Unsure why she got the distinct feeling that entering the fort wasn't wise. She said, "I don't know if I can."

Poetry guffawed. "At least try."

Persistent, the feeling refused to go away. Cynder let out an unintentional whine. The sensation of something foreboding continued to grow. We shouldn't be here, she wanted to say.

Poetry lightened her tone. "Listen, if you can't do it, that's fine. We'll fly back; no harm done—but I need you to try." Cynder looked at her, into those striking yellow eyes. "And I need you to trust me."

There was a moment of silence where Cynder realized she could have ended all of this—could have set her paw down and stood her ground. But with the rain filling her ears, dripping down her scales, and the expectant looks in everyone's eyes, each one seemed to both tear her down and lend her strength at the same time. What finally settled it was the answer to the question of What would Spyro do?

She didn't know, Cynder realized. Nor did she care. Spyro wasn't here. He couldn't make this decision. Whether it was out of spite or some new sense of agency in her life, Cynder finally came to the realization that she didn't want Spyro to be the one to make her decisions.

The rain filled the long moments with its torrential downfall and the trees shivered beneath its intensity, creaking at the storm's fury. Lightning cracked, splitting the sky with a gnarled smile, clouds boiled and churned—an endless sea of thundering, storming grey over a valley of green mountains and fog.

Cynder sighed. "Okay," she said, "I trust you." And it was the truth, she did trust her—perhaps not her judgment, but her determination. And feeding off that conviction to see things through to the end, Cynder wanted some of it for her own.

When she called them, the shadows came, wrapping around her—so warm, so inviting as they whispered at her return. It had been so long since she had called on them like this. It felt sensational: a weightless, untouchable feeling, not like when she called on the wind. This was different. Intoxicating. A constant fluttering in her stomach like she was freefalling. The world hummed around her—a brooding tuneless melody—the trees, the ground, the sky, the rain, everything aside from the cold, rusted Mütallium walls.

The metal sang no song.

Around her, the other dragons—an array of shifting energy, strands connected to one another like chains to prisoners—watched in rapt interest. But she, untethered, free, and able to control the shadows with ease, could pull them to her like a harpist plucks strings. Only... she wasn't just playing the strings, she was the strings—and the song, and the audience, and the theatre. She was the dragon in the moon and the shadows were her puppets to command.

One of the prisoners said something to her. Open the grate, it mumbled; male, deep-voiced—Guzal. She obeyed, slipping between the bars like smoke, making sure to never touch the songless metal. Another prisoner shouted in triumph; female, excited. Young—Poetry.

With sudden clarity of what she was meant to do, Cynder shifted back, chaining herself to the world. Solid and heavy, it clung to her. Everything tilted, falling out of focus. Something wet and soft pushed against her paws, stench creeping through her nostrils like worms. She gagged.

"Oh my gods, that was amazing. I've never seen a dragon do that! I mean, I've read about it but," Poetry broke off into quiet, hysterical laughter Guzal meanwhile, gave her a small wink and confident smile.

If she weren't ankle-deep in black water she might have felt humbled. Cynder sent a ghost of a smile back, breathless, trying not to puke. Why didn't it smell this bad outside—or maybe it had and it wasn't the smell that was making her sick. Thoughts for later.

Popping the latch, Cynder grunted as she pushed against the Mütal grating. It strained, unleashing a scream of protest as it flipped upwards and outwards. They were in.

Inside, Cynder trailed in the back with Guzal ahead of her with the rest of their team between him and Poetry—who took the front thanks to her necklace, which shined with the soft glow of white light. The path forward would have been pitch dark except if not for that necklace—or the occasional glimpse of the above-ground world through small, overhead drain grates.

At some point in the trek through the sewers, Virga'al, Finch, and Zirin split off from the group to unlatch the northern drainpipe for the other half of the team. Once inside the fort, everyone was to meet in the bailey of the fortress courtyard. This left Cynder responsible for maintaining a silencing barrier around everyone as they made their way through the wretched filth of the tunnels.

Miserable and cold and desperately trying to nose blind herself to the ammonia stench of piss and feces, Cynder followed, reliving the feeling of using her shadows. Part of her wanted to use them again now—to slither through any one of the occasional, smaller drain grates—and escape the awful smell, but the same feeling of dread from earlier resurfaced, more forceful this time, ominous and whispering.

Moving deeper, the sound of rain and thunder dulled, strangled by the same choking silence from in the woods and Yarrow. Only the sound of dragons moving through refuse-filled water provided any sort of disruption to the ever-consuming void around them.

Uncomfortable, Cynder tried to distract herself by thinking of anything. Only one topic surfaced—at least, only one that she could bear to speak aloud.

"Guzal," she prodded.

"Hm?"

