It saw its own kind across the ravine, pouring down the opposite slope toward their prey. But what was this? Instead of scattering in terror, the unicorns were massing. Racing toward them, the two-headed wyvern heard the party’s leader, the grey-and-yellow dapple, coolly whistling orders, saw the coppery mare and young half-growns beside her swinging to form themselves into an outward facing ring, horns bristling to meet the wyvern onslaught. Here was no motley band of colts. Those wyrms who reached them first were skewered and tramped, fell back with screams of surprise, hisses of rage.
“No matter!” the ice-blue found itself shrieking. “No matter they’re warriors. We’re larger than they. We outnumber them. Use your stings!”
Its own tail lashed to scourge the dappled stallion ramping before him. The unicorn braced for the coming blow, did not so much as dodge. He held his place in the outward-facing ring, hooves set, horn aimed.
“See how your blood burns at this!” the ice-blue wyvern shrilled, bringing its tail barb down like a flail.
The yellow stallion shuddered, shrugged the stroke aside, then lashed and lunged. The bluish wyvern drew back, surprised. All around, its snarling companions swarmed. None of the unicorns broke ranks. The blue wyrm saw them repeatedly stung, but though they flinched, they did not fall. The battle became a grunting, panting shoving-match, wyverns pressing in against the circle, horned warriors refusing to buckle.
“Our stings have lost their power!” the pearly one beside it cried, panic beginning to edge its voice.
“Our horns have not,” the copper-colored mare beside the dappled stallion retorted, lunging. Her horn pierced the pearlescent wyvern through one shoulder. It sank, writhing, colorless blood streaming down its pale hide. Its badger claws pawed ineffectually at the wound.
“I’m pierced!” it shrieked. “Pierced through the bone! The unicorn has rent me!”
“Our weapons are keener than once they were,” the dappled stallion panted. One flailing forehoof landed a stunning blow to the wounded wyvern’s skull. “And tempered by fire. Your fibrous bone no longer dulls and chips our skewers.”
Beside the stallion, the copper mare bent to finish the fallen wyrm. With a shriek, the bluish wyvern beheld others of its folk struck down by these half-grown colts, these stripling warriors. It reared to flee. The dappled stallion sprang. The bluish wyvern felt searing pain cleave its breast. Pierced, it realized, stunned. Riven. Already its awareness ebbed. Run through the heart. The cartilaginous breastplate that had protected its kind for centuries worthless now. Our stings, useless. Our king’s fire, burnt out.
Sky above burned impossibly blue, not a cloud or a wisp obscuring the sun at zenith. Something circled there. A lute? No. Too large. Too green. Not the right shape at all. This creature’s lower half looked like a pard. The wyvern’s thoughts evaporated. Dimly, it felt the dappled stallion pulling his skewer-like horn free of its breast. Faintly, it felt itself fall. Distantly, it heard the high-pitched cry of the pard-bird overhead. Around the dying wyvern, its companions began to flee.
New whistling arose, not from the ring of young unicorns in the heart of the ravine, but from elsewhere on every side. The wyvern’s transparent eyelids sagged. Unicorns, many more of them, streamed into the ravine from the entryway. A pied rose-and-black mare charged at their head. Other groups poured over the tops of both slopes, one led by a black-maned, mallow-red mare, the other by a poppy-maned mare pale as flame. These two bands converged on the fleeing wyverns while the third, larger mass swept up from the ravine’s egress.
Trapped, the dying wyvern thought, astonished still. Trapped even as we had hoped to trap them. Screams from the wounded. The concussion of falling bodies. The dying wyvern’s eyes slid shut. Battle’s din, ever more furious, receded to a gentle buzz. The wyrm felt, barely, as from a great distance, the tramp of heels and the slither of bellies passing over it. Overwhelmed by innumerable, invulnerable enemies, it thought. The utter absurdity. The waste. When our king bade us lie here in wait for unicorns, we, too, should have fled.
“It will be a rout, then,” Jan whispered, gazing into the illuminated darkness of the dragon’s brow. His conclusion startled, confounded him. “Who would have believed it could be so? I had always thought recapturing the Hills would be arduous, a mighty struggle…”
He let the words trail away as Wyzásukitán stirred. “Oh, a rout is it?” she asked him gently.
Her smoky breath flowed and swirled about him. Across the dark pool, fleeing wyverns fell beneath the heels and horns of the unicorn warhost pursuing them across the Hallow Hills toward their limestone dens flanking the cliffs where the sacred moonpool lay. The dragon queen turned her head ever so slightly.
“You think it will be a rout?” queried Wyzásukitán. “You suspect your folk can win back your Hills so easily they have no need of you?”
The dark prince shuddered, considering. Did he truly believe these predictions, then? Dared he trust the visions? Had he gradually, without realizing, come to accept the images as the sure and certain future? But were they, he wondered? Would the events portrayed here come to pass in time, regardless of his own actions or failure to act? Dared he relax into such a soothing complacency?
“Nay, I…,” he started.
“Watch,” the dragon queen murmured.
The images upon her brow intensified, their colors deepening, becoming brighter. Jan felt himself drawn in the way that had become so familiar during his brief stay with the dragon queen. How long had it lasted—a few hours? Half a day? How far into the future lay the events that he observed? He ceased to wonder as the view pulled him back into its depths. As before, he merged with it and lost himself.
He floated in the air above the Hallow Hills. The wyvern warriors who had lain in ambush in the box canyon had all broken ranks, seeking to flee the steep-sided ravine. Unicorns pouring over the sides fell upon them without mercy, the whistled orders of Tek and Dagg, Teki and Jah-lila, Ryhenna and Ses sounding clearly above the din: shrieks from the wyrms, the clash of hooves and horns, groans from the dying, panting and snorts.
Bodies littered the canyon, impeding the long-leggèd unicorns. The wyverns, with their slithering gait, snaked over and between mounds of the fallen. Ineffectual stings forced them to fight with teeth and claws. The few who managed to escape the ravine flashed away faster than coursing rainwater. The unicorn warhost gave chase, managed to cut a fair number down as they fled across the open, rolling hills, through broken scrub and groves of slender trees.
The fleeing wyverns’ screams had evidently been heard, for out of the limestone shelfland adjoining the moonpool cliffs poured fresh waves of stinging wyrms. Shrieked warnings of the invaders’ seeming invulnerability only confused the rescuers, who attacked the unicorns in the traditional manner, with their stings. The battle changed from a chase to a series of pitched skirmishes as the two surging warhosts broke apart into dozens upon dozens of smaller assaults and combats.
Morning passed. Noon sun, coolly ablaze in the deep blue sky, declined to middle and then late afternoon. The great black stain upon the air to the east continued to grow, filling that quarter, and then that half of the sky. It chased the sun like a dark, enveloping mass. Watching it, the wyverns groaned. “An omen, an omen!” Jan heard some crying. “A darkness from out of the Smoking Hills. Surely it marks the end of the world.”
Wyverns fell. Unicorns, as well—but far fewer than the wyrms. Repeatedly, small bands of a half-dozen unicorns maneuvered to surround one of the huge, stinging wyrms. More than a few had double heads, they were so old. The ring of warriors then pressed in on the wyrm, striking and slashing, pummeling with hooves and stabbing with horns, while the wyvern lashed ineffectually with its barb, snapped needle teeth, and raked what unicorns it could with the knifelike claws on its broad, stub paws.