Good girl, Mora thinks, grateful for Nym’ellia’s calm under pressure. Then Mora unsheathes her glowing green rune stylus and powers up the control board, taking in the panoramic view in one sweeping glance. A sizable dragon horde is zooming straight toward Voloi, Mora’s ship smack-dab inside that target.

With mounting urgency, Mora calibrates the ship’s control runes as the first dragons reach the shoreline. Her neck tightens as screams rise, dragons throwing bolts of dark fire onto the First Tier. Forcing an even breath, Mora keeps Nym’ellia in her sights as scattered civilians stream onto her ship and the Shadow tide reaches Voloi, rapidly coursing over the pier, and Mora notes, with horrified astonishment, that it’s cutting out all color in its wake. She glances over her shoulder and spots Olilly dragging aluminum and copper cookware to Fyon while Kir Lyyo and his hateful father run onto Mora’s ship along with a few more civilians just as Nym’ellia releases the rune ship’s final tether.

“Unmoored!” Nym’ellia calls up as the ship bobs away from the cliffside.

“Get everyone inside,” Mora calls to Nym’ellia, then taps a series of control runes. Six huge varg runes blink to life around her ship, three on each side, all of them beginning to rotate.

She turns once more and takes in the deft sweep of Fyon’s arm as he finishes fabricating an additional emerald varg rune just above the ship’s stern. He taps the floating rune, and a translucent green shield flows out from it over the entire ship. Then he turns and meets Mora’s eyes, a look of blazing gravity in his silver gaze.

Ferociously determined, Mora gives the acceleration rune a hard spin, and her ship shoots forward. She glances toward the Vo Mountains at the exact moment that the blue borderline flashes silver then explodes into gray with a low boom that reverberates through her very bones. What looks like a spiderweb of Shadow courses up from the newly gray border and ripples over Noilaan’s dome.

The dome’s runes blink out of sight, the whole city cast in a sudden darkness that jolts fear down Mora’s spine.

Screams rise as the blackened forms of every ship in the sky hurtle toward the ground, walkways and buildings collapsing toward the tiers below. A series of explosions sound, and Mora gasps in horror as the rune-supported restaurants all along the Sixth Tier’s cliffside crack off from the street to hurtle downward.

Tears stinging her eyes, Mora guides her ship into a hard swerve northwest. She glances through the glass wall behind her and takes in a distant knot of dragons that have broken off from the main dragon horde, six of the Shadow beasts fly straight toward her ship.

CHAPTER SEVEN

SHADOW DRAGONS

Olilly Emmylian

Xishlon night, twenty-second hour