"What is this place—what is it called?"

"The sewer pipe, I'd imagine."

"I mean the fort. Does it have a name?"

He chuckled to himself. "Oh, of course. Everyone calls it The Mirefall—but if you were hoping for an originating name, I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint.

"No one knows it?"

He shrugged. "As I said, this place is ancient. I'm certain there's not a creature alive who knows the name of this place."

I think I might know someone, Cynder noted, a thought taking root, but before she could press further, they stopped moving.

Restless, and eager to get out of the sewer, Cynder voiced, "What's going on up there—why have we stopped?"

"We're at a porthole," Poetry said.

Looking up, Cynder could make out Poetry's white-furred mane as the female pushed, grunting, against the cover. Nothing happened for a few seconds until the shriek of rusty metal, followed by a heavy thud, had Cynder gritting her teeth. Please, for the love of ancients, have nothing feel that.

Guzal and Poetry must have been sending up similar prayers as well because no one attempted to make a move for the opening. Slowly, they all crawled out from the small confines of the pipe, counting every moment that the fort didn't come crashing down on them with death or capture, as a blessing.

Out of the sewage pipe, they stood in a long curving hallway made of Mütallium—from the doors that lined either side of the hall to the chains that held them shut. Where there wasn't a door there were tool racks, corroded and abandoned, as well as burnt-out torch stubs that looked like they hadn't been replaced for weeks.

On and on it stretched, past the edge of what was visible until it faded off into the black.

"At least it's not a bathroom," Guzal mused, then clamped his mouth shut.

The silence barrier was gone, Cynder realized in the same moment that the others did. She tried to recall it, to form the bubble of air in her mind and bring it into existence but the tendrils of wind slipped from her grasp like a wet eel.

"I can't bring it back. It—it must be the metal. We're too far in." Cynder frowned.

There was no echo, only muted emptiness. It was as if the air here refused to hold the memory of her voice. The place practically ate sound.

Experimentally, Cynder picked up a stray piece of metal that had rusted off and fallen to the ground. The others watched with raised eyebrows, then blatant horror as she threw the chunk of metal off into the bleak void of darkness beyond their small puddle of light.

Nothing. No bounce. No echo. It was as if the world fell apart to the abyss beyond the edge of Poetry's small island of light.

Cynder desperately wished for a light source brighter than Poetry's dim necklace, feeling that anything could be waiting for them in darkness, beyond the impenetrable veil of black. It should have scared her, made her frightened of the dark. Instead, it called to her, beckoned sweetly with the alluring false sense of security.

They moved slowly at first, treating every slight disturbance—chains rattling in their wake as they passed, a rat scurrying down a drain hole in the floor, the fall of rust from the walls and ceiling—as a sign of incoming danger. But nothing ever came, a small comfort weighed against a tide of dread.

Cynder half expected to find the chunk of metal she had thrown suspended in the air, but as they passed down the corridor, she spotted it—resting on the ground against a drain in the floor.

When she felt it was safe, she spoke again, brushing her shoulder against Guzal as they walked, whispering his name. "Is there anything known about this place?"

She awaited his answer.

When he replied, his voice was grave and hoarse, a cut through the silence despite its careful volume. "Scholars believe it may have been used as an old slave trade outpost in a previous age. For experiments and smuggling hostages and criminals up into the Chasgrym waste, far to the north—although I don't think it was called that back then—where a similar fortress would receive them. From there the captives would be redistributed."

Feeling as if she were there, Cynder imagined the nightmare of the fort—chains wrapped around her tail and neck, her paws pinned to the floor, screaming as she was tortured, brutalized. Even pleas for mercy wouldn't echo down these halls. It was a place engineered by monsters, and she could sense the lingering horrors of their cruelty, could feel the imprints of it fermenting in the seemingly endless halls of rust.

Before the silence could choke the words out of her, Cynder spoke. "I thought the fortress was in use before the attack. This place looks abandoned."

"We don't use this part of the fortress very often—doesn't seem right to."

"Were you stationed here?"

"Everyone is stationed here at some point." Guzal's tone was leaden. "A rite of passage for Paladins, you could say. But it's something about this place, once you've been here long enough, it starts to take things away from you—like it's leeching off your soul. Your joy."

"Perhaps that should be put in the brochure," Cynder joked, hoping to lighten the drake's mood and scare off the ghosts dancing in his eyes. She earned a smile and a sigh of a laugh.

They continued in silence after that, the darkness devouring their words, and every time Cynder felt like speaking to him again, it was like pushing against a wall.

Rounding a corner, her restlessness multiplied. The hallway—cold and desolate, with an ethereal underground breeze—narrowed, forcing her to fall in single file behind Guzal once more, and tail the pack like a lamb.

