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A TOP R URO , E SME crossed the sands and climbed to the top of a ridge. From her vantage, she watched the last of the wings spread north, leaving the ruins of their wrath behind. A heavy pall hung over the dunes.

She crested a rise and stared across the devastation.

All around, bronze glinted against red sand. Broken, slagged, mangled. Other ta’wyn lay burning, smoking from some strange alchymy inside their bodies. Blasts blackened several areas, much like the spot she had left behind.

She carried with her the losses from that battle.

Abresh lay draped across Ruro’s rump. She had tied Crikit to the saddle seat behind her. She refused to leave the dead to a lonely grave in the sand. Sadly, she would not be the only one looking to honor the fallen.

She stared across the ruins of the desert, at what victory looked like.

Bodies lay everywhere, staining the sands with blood. Both man and beast. Some had died where they had dropped; others had clearly dragged themselves, only to find death at the end of the trail. Larger hillocks marked the resting place of ürsyns. One stouthearted beast limped on a broken leg, bellowing his distress.

Closer around her, little else moved across the dunes. A broken wraith, one of hundreds, battered a wing, as if trying to take flight. The last surviving molag roamed leadenly, a lonely sentinel among the dead.

She struggled to understand what she had witnessed as bronze fought wings, men battled bronze, and claws ripped everything. While she should be grateful for the strange intercession of the mankrae, for ridding the sand of the raiders, she could not drum up any thankfulness after all this death.

Ahead, a rider spotted her from a ridge in the distance and lowered the glint of a farscope. His ürsyn then bounded down and headed toward her. She guided Ruro to meet him. As she climbed out of a deep gully between dunes, the rider and ürsyn appeared at the top of the rise.

She stared up, with her headscarf long ripped away.

“Esme!” the rider shouted down.

She recognized Arryn’s voice. She suspected it might be him, hoped it would be, but she remained baffled. The last time she had seen her brother he had been leaving. He must have rushed back from Evdersyn Heep as the battle started.

She let Ruro come to a stop in the shadow of the dune. Both were too exhausted and heart-heavy for this last climb. Arryn dropped from his saddle and skated down the sand to join her.

Once he was close enough, she fell off Ruro and into his arms. As she hugged him, she shook with a sob that might not end. He held her as if willing to stay no matter how long it took.

“What happened?” Arryn finally whispered.

She didn’t have the strength to answer, but she felt him staring over her shoulder at the burden on Ruro’s back. She simply shook her head. After a long time, Arryn guided her up the slope. He clearly intended to carry her home atop his mount, to relieve some weight from Ruro’s back.

When they reached the top of the dune, Esme stared across the desert. Winds swept sands across ridges, as if trying to erase the deep wounds. Farther out, she spotted the smoky husk of the Fyredragon, where the ship lay crooked on the glass.

But it was not that dragon that drew her attention.

Arryn joined her. Like her, he must have noted where the mankrae were headed. “What do you think will happen?” he whispered.

She suspected the answer and dropped her gaze from the black mountain to the devastation around her.

“This is just the aftermath of the Dragon stirring…” She recalled the Chanaryn legend of these lands. “But beware when the Dragon wakes. ”

Arryn finished the ancient warning. “For it will shatter the world.”

As if foreshadowing this fate, the ground trembled, dancing grains of sand across the dunes. A low roar rose around them, like some great beast had already begun to wake from its long slumber.

Arryn reached to Esme’s hand, joining together the two halves of the sun tattooed between them. He squeezed a promise into her.

No matter what happens, we’ll face it together.