"You will feast upon dragon flesh!" Raem shouted, standing in his stirrups. "You will drink dragon blood and suck marrow from their bones!"

They howled, cheered, laughed, screeched, hissed, bellowed—a thousand creatures flying around him. Some were balls of fat, their sores oozing. Others were long, scaled strips of festering flesh. Some were feathered, others naked, some encased with the screaming faces of victims like plates of fleshy armor. Drool dripped between their teeth. Their eyes blazed like torches. Their wings churned the clouds and sent waves of stench across the land.

Soon, my daughters. Raem's lips peeled back as he inhaled the sweet miasma of his host. Soon you will join this army. I will break you. I will reform you. I will turn you into creatures.

He looked down at the demon he rode, a tortured, weeping thing. Once, they said, she had been a woman, a mere mortal. Her bones had been distended, her skin stretched, her body broken and reshaped so many times her mind had shattered. Today this creature flew as a great bat, mouth smacking, wings thudding.

"An abomination," Raem whispered, disgust flooding him. "And my daughters are sinners. They are abominations too. Soon they will fly as broken creatures. I will ride them."

The north sprawled beneath him, the hinterlands across the sea, barbarous realms of wandering tribes, backwater villages, and that pathetic Requiem the weredragons called a kingdom. He sneered. Eteer, his kingdom in the south, was a land of towers, of high walls, of lush gardens, of civilization. Here was a benighted wilderness. Here was a den of reptiles. Here was a land he must crush.

"Seek their column!" he shouted. "Stare, demon eyes, and scan this world, and find the pillar of marble. They built a beacon to draw in more of their kind, a lighthouse for lizards." He laughed. "It will also summon their doom."

They demons cackled with him. They flew on.

They flew for hours, for days, for nights, never tiring, never resting, seeking Requiem. She would be there, Raem knew. Issari would be among the other filthy weredragons. He caressed his arm where stitches still held his raw wound, the wound Issari had given him when she stabbed him in the cistern. Raem licked his lips as he imagined how she would suffer, how he would cut every part of her. Perhaps he would stitch Issari and Laira together, forming a conjoined twin, a single daughter to torment. He had seen demons perform this art; he would practice it upon the reptiles.

They flew onward, dripping rot, scanning the world. Spring had begun, but their wings darkened the sky, their steam hid the sun, and all wilted beneath their rancid rain.

They flew until they saw the village ahead.