While she wasn't exactly the talkative type, not speaking left her uneasy, grinding her teeth, and with Poetry's irregular behavior, the sensation was amplified—nothing felt as it should have.

Petulantly, Cynder imagined the Shiverum dragoness to be in a similar state. Talking was like breathing for Poetry—natural and occasionally loud and in heavy spurts.

When the path widened again, Cynder pushed to the front, brushing shoulders with Guzal until she was standing beside Poetry, the dragoness's mouth a severe line. Before them, the path diverged, splitting off in four different directions and with every corridor dissolving into darkness, the dragon beside her hesitated.

"Do you know which way to go?" Cynder prompted.

Poetry glanced down the corridors. "No?" She said, her throat tight with distress. "You didn't happen to bring a map did you?"

"You're kidding."

Poetry smirked.

"Does your sarcasm hold no bounds?"

"It's a ghastly amount for sure, but it's not boundless, I can assure you. If I'm correct then that path there"—she pointed to the right-most hallway—"will take us to the bailey. With luck, Daheel and the others will have beaten us there."

Grunting at the mention of his brother's name, Daheel shouldered his way forward. "My brother may be a bit slow in some areas but following orders is not one of them." He looked between the two of them, then the corridors. "It's the middle hallway, by the way."

Frowning, Poetry scraped her claws along the floor. "Excellent. I knew that."

Something seized Cynders spine, prickling, wrenching her attention away with a cold hand. And when the sensation faded, it left a frigid voice in her ear—muttering in tongues, repeating, running the words together until each one became indecipherable from the rest—the kind she had never heard before.

The language made little sense, like the crazed ramblings of a dark fever dream whispered in her ear. She got the distinct feeling that she was eavesdropping on a conversation not meant for mortal ears. Listening to them pushed a weight on her chest until the rhythm of her heartbeat drowned them out. Something touched her shoulder. The world collided.

Memory.

A burning lance of white flame through the chest. A bleeding heart with pale white petals. A throne left unset. Laughter. Screams. Betrayal.

When Cynder finally came back, Guzal had his tail on her shoulder, Poetry had a strange look in her eyes, obvious worry there, and perhaps a touch of fear—Cynder could taste it, including her own.

"Did you hear that?" she asked, casting her eyes about the hallway as if she might again catch a glimpse of the images that flashed in front of her eyes.

"Hear what?" Poetry asked, forcing a level of calm into her voice.

When Cynder didn't answer immediately, Poetry took a step closer. "Your shivering," she noted.

Cynder looked at her, wishing that the words of an explanation would come. "It's cold in here," she said. "Let's keep going."

Guzal and Poetry shared what Cynder knew must have been a worried glance and felt her cheeks darken, suddenly embarrassed for having said anything at all.

"I'm ready to get out into some open air," Cynder offered weakly.

The distraction must have worked because both dragons nodded.

"Ancients forbid Daheel beats us to the Bailey," Guzal grunted. "He'll never let me hear the end of it."

"Fantasizing about saving the day, Guzal?" Poetry teased. "Or just eager to see Keza again?"

"Hardly," he scoffed, although some red did creep into his scales. "I've got a reputation for always being the first on the scene. Can't let Daheel sully it with a defeat."

"I'm sure Keza will be very impressed, Guzal."

"Don't get a big head, PT. I'm still looking for a rematch of earlier."

The smile was practically audible in Poetry's voice. "No need to get so puffy. My head will remain just as it is."

Cynder heard very little of what was spoken after that. The whispers continued to linger on, following her around the same way a cloud of agitated gnats liked to follow those who walked through their swarm.

The chain of ice that had wrapped itself around her stomach and spine tightened, drawing her sense of ease to a needlepoint. Instinct had long taken over, heightening every one of her five senses until even the smallest of sounds and movements were enough to make her flinch.

After taking a winding set of stairs upwards, the team finally passed through a wide hallway that looked as if it must have been a more appropriated portion of the fortress. Rooms and doors were left open instead of chained shut, stacked to the ceiling with supplies, weapons, usable materials.

"There's enough provisions here to last a full season. Why abandon it?" Guzal murmured aloud.

"I don't think it was by choice," Poetry answered, ducking under a nest of cobwebs big enough to knit a sweater with.

"There's no sign of forced entry or stolen supplies," he continued. "Skral ransack villages and leave little more than a crumb. Why get stingy now?"

"I don't know. But whatever happened here," Poetry contended, "It wasn't good."

Looking over to the dragoness, Cynder found Poetry staring at her paws, toying with something on the floor. Cynder shuddered.

"More talons and horns," Poetry noted absently.

