Lik-Rifa was roaring as the white-winged woman spun through the air, wings beating, trying to pull herself out of her fall, but she was too low. She smashed into the ground, skidded and stopped, rose to her knees and then the dragon slammed a long-clawed foot down upon her. Jaws lunged, crunching down on to the woman’s head. A savage wrench of Lik-Rifa’s neck and a screech was cut short.
The dragon lifted her neck and gulped, swallowing the head, then let out a ground-shaking roar and stamped on the headless woman, again and again, ripping and rending with her taloned feet: blood, bone, feathers torn and pulped and mashed to a fine mist.
Ilska and Drekr stood silently, staring.
Lik-Rifa slowed, then stopped, looked around and saw the horse from the cart, still laying on its side, eyes wide and white, sweat-streaked with fear and pain. The dragon’s wings beat and Lik-Rifa lurched into the air, came down hard upon the horse, claws pinning it, jaws biting, tearing. Flesh ripped, blood spurting, bones cracking as the long-caged dragon feasted.
Elvar stared in silent awe and horror.
Then the dragon was raising her head, the scales of her jaws dripping red with gore. She licked her lips and shivered, huge and proud and dreadful, her razored tail lashing, gazing about with red-glowing eyes. She took a long, shuddering breath, her eyes focusing upon Ilska and Drekr standing before her, small and insignificant against her hulking form.
“Ahhh,” the dragon sighed with a rumble that shook Elvar to her bones and reverberated in her chest. She heard a scraping sound behind her and saw Grend, ash-covered and bleeding, crawling towards her. She moved to him, dragging herself across the ground with her one good arm, and they collapsed upon each other, lay there staring at Lik-Rifa.
A silence settled, punctuated by the groans and screams of the wounded or dying, the wailing of children scattered by the dragon’s arrival.
Figures appeared from the ash: more of Ilska’s dragon-born and Raven-Feeders, rising from around the battlefield where they had been tossed like the wooden figures on some giant tafl board.
Ilska approached Lik-Rifa, twice the size of Snakavik’s mead hall, and fell to her knees before her, Drekr and the others doing the same.
The dragon regarded them, dipped her sinuous head and breathed deeply, stirring hair and clothes and ash.
“My children,” Lik-Rifa growled, her voice like a mountain slide, like a summer storm fractured with lightning, rumbling into the distance. A tremor passed through her, from snout to tail, and then her shape was shimmering, twisting and coiling like mist, shifting and changing, contracting, shrinking, until a woman stood before Ilska and her kin. She was tall, taller than any man, at least as big as the bull troll Elvar had slain on Iskalt Island. Her body was lean and striated, skin pale and raw and scabbed, weeping pus. Blood oozed from wounds. She was clothed in a tunic of grey, red-woven at the neck and hem, a belt studded with gold about her waist and a dark cloak billowing about her like wings. Her hair, black as jet, streaked with silver, was pulled back tightly, braids woven into it. She had a sharply beautiful face. Red coals glowed in her eyes.
“What has become of my world, my children, my warbands?” she said, her voice hard as the north wind, a tremor shivering through it. She looked around at the battle-plain, the shapes of the long-dead become part of the landscape. Her red eyes flickered to Ilska.
“What has Orna done?” she snarled, lips twisting, wringing her hands. “I heard them screaming, my children, my faithful, but I could not help them, because of that winged BITCH. ORNA DECEIVED ME AND I WAS CAGED.” She roared those last words, the sound of it seeming too loud for her lungs to create, but Elvar felt it in her bones, felt the ground quake beneath her.
“The world has changed, my lady,” Ilska said. “But we are your faithful, the pure. We have laboured the long years to set you free. We are few, but more will come, now that you are released from your cage.”
“Hhmmm,” Lik-Rifa rumbled, then reached a hand out and stroked Ilska’s cheek. It was big enough to crush her head, if she wished. She looked around again, her eyes coming to rest upon the shattered stump of Oskutree, and shivered. “I hate this place,” she snarled, the muscles twitching in her face. “I must get away from here. I would see my hall of Nastrandir.” She shook, a tremor passing through her, and suddenly she was shifting and changing, growing, expanding, wings sprouting and arching from her back, until she was a dragon again, bigger than two mead halls. Her wings snapped out, pale and tattered, with a blast of foul air, and then they were beating, lifting her from the ground. “I have languished in a hole and devoured nothing but corpses for three hundred years,” she said with a disgusted twist of her lips. “I would feel the wind in my face and hunt again,” she rumbled as she rose into the air, wings lashing and rising higher and higher, spiralling up.