She wanted to say more. She wanted to embrace her father and brother again, to tell them she loved them, but her eyes stung, and her voice caught in her throat, and she dared not show them weakness. She spun around, shifted into a dragon, and took flight.

"Wait up, pups!" she shouted. Dorvin and Alina were flying ahead, silver and lavender, already distant

Dorvin looked over his shoulder at her. "Fly faster, Mammoth Arse!" He blasted flames her way, then turned back forward and kept flying.

"Shut your mouth, Dung Beetle!" Maev beat her wings and flew faster. She looked back only once and saw other dragons taking flight around King's Column. Then she returned her eyes westward, sucked in air, and vowed that if any others existed in this world, she would find them. She would bring them home.

TANIN

 
TANIN

The two dragons flew south, red and white, traveling over the ruin of the world.

"A scar rifts the land," Tanin said.

Gliding beside him, the white dragon lowered her head. "The wounds he gave me scar my body." Issari took a shaky breath. "And the wound he gave the world will perhaps forever mar this land."

A line of devastation covered the landscape, coiling from the south like the path of a parasite through a heart. The demon army had flown here, raining its rot, wilting the land. Trees stooped, white and frail as starved corpses. The earth had turned a charcoal color, and globs of red grew upon it like warts. Animals moved along this unholy path, deformed under its curse, twisted beings with many limbs, their eyes bloated and bulging from their sockets, their entrails dragging behind them like clinging lampreys. The creatures wailed up at the flying dragons, hissing, weeping, begging for death. A stench of rot flared, and when Tanin and Issari flew directly over the path, the miasma made them gag. They banked eastward, keeping the living land directly beneath them, but always they gazed upon that cursed line in the west.

"This is what Requiem will look like if my father wins," Issari said. The white dragon stretched her wings wide, gliding on the wind current. "Already Eteer has fallen to this evil." She looked at Tanin, green eyes wide and wet. "We have to stop him, Tanin. We have to take over his throne."

Whimpers sounded below, and Tanin looked back down at the coiling path of the Abyss. Small creatures moved there, raising their hands, pleading. They had the bodies of dogs, but their heads were human heads, bloated and pale like corpses. They yowled wordlessly, but Tanin thought he heard words in the senseless mewling.

"Pleee . . .," they seemed to beg. "Pleee . . . kell . . . kell us . . ."