Blood decorated the wall around the area where they stood, coagulating along with the flakes of rust. Clumps stuck to the wall in hardened bubbles. From what Cynder could make of the patterns, the kill had been quick but messy—a severing twist of muscle.

Like a predator with its prey.

The rest of the walk down the hallway was spent in cold silence. There were more stains along the wall, Cynder knew, from the way Poetry or Guzal noticeably slowed when they came across one.

More talons. More horns. More blood. Nothing else.

Decades past, during the final years of her self exile, Cynder had come to loathe the sound of rain. The wetter seasons always brought a profuse measure of it. Plowed fields meant planted ones, and for every planted field meant at least three days of solid downpour.

That made finding shelter even greater a stress than it did food. In the harvest times, she could afford to be a little lazier with her lodgings; occasional evenings under the stars kept her mind free and circulated. But nights spent out in the damp did horrors for her bones and were the culprit to more than one of her undignified bouts with nose-bite fever.

So it was always with a rush and critical energy that Cynder tried to find cover at the nearest inn or tavern when her winds brought back warning of a threatening storm off in the distance.

Needless to say, it was with surprising awareness that Cynder realized she wanted to whoop for joy when the soft patter of rain managed to find its way to her ears through the suppressive gloom of The Mirefall's dank corridors.

She visually sighed and heard the others do the same when their small team finally came upon a grand archway opening to the outside world. They passed through a curtain of rain, draped from one side of the yawning entrance to the other like a sheer veil dividing one world from the next.

Everything was suddenly loud enough to make Cynder's ears ring, a surreal juxtaposition that made the backs of her eyes burn and the temples at the root of her horns throb. She was only grateful not to be the only one suffering; a look at her companions revealed a similar stricken state.

"Blinding Light of the ancients," Guzal swore, only just managing to catch himself before slipping in the mud.

"We're just light struck," Cynder hissed out.

Only a moment passed before she was finally allowed to open her eyes fully, blinking away the tears that rapidly filled her lids. One quick scan of their surroundings.

"I don't see the others," Cynder observed. "Should we wait here for them?"

"No," Poetry answered, wiping the water from her eyes with a wing. "Search the grounds. It must be getting close to noon by now. The assembly will be starting soon and I want to have enough time to wrap this place up in a nice big bow before we present it to the council."

Guzal barked out a laugh, shaking his head in either exasperation or an attempt to free himself of the Mirefall's lingering after-effects. Cynder couldn't tell.

The three of them stayed close together, following the others' footsteps through the bailey's assortment of stalls and buildings—shambled storehouses, a smithy with a cold forge and unkept tools. Swords, spears, daggers, and scimitars littered the ground along with piecemeal armor.

Braziers and damp pyres of ashen wood stippled the muddy lanes and alleys. They crumbled in the rain, some of them still smoking as their black ash grew like a stain in murky puddles. Stronger than Yarrow had smelled of fish, the air here smelled of smoke. Coupled with the trace lingerings of blood and fear, not to mention the stench of the sewers that seemed to cling to them like a miasma with an agenda, Cynder had to wonder if she'd ever be free of the odors—or if they would follow her to the grave.

"Stars of Fate," Guzal suddenly swore, startling both her and Poetry. Turning to look at him, Cynder found the drake fighting a battle against a knot-weighted fishnet that had entangled itself around his claws, the buoy's dragging through the mud.

Poetry laughed. "It would seem we caught ourselves a strapping young drake, Cynder."

Cynder hummed. "Should we throw him back?"

"You two are hilarious," He feigned, cutting himself free. "Seriously, you should consider a standup routine at the Laughing Badger."

"Oh please," Poetry scoffed. "I could do much better than the Laughing Badger."

"A dumpster in a back alley perhaps?"

"Insubordination."

Shaking rain from her wings, Cynder kept an eye on her surroundings. The inside ward was remarkably larger than what it had appeared to be from beyond its walls. Like an illusion of underestimation had been cast upon the place—the fortress wanted to be attacked.

Walking past a semi toppled lodge that must have belonged to the fort's smaller mammalian division of soldiers, she raised her head to look at the battlements wall-walk. Empty except for the slumbering forms of the fortress cannons, the walls crenels stretched to the sky like teeth ready to snap shut around her at any time.

The whispers roiled; Cynder shivered.

Eventually, finding themselves at the heart of the citadel, Cynder and the rest appeared to be in some kind of centralized training yard. A watchtower she swore hadn't been visible from outside, towered over them, the peak of it surpassing even the clouds.

All around them though, centralized around the sky-scraping pillar in a dizzyingly haphazard pattern, were gravemarkers.

Planted in the ground like saplings left to rot, none of them bore any real graves as if there hadn't been enough to be considered worth burying. Just a flimsy bundle of sticks in the ground.

No name.

No memory.

