The force of the blast hit Gunther like a physical wall.

  She’d turned just as Sihar’s arrow flew, shoving the archer back into the gallery’s entry corridor. The world buckled. Sound vanished, replaced by a deep, thrumming pressure that popped in her ears. A hurricane of heat, stone, and shredded wood howled up the open space before them.

  Gunther slammed against the corridor wall, the rough stone scraping her cheek. Sihar crumpled beside her, a grunt of pain lost in the roar. The carved gallery railings disintegrated into splinters. A wave of soot-blackened air, hot as forge-breath, choked them.

  For three heartbeats, there was only the scream of rending stone and the bloom of hellish orange light from below.

  Then, silence. A ringing, thick silence, punctuated by the distant groan of shifting rock and the wet patter of falling debris.

  Gunther pushed herself up, spitting grit. Her lungs burned. “Sihar.”

  “I’m here.” Her voice was a rasp. She was already moving, one hand pressed to her side where she’d impacted the wall. She peered back into the gallery, now shrouded in a churning dust-cloud. “Did we stop it?”

  “We definitely started something.” Gunther crawled forward on her knees, pulling her scarf over her mouth and nose. The air tasted of sulfur and burnt bone. The heat radiating from the open shaft was intense, like standing before a vast oven.

  As the dust settled, the devastation below resolved itself.

  The great cavern was a ruin. The central alchemical vats were twisted, molten wreckage. The network of wooden platforms and stairs was gone, reduced to a rain of smoldering kindling strewn across the cavern floor. Fires guttered in pockets of spilled oil. The bodies of cultists and laborers were dark, still shapes.

  But the dragon-fire barrel was not just destroyed. Its cataclysm had torn a jagged, smoking hole in the cavern wall behind it. Through the breach, Gunther saw the glint of scales and the slow, powerful coiling of immense, shadowed forms. A low, rumbling chorus of agitated hisses echoed up to them.

  The dragon pens. They’d breached them.

  “Oh, no,” Sihar breathed.

  A massive, wedge-shaped head thrust through the new opening, scattering rubble. It was a deep, mossy green, its eyes like pools of molten brass. It snuffed the scorched air, jaws parting to reveal rows of serrated teeth. It let out a guttural bellow of outrage that vibrated in Gunther’s teeth.

  “They’re loose,” she said, her voice flat with dread.

  Movement flickered on the far side of the cavern, near the raised dais. A shimmering hemisphere of crimson energy snapped into existence, deflecting a chunk of falling ceiling. Within it stood Lord Baucher, his fine robes smudged but intact, his face a mask of pure, apoplectic fury. He held the Primordial Egg aloft in one hand, its internal light pulsing angrily. Beside him, two surviving cult mages gestured, maintaining the shield.

  Baucher’s gaze swept the carnage, then locked upward, finding Gunther and Sihar on the ruined gallery. Even at this distance, the hatred was a physical force.

  “Vermin!” Baucher’s voice, amplified by magic, ripped through the cavern, drowning out the dragons’ rumblings. “You think this is a setback? This is a gift! The dragons are unbound! They will feast on your villages tonight!”

  He turned to the green dragon now fully emerging from the breach. “Krivess!” he roared, pointing a trembling finger upward at the gallery. “Kill them!”

  The dragon’s brass eyes fixed on them. It gathered its powerful hind legs beneath it.

  “Run,” Gunther said.

  They ran.

  Back down the narrow corridor they’d come, boots skidding on dust-covered stone. Behind them, they heard the thunderous scrape of claws on rock and a hiss like steam escaping a mountainside. The dragon wasn’t flying in the confined space; it was climbing the sheer cavern wall toward the gallery opening.

  Gunther risked a glance back as they reached the first ascending stairwell. The green head, larger than a wagon, appeared in the gallery entrance, its neck snaking into the corridor after them. Stone cracked and powdered beneath its grip.

  They took the steps three at a time. The stairwell was tight, a spiral meant for men, not monsters. It would slow the beast, but not stop it. The entire keep shuddered with the dragon’s progress.

  “The plan’s changed!” Sihar yelled, pulling ahead. “Forget Baucher, forget the egg! We need to warn Stonekeep! If that thing gets out ”

  “If that thing gets out, there’s no Stonekeep to warn!” Gunther shot back. They burst out onto the dungeon level proper, into the wider corridor lined with cell doors. “We have to collapse the access. Trap it down here!”

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  “With what? Harsh language?”

  A section of the corridor wall behind them exploded inward in a spray of mortar. The dragon’s claw, each talon as long as a shortsword, groped through the hole, swiping blindly. They dove aside. The claws tore through three iron cell doors as if they were parchment.

  Gunther scrambled up, mind racing. She was a battle-mage, not an earth-shaper. Her own magic was fire and force, Sihar’s was wind and precision. They needed a structural weakness.

  “The central pillar!” she gasped. “The one in the main guard chamber, below the oculus! It’s load-bearing for this whole wing!”

  Sihar understood instantly. “Bring the roof down on its head. Might just piss it off more.”

  “Got a better idea?”

  Another section of wall shattered. The dragon’s head now filled the broken corridor behind them, jaws wide. A deep, green light gathered in its throat.

  “No!” Gunther shouted. She pivoted, planting her feet, hands thrust forward. She didn’t try to counter the coming fire; she shaped it, redirected it. A shimmering lens of concussive force snapped into existence before them just as the dragon unleashed its breath.

