Sun had already set upon the Smoking Hills, plunging them into darkness save for the ember-bright glow of dragonsflood. Wyzásukitán veered in a hurtling rush toward the west, where dying sunset flamed scarlet still, a distant, unseen conflagration. Smoking cinders and flaming chunks of rock arced around them as they flew. Jan realized they were climbing higher, and higher yet, rising above the burning dust and ash.

The farther they rose, the more frigid the wind became. Though he felt its bite, Jan did not mind the cold, or the airlessness of atmosphere attenuated almost too thin to breathe. The dragon queen’s heart hammered. Her great lungs labored even as her stroking wings maintained their powerful, even rhythm. She was soaring aloft, coursing westward, chasing the sun. The Smoking Hills raced far, far below. Tiny peaks burst and spattered fire. Crimson rivulets threaded the black landscape.

The Salt Waste rushed beneath them, racing along at impossible speed. The upper ether through which they lanced had grown so thin there scarcely seemed to exist any wind. The rising cloud of ash and dust fell away behind them as they flew. The world shrank. Above, the sky darkened, air thinning into nothing, stars beginning to prick through the crimson blaze that colored the sky. Slowly, it grew more tawny. They left the crimson behind. The Salt Waste receded and the Plain rolled underneath.

They were drawing nearer the western horizon, closer to the Hallow Hills. The vanished sun appeared, unsetting, rising above the western horizon as though it were the breaking dawn. Sun light streamed across the Plain, turning the sky not scarlet, but gold. Time seemed to reverse as they sped westward from first evening into dusk into very late afternoon.

From high, high above in icy space near the limit of the air, Jan looked down to see a host of unicorns galloping far in the distance ahead, much closer to the edge of the Hallow Hills than he and Wyzásukitán. Members of the host were all dark in color: ink blues and reddish roans, charcoal dapples and deep-golden duns. A roan maroon led them.

They raced with the energy of warriors still fresh, newly embarked, yet Jan knew they had been traveling for—how long: hours? Days? He knew only that sipping from the late dragon queen’s dreams had fortified them in the same manner it had fortified him. He wondered if they had any notion of passing time. Or did they journey in reverie, a blur, as he himself had journeyed through three-quarters of a year deep in the darkness of the dragons’ halls?

He watched the late, late afternoon sun floating infinitesimally upward, growing gradually younger and brighter with each passing moment. Its strong yellow light illumined the distant Hallow Hills. He felt the rhythm of Wyzásukitán’s wings change, descending now. The warband of unicorns far ahead and below had just left the rolling Plain. The Scouts of Halla were streaming into the rills of their ancestral land.

The wyverns pressed forward relentlessly, the white wyrmking at their head screaming his hatred for unicorns. Tek braced herself, determined not to be driven farther back. Already her warriors around her were dangerously bunched. They had no room to pivot and dodge, none to charge to one another’s aid. The wyverns had them pinned against the moonpool cliffs, escape to either side so narrow that few unicorns could have survived a dash for freedom. The rest would have been overtaken and cut down. Better far to make a stand. Indeed, it was their only hope.

The pied mare glanced to left and right, surveying the battle. Dagg fought shoulder to shoulder with her, his mate, Ryhenna, on his other side. She spotted Ses farther back and to the left, the cream-colored mare with the flame-bright mane holding her ground in a press of other unicorns against the surge of oncoming wyverns. Tek searched the opposite way, glimpsed her own dam, Jah-lila, even farther distant, flanked by her foster father and namesake, the healer Teki.

The unicorn warhost stood spread in a long, shallow ribbon against the moonpool cliffs, more wyverns pouring from their holes and rushing toward them at every moment. Coldly, clearly, Tek grasped Lynex’s strategy: with luck, he hoped to break through the unicorns’ ranks and splinter them, then surround each smaller group and overwhelm it. Barring that, she knew, he planned to grind them against the cliffs until their line thinned and collapsed.

The extent to which her troops had allowed themselves to become stretched was not good, the pied mare saw. No helping it now. Her only viable tactic was to form them into an outward-facing crescent strong enough to resist the momentum of the wyvern advance. Then, carefully, she must pull the tips of the crescent inward, massing and thickening the formation before bulging its forward edge into a point. Perhaps, just possibly, she could then drive this wedge into Lynex’s army, thus breaking it in two.

But they stood a long way from there yet, she acknowledged grimly, even as she whistled to rally the herd. She heard others take up the cries, pass them on in shrill piping that rose above the grinding noises of battle. Raggedly, the crescent began to form.

Scarred Lynex, amid his double-dozen huge bodyguards, reared at the heart of the onrushing mass, driving his followers with shrieks and threats. Despite all the foes her warhost had slain so far, Tek realized, as many more faced them now, fresher, larger, wilier and older than any they had fought earlier in the day. The new onslaught’s force was tremendous. Again and again, Tek hurled herself forward, fighting furiously. Half a dozen wyverns fell before her hooves and horn. Dagg and Ryhenna protected her shoulder. Overhead, Illishar harried and stooped.

Others of her band did not fare so well. The pied mare spied places where the ranks of her defenders had grown perilously thin. The crush of fighters impeded reinforcements from reaching those spots. She saw Ses standing at one such point, nearly the sole defender. How much longer could she hold out? To the other side, Teki and Jah-lila worked feverishly, marshaling warriors to strengthen the line.

The crescent had stalled coalescing into the wedge needed to drive the wyrmking’s hoard apart. Tek whistled the rallying cry again, again, but the exhausted unicorns were faltering. Before them, Lynex, three times the size of any other wyvern on the field, hooted his glee.

“Smash them, crush them!” his largest head shouted.

“Rip them, rend them,” the two middle-sized pates flanking the main one cried.

“Snap them, slash them, bite and devour them,” three of the smaller maws ranted, while the littlest nob gabbled and hissed: “Smash, rend, slash, devour!”

The wyverns were breaking through. Tek saw the line waver in two places. Ses leapt toward one of the weakening points, spurring on comrades with her whistles and cries. Ryhenna sprang to join her. On the opposite side of the pied mare, Teki and Jah-lila forged toward the other spot at which the warhost’s ranks were in imminent danger of giving way. Too slowly. Defenders crumpled beneath the wyverns’ teeth and claws. The crescent was staving in. Tek felt her own heart quail. The healer and the red mare would never reach the breach in time.

“Dagg, go!” she shouted, giving her shoulder-friend a slap on the rump with the flat of her horn.

The dappled warrior sprinted toward the buckling formation’s edge, shouldering his way across the fray, whistling encouragement to those who still lived and desperately fought on. Tek returned to the struggle before her. She dared not follow Dagg’s progress even a moment more. His absence and Ryhenna’s created a gap in the ranks around her. She leapt forward to fill the breach.

The seven-headed wyvern king towered above her, his immense bodyguards writhing. They bore down on Tek like a mountain falling. Illishar swooped, dived, trying to strike at the wyrmking’s heads, but his double-headed bodyguards battered the gryphon tercel off. The pied mare found herself unable to hold her ground. Notwithstanding her furious charges, she was being driven back, step by step. How many more before she found herself against the cliff? Her folk around her, she knew, found themselves in the same case: hemmed in, incapable of breaking free.