Beside her, Cynder heard Poetry suck in a strangled breath. When she looked it was to see the dragoness fighting some unseen argument with someone no one else could hear, the look of a dragon who expected more of herself than perhaps the rest of the world altogether. How many times had she seen Spyro with that same look on his face? Lips pursed, eyes flickering, shoulders tight enough to bend steel, and claws that rent the soil to tilled earth.

Guzal, on the other hand, only stared—pain and lost hope in his wilted gaze.

He knew people stationed here, Cynder realized. All of the Paladins did. It's why they all came, why everyone was so uneasy coming back to the fortress.

"What was their name?" Cynder asked him.

Silence.

Then, "Kodrik," he said, the name like an unanswered prayer falling from his lips. She felt it shatter on the mud.

She nudged him with her wing, laying it over his when he still refused to move. A trembling sigh fluttered out of him.

Louder, the whispers grew. The dark voices eddied, swirling in the air around her horns, conjuring images of herself in a grave, limbs pinned to her sides in Mortis statum—Death Position—as she tried to scream.

Dirt flooded her mouth, spilling down her throat, sticking to her eyes. All around her, wriggling within the earth, maggots wormed their way towards her, eagerly awaiting their next meal. Panic took hold. Cynder's heartbeat thundered in her skull as helplessness brought tears. Her chest beat a rapid tap dance of shrieking notes in her ears. She couldn't breathe, gagged with every attempt until bile filled her esophagus, stinging her eyes and nose. Hyperventilating—lungs tight and pushing in desperation—she sucked in more dirt, her limbs and muscles burned with adrenaline, slowly retreating to spasms. Twitching, tightening, like the first onset of rigor mortis.

The darkness crowded in. White. Black. White. Black.

The whispers carried her away.

And back into the present—with Guzal under her wing and Poetry making her way towards some kind of stately building she might have expected a superior officer to spend three-quarters of their day enclosed in.

Cynder followed, tugging Guzal along with her tail. Gentle, coaxing; she could still feel him breaking.

The fear of being buried alive. Where had it come from? A lingering scent. But not Poetry's—or Guzal's. So why had she been able to taste it so vividly?

It had been years since she'd felt visions like this.

Empathies, Spyro had called them—hallucinations that came when she lived out a shared memory of a creature's pathological fear. It shows that you care, he used to say. That she wasn't the monster people thought her to be.

Cynder knew differently. From what she could understand, the visions came based on the strength of the fear that produced the aroma, not the emotions it might have leveraged out of her. Empathy had little say in the matter, but she hadn't had the heart to tell Spyro otherwise. Sporadic and often short-lived as they were, she had always been ashamed of them—and the rejuvenating strength that seemed to always fill her sails after experiencing one.

So whose fear had she been living out?

There was little time to ponder the thought before Cynder entered the officer's building to find Poetry frantically ransacking every recess and corner, practical or otherwise. She mumbled under her breath, virtually pulling a cabinet door off its hinges in an attempt to scour the documents and portfolios within.

There appeared to be a remarkably scarce amount of paper, with most of the records being recorded on dried sheets of pigskin, or paper substitutes. There were a great deal of memory crystals, several slabs for chalkboards, and less than three whittling scrolls.

"Capiteer Sheoba—portcullis monitor; visitation 23:00 hours {No Departure}"

"Quartermaster Jugaffi demands weapon logistics, ration reports, and mail deliveries"

"Yarrow patrol team Virgil 08:00—19:00. Status report; unclear."

Everything else on the chalkboard was unintelligible, messily written, and smeared. The rest of the room was just as disorderly.

Maps of continents both familiar and foreign, of Mirefall and Shiverum, Warfang and neighboring cities, decorated the walls—tacked with pins, weather reports, jet streams, crop rotations, tenant quotas, and other information Cynder couldn't quite interpret.

"Where is it?!" Poetry suddenly shouted, startling both Cynder and Guzal.

"Where's what?" She asked.

"The logbook," —more quiet mumbling— "protocol mandates that a logbook be kept in the commanding officer's quarters at all times."

As if understanding something Cynder didn't about the gravity of the situation, Guzal began to search the room as well, just as frantic as Poetry now.

"You were here the longest, Guzal," Poetry began. "Where was it usually kept?"

"I—I don't know. The only time I ever saw the inside of this office was when I got in trouble for nights on the town in Yarrow."

Poetry huffed, plumes of frost billowing from her nostrils to match the iciness of her stare. Guzal looked inclined to swallow his tongue.

"That logbook may be the only thing in this fortress that can tell us what happened here," Cynder heard Poetry say aloud, most likely for her benefit.