  It wasn’t a stream of fire, but a churning cloud of corrosive vapor that hit her shield with a deafening hiss. The magic strained, the air itself dissolving around the edges. Gunther gritted her teeth, veins standing out on her temples. She couldn’t hold it. She shoved, angling the shield upward.

  The virulent green cloud billowed up, eating through the ceiling timbers and stone in a cascade of sizzling decay. A twenty-foot section of roof vanished, opening a jagged hole to the level above. Dust and debris rained down, momentarily blinding the dragon.

  Sihar didn’t wait. She nocked, drew, and loosed a single arrow not at the dragon, but high up through the new hole. As it flew, she whipped her hand in a tight spiral. The arrow, guided by her will, zipped up into the vaulted chamber above, arcing around to strike the iron bracket of a massive, hanging chain-hoist used for moving heavy prisoners.

  The bracket sheared. The multi-ton iron counterweight plunged down through the hole Gunther had just created.

  It struck the dragon square on the crown of its skull with a sound like the great bell of Stonekeep breaking. The beast staggered, a stunned, guttural moan escaping its jaws. Its head dropped, smashing into the floor.

  “Now!” Gunther roared.

  They sprinted past the dazed creature, down the corridor toward the dungeon’s central hub. The guard chamber was ahead, the round room with the single, massive central pillar and the oculus open to the sky far above.

  They skidded into the chamber. The pillar was ancient, thick as an ancient oak, but webbed with cracks from centuries of strain and the recent tremors of the explosion below.

  Sihar immediately looked up. The oculus showed a circle of twilight sky. “Too far. I can’t hit anything structural from down here that would matter.”

  Gunther placed both hands on the cool stone of the pillar. She closed her eyes, reaching out with her senses not for flame, but for the latent heat within the stone itself, for the pressure points of the immense weight it bore. She found them a nexus of stress fractures deep inside.

  “I can superheat the core,” she said, her voice tight with concentration. “Make it expand. Shatter from the inside. But I’ll be a target. It’ll take everything I have.”

  Sihar moved to the chamber entrance, looking back the way they’d come. The enraged scraping of claws was getting louder. The dragon was recovering. “Do it. I’ll buy you time.”

  “Sihar ”

  “Just do it, Gunther!”

  She nodded, shutting out the world. She poured her will into the stone, not with violence, but with a terrible, focused pressure. She imagined a star being born inside the granite. The pillar began to hum. A deep, red glow seeped from the cracks, pulsing like a slow, angry heartbeat.

  Sihar stood in the archway, bow raised. She didn’t nock an arrow. Instead, she drew the string back, and the air itself along the bow’s length began to condense, to solidify into a shaft of pure, compressed wind, tipped with a spiraling head of vacuum. She held it, waiting.

  The green dragon rounded the final corner, its movements now jerky with rage, a deep dent visible in its skull-plates. It saw Sihar blocking its path to Gunther, who glowed like a forge-god beside the now-incandescent pillar.

  It charged.

  Sihar released.

  The wind-arrow didn’t make a sound. It tore the air apart in a straight line, hitting the dragon in its already-wounded head. There was no impact of flesh, only a localized detonation of atmospheric pressure. The vacuum tip collapsed, and the surrounding air hammered inward with the force of a thunderclap contained in a single point.

  The dragon’s head snapped to the side. It reeled, disoriented, one brass eye clouded.

  But it didn’t stop. It lunged, jaws gaping for her.

  Gunther opened her eyes. They were blazing with reflected firelight. “DOWN!”

  She wrenched her hands away from the pillar.

  The central column exploded.

  Not outward, but in a controlled, volcanic fury straight up and down. A jet of white-hot stone and superheated gas screamed upward through the oculus like a reverse meteor. Simultaneously, the foundation of the pillar vaporized, blasting the floor of the chamber into a crater.

  The dragon, mid-lunge, was caught in the upward cataclysm. The jet of molten stone took it in the chest, scorching through scales and flesh, lifting its multi-ton bulk and hurling it up through the oculus into the darkening sky above Stonekeep.

  The shockwave blew Sihar off her feet, tossing her back into the chamber. Gunther was thrown against the far wall.

  Then, the groaning began. Without its central support, the ceiling of the vast dungeon complex buckled. A crack shot across the vaulted roof of the guard chamber, then branched like lightning. Stone screamed as it gave way.

  The entire section of the keep above them guard posts, storerooms, barracks plunged downward in an avalanche of masonry, timber, and dust, sealing the entrance to the deep caverns under a hundred feet of impassable rubble.

  The world collapsed into a roar, then a settling, gritty quiet.

  Gunther lay in the rubble, ears ringing, her magic utterly spent. She coughed, a rough, dusty hack. “Sihar?”

  A pile of shifted stones moved a few feet away. Sihar emerged, coated in white dust like a ghost, her bow still clutched in one hand. “Here.” She crawled over to her. “The dragon?”

  “Gone. Up and out.” Gunther pushed herself to sitting, every muscle protesting. “The way down is buried. Baucher and the egg are trapped below. So are the other dragons, for now.”

  Sihar looked at the mountain of debris that had once been an archway. “We need to get to the surface. Now. If that green one is still alive…”

  Gunther followed her gaze upward. Through the now-giant hole where the oculus and half the roof had been, they could see the first stars pricking the deep purple sky. And silhouetted against them, circling high above Stonekeep with a ragged, smoking wound in its chest, was the shape of a very angry, very free dragon.

  Its roar of pain and fury echoed over the silent keep, a promise of fire and blood.

  It was not trapped. And it was not alone for long. From the direction of the mountains, answering roars began to sound in the distance.