The whispers riled—not that they had ever left—growing loud with fervency. She began to hear screams, and for a moment thought they might have belonged to the other half of their group. An ice-cold vice gripped the base of her neck and refused to let go. But a glance at Poetry and Guzal told her that she must have been imagining them. Still, the wailings lingered, phantom sighs on the breath of a damp breeze that, to her, sounded like the distant shouts of a crowd on a drowning ship, but distorted—as if she were hearing them through a thin texture of unbroken water.

"I've got it!" Guzal suddenly shouted, his voice cracking like a whip.

Together, the three of them huddled over the book, with Poetry flipping past pages without an ounce of gentleness spared for the already decrepit logs. There were recounts of events from centuries past, riddled with stains and holes from moths and paper mites as well as more than one missing page.

As the events became more recent, the condition of the pages improved but only slightly. Watching Poetry feather past the pages, Cynder bit off a sneeze as a cloud of dust puffed into the air.

"Lots of shipping transactions, patrol and scout reports from before the attack," Poetry mentioned aloud. "And then they just stop—on the day before Shiverum was attacked," she finished.

"They must have been hit first. There would have been no warning for them," Guzal mumbled, his mind somewhere else.

"Still!" Poetry said. "Mirefall is a fortress. One with military ordinance and siege breaking countermeasures."

The ice grip on Cynder's neck tightened. "There would have been signs," she agreed, nodding stiffly. "Of battle. Of a struggle, But instead, it's as if the entire valley simply dropped dead. Nothing here indicates anything other than a massacre."

"There are pages missing," Guzal pointed out. "Blank ones maybe. Why only rip a few pages out and leave the rest."

No one spoke for a while.

Then, "Continue searching," Poetry ordered, closing the book. Cynder left before the miasma of dust became a nightmare for her nostrils—only to find herself back in the rain.

Up above, the tower through clouds still loomed, looking down on her with its nonexistent gaze as she approached. Somewhere to the left of her, Cynder saw Guzal enter one of the many quartering cabins that surrounded the clearing. Poetry did the same.

She knew that perhaps she should have done the same but couldn't find the courage in herself to rummage through another dragon's belongings. Even if it was in search of clues. Just being here in the fortress felt like a violation.

She wanted to be out of the rain, to be above the clouds and feel the sun drying her wings. Opening the door, heavier by far than any door she had ever opened, she entered the tower. Once again, as if she were back in the confines of the fortress proper, darkness and numb silence enveloped her.

Until her eyes adjusted, and unexpectedly she could see more than a meter in front of her, up a spiral staircase wide enough for two dragons to walk abreast. There was a centralized core that spanned up the center of the tower with occasional landings for a single door across from a single embrasure window, and a single murder hole. Most of the lower doors lead to storerooms used for weapons, grindstones, sparring dummies, as well as a few extra provisions for sleeping bags and tents. The upper rooms had a greater tendency to be empty, little more than a few unfilled crates that could have been additional storage and an entire floor of empty jars of burning oil.

The exit to the roof of the tower was a wooden trap door that bore more than its fair share of torment. Claw marks and spears and blades and small claws riddled its underside, chunks of wood missing and littering the floor around Cynder's paws. It didn't take much effort from her part—mostly because it hadn't been made of Mutallium—to shatter the lock and open the trap door.

Light filled her vision, forcing her to shut her eyes from its sheer intensity until spots danced in her vision from how tightly she had closed them. Had anyone been there to see her she had no doubt how foolish she must have looked, opening and closing her eyes with quick, tear-filled blinks. When she finally managed to condition herself to the brightness of a world she could have forgotten existed, Cynder felt her breath leave her lungs.

The sky was a symphony. A practical phantasmagoria of pinks and oranges and purples. The clouds, like sugar cotton, frolicked on a thermal current of wind that could have taken her to anywhere in a world of dreams. The sun, like the yolk of a cracked chicken egg, nestled itself on the horizon as it slowly eased itself into slumber. The moon battled for dominance, turning the expanse of rumbling clouds below her into an ocean of toiling waves that flashed in anger.

It was early morning when they had left Shiverum and they couldn't have been gone for more than an hour and a half, but Cynder had given up trying to calculate time-based on the position of the sun and moon long ago. It had become too difficult in the currently discordant day and night cycles.

It's unnatural, she tried reminding herself. But even unnatural things tended to be beautiful.

Perhaps the sunset would linger, Cynder found herself hoping—and let the moon travail angrily in the sky. The thought of being at Mirefall at any time of night left a pit in her stomach and an itch on her scales. The whispers screamed their agreement.

Cynder crashed back to reality, realizing she was still halfway standing on the landing and the ladder of the trap door. Stepping up and out, she exposed herself fully to the splendor of a liberated sky.

She called the wind and smiled when it answered—like an old friend greeting her in a chance encounter. The cold still nipped at her nose but the warmth of the sun vibrated through her scales. A pleasant shudder and inelegant sigh escaped her.

She didn't want to leave this place. Correction: she didn't want to go back down below, beneath the clouds in the rain, away from the sun. Down there, where the fortress seemed to watch and pluck at her, she felt like one of the prisoners Guzal had spoken of.

Nevertheless, she forced herself to turn away from the warmth of the setting sun.

Only to find herself looking at a corpse. A real corpse, a full one. Not just claws or horns. Not that there would have been horns anyways. It was the corpse of a wolf, brown with grey spotting around his eyes and ears. He wore piecemeal armor, torn and battered in some places, with bloodstains decorating the front of his breastplate and fur. Crumpled in one of his hands, too big to be fully concealed, yellow shreds of paper peeked out.

Gently, as if afraid to disturb him, Cynder pried the papers from his hand.

The notes were neat, evenly spaced, and succinct. The writing of a soldier.

"The first we knew something was wrong was when an entire patrol of dragons turned up missing. That was the first we knew. Dragons had been turning up missing days before then, but the commander hadn't made anything about it because it wasn't anything out of the ordinary. Yarrow has that effect on people. Sometimes you just need to get away.

Nobody started to get a clue until old Gadrun stopped visiting from his boat home higher up the Chagras. Gadrun was a local, one of the loyal ones. Never stepped a paw out of this valley since the day he could walk on them.

Everything fell apart after that. Everyone woke up one night to the sounds of screams somewhere down in the hamlet. The commander sent an investigation crew twenty strong to see what was going on. None of them came back.

We could hear the screams come from anywhere after that—in the woods, down in the valley, even in the halls. Every team sent to look for them turned up missing.

One of the dragons, Kodrik, brought back a set of horns and talons one day. Then another. And another. That's when we realized we were being hunted. They don't like the sharp parts, I guess. We sent a messenger to Shiverum but… I don't think he ever made it.

Whatever these creatures are, whatever is hunting us, they're smart. They hunted the dragons first, leaving just the mammals behind. What chance did we have?

They don't like fire we learned, and they only seem to hunt at night and in the shadows. We made braziers and bonfires all around the fort, and no soldier went into the halls without a torch on hand, but after a day or three, we started to run low on oil. We could see thunderheads rolling in and we knew that burning wood wasn't going to be enough to last through a real downpour. The gods must have decided our fate early because no amount of prayer seemed to lessen the wrath of the storm. The screams were the worst that night."

The writing became messy, almost a frantic scrawl as Cynder read on.

"I figured out how they do it—the screams. They harvest them, using the last agonizing moments of their victims' wails to lure you away. I locked myself up here, away from the others. I can't trust anybody else. They bang on the door. I can hear them screaming for help but I won't fall for it.

DON'T TRUST THE SCREAMS. THEY ARE CUNNING. SO CUNNING. DON'T TRUST THEM. DON'T TRUST ANYONE. THEY COULD BE ANYTHING. I WON'T LET THEM HAVE ME. THEY CANT HAVE MY SCREAM. THEY CAN'T. THEY WON'T."

Shuddering, Cynder forced herself to stop, the last lines rereading themselves to her in her head. She looked at the wolf again, surveying him closely. The blood that spilled down his cuirass, dried and coagulated, seemed to have spilled from a wound in his neck. It wasn't until she discovered the long seax dagger cradled in the wolf's other palm that the reality of what she read finally set in.

"Fate's stars," Cynder swore, "what happened here?"

That's when she heard the first scream.

It cut through the din of rain like a battle cry. Cynder's stomach twisted. When the last note of terror finally faded from the air was when the whispers began to shriek at her, a note of urgency to them this time—like they knew something only she suspected at.

She didn't waste time running down the stairs again and instead flung herself over the crenulated teeth of the watchtower railing. For the better half of a second, the world was a smiling, beautiful place—then she was diving through the clouds—before it vanished like a vaulted memory.

Her wings furled, catching the wind in just enough time to make her landing less than unpleasant. The mud sucked at her paws when she tried to run, almost tripping her.

She didn't know where she was running only that she needed to get there before anybody else. The world became a blur as if she were seeing it through tears.

The scream came again, terrifying and loud—too loud. Cynder thought it might have made her eardrums rupture if she were to hear it from any closer distance.

The smithy. It must be coming from the smithy, she estimated.

Her run turned into a sprint, a full gallop. All around her she could hear the shouts of paladins coming to the same conclusion she had.

"Don't!" she felt more than heard herself yell. "It's a trap!"

She had no idea if they heard her or not; she never slowed her pace though.

A white blur cut the corner of her vision to the left, and again when she turned left on the first intersection; she could see the smithy and just ahead of her, barreling across the yard with all the speed and agility she knew he could muster, was Guzal.

She tried to warn him. "Guzal, Don't. It's—" but a third scream cut her off, drowned out her voice

The whispers came back, crowding out every one of her thoughts until it was just them and the sound of her heartbeat. They danced and cried, swirling through the air. Afraid, Hungry. So hungry. Cynder felt her own stomach growl with the intensity of their cravings.

"Cynder!" Poetry shouted from behind her, fevered, a little breathless. Others could be seen joining the charge, swerving in and out of buildings and side streets. Somewhere in the back a building crumbled as Daheel cut through its foundations to get to them.

It felt like an eternity since she had last seen Guzal make the turn down the alley, and eternity more before she and the rest of them finally managed to make the same turn.

They were at the mouth of the alley when a fourth wail sent shivers across the surfaces of Cynder's scales. It was the kind of scream no one ever forgot—teeth-gritting, excruciating. The kind of scream you'd have expected to hear from a dragon getting their wings sheared from their body, or their tail sawed off by a rusty blade, not the kind anyone would let out when they were moments away from rescue. It made Cynder's shadows tremble, echoing in pain.

She could see Guzal in front of her, approaching the quivering form of a dragon that refused to look in their direction even as he spoke, "Are you hurt? What's your name?"

Who—whatever it was—did not speak. A low whine seemed to fill the air, and it wasn't until she decided to try to intercept Guzal that Cynder found the simple task of moving her feet an impossibility.

Beneath her, Cynder's shadows clung to her paws, welding herself and the rest of the group to the ground. Everyone except Guzal.

The shadows shrieked in whisper tones, refusing to let her get any closer to what was only a few paces away from Guzal. Beside her, Cynder saw Poetry cast a questioning glare at her.

Cynder hoped she would realize it wasn't her. It couldn't be her.

"Guzal!" she shouted.

He turned. The stranger moved.

It happened so fast, quicker than Cynder could draw breath.

The stranger cried out, their body lurching with the force of it. The shadows quivered in response.

And as the wail died in the air, the being that released it jolted on the ground. Bones snapped, limbs contorted, muscles frayed. It began to...unfold itself, shedding its scales. Blood molted off its outer shell-like secreted tar; it hissed and writhed on the ground where it fell.

What remained still shared some shifting resemblance of a dragon, but with far more identifying differences than similarities. Even with arms too long, height too great, and hide too pale, Cynder could still see the dragon in it, albeit warped, a mere shadow of what it might have been—not natural.

Something... other.

Whatever it was, it stood on two legs, hunchbacked and almost dragging the knuckles of its talon-fingers on the ground with the length of its arms. Its maggot white flesh stretched across bone and sinew, looked too thin, and clung to its body as if it were the only thing holding it together.

The shadowy whispers were a choir now, yowling, writhing, singing for her to flee. To run. To...feed.

The creature reached down—and wrapped its knobby taloned fingers aground Guzal's abdomen as if it had done the action a dozen times, a hundred times before.

And as if the weight were nothing, as if it were a child picking up a wriggling pet, it lifted Guzal from the ground.

Guzal didn't even have the chance to roar as it drew him up to its head.

God's it's head. Faceless, eyeless, a blank canvas except for the cruel curve of its forever smiling mouth so wide it seemed to stretch more than halfway around its skull.

Its jaw unhinged, exposing rotten teeth stained so dark they were almost black. Blood dribbled down its chin like the eager drool of a slobbering infant.

Cynder tried to move, to run forward and do something but her shadows cemented her paws to the ground; they wouldn't let her get any closer.

Then the world suddenly grew loud and silent at the same moment. Every other sound drowned under the smothering noise of the creature's teeth sinking into Gazal's neck.

Of the blood-curdling scream that was cut from his throat as it sliced his vocal cords.

Of the sickening pop of his bones as his vertebrae were severed and his muscles torn.

Cynder watched as it dislodged Guzal's head from his neck, biting down with a crunch she could feel through the ground—and spat out his horns.

Several things happened after that.

Poetry vaulted into the air in the same moment lightning split the sky. Ice spears punctured the creature's arm, drawing out a high noted scream. Before Guzal's limp corpse could the ground, Daheel roared, spittle flying from his mouth as the earth quaked under his devastating fury.

All Cynder could think about was the sickening choir of Guzal's last moments, of how It reminded her of his words from earlier that day.

"I'm the fastest in my regiment."

She wished she had been faster.

---

Author's Note: This one was a biggie. Hope you all enjoyed it! More to come soon! Tell me what you guys have thought so far. What do you like? What needs improvement? What would you like to see? Tell me everything. I love to read your thoughts in the reviews.