The bolt of lightning spit from the blue’s mouth, ripping away a golden wing in a blast of searing, flesh-charring power. Aurora flailed at the blue’s tail as the dragon swept past and then immediately banked out of his plunging dive. Canting drastically to the side, the gold instinctively stroked with her good wing-but this only sent her spinning crazily, tumbling out of control into the canyon depths.
Aurora trimmed her wing, pulling the leathery membrane back to her side as she arced neck and tail to bring herself out of the spin. Another spell fell from her lips, a single word of magic, and the power of levitation brought her plunge to a halt. Slowly the golden body started to rise, drifting gently back toward the sky. The blue dragon howled triumphantly, growing larger in her view as he winged straight toward Aurora. Azure jaws gaped, another cruel lightning bolt forming within.
The gold dragon saw utter doom, for herself and for all of her kind, in that merciless maw-and she knew that she could not afford to fail. She had hoped to save her most powerful spell until the end of the fight-or to not use it at all, because it tapped into black reaches that reeked more of the Dark Queen than the Platinum Father. Yet now she had no choice, and with a verbal quickness to match the speed of her decision, Aurora spat a dark and killing word full into the face of the onrushing wyrm.
The death spell seized the blue dragon by the guts, coiling the serpentine body into a wriggling ball. The lightning bolt died, unspat, as the pulse of vitality withered and perished in the azure belly. Plunging downward, the dragon’s corpse followed its green brother, vanishing into the raging turbulence of the mountain river.
Forcing herself to ignore the pain flaming through the nub of her left wing, still airborne on the power of the levitation spell, Aurora summoned another incantation. This time the magic brought a gust of wind, swirling air pushing her buoyant body toward the mountain. The gust circled the mighty peak, whisking its mighty passenger toward a high shelf of rock on an otherwise inaccessible cliff.
Coming to rest on the ledge, Aurora slumped to the ground, a momentary wave of weakness spasming through her golden body. Knowing that urgency allowed no delay, she painfully dragged herself across the flat surface of rock toward a jumble of boulders piled against the wall of cliff. Moaning unconsciously, pain wracking her flesh, the gold dragon pulled away huge boulders with her foreclaws.
Soon she had revealed a cave mouth, one of several secret entrances leading to the vast chamber beneath the mountain. Crawling along a rubble-strewn passageway, she soon reached a ledge where dark space yawned into the distance and the waters of the subterranean lake glistened darkly a hundred feet below.
Without hesitating, Aurora dove straight from the ledge, plunging into deep, chill waters. With strong kicks of her rear legs she swam, stroking with her forelegs to steer toward another shadowy passage on the periphery of the vast chamber. Despite the strain of hard, repetitive movement, the cool water felt good against the gold dragon’s wounds, and she swam to her destination with unflagging determination.
At the base of the cliff, she rose from the water with the force of levitation magic. Water flowed off her body and back to the lake like a series of waterfalls. As she floated upward, coming to rest at the mouth of a long, familiar tunnel, Aurora could only hope that the wall of stone was still intact, still blocked the red and black from this sacred cavern.
Yet as she reached the access tunnel and started through the darkness, an oily and reptilian scent assailed her nostrils. With a stab of fear Aurora knew the truth- and made up her mind not to waste time going all the way to her arcane barrier. The stench told her that the two wyrms of the Dark Queen had already passed. Clearly they had battered down the wall of stone, and now were somewhere within the watery cavern.
Again Aurora hurled herself into that cold liquid, diving below the surface and stroking toward the center of the lake. She forced herself not to think about the eggs, so vulnerable in their pristine grotto. She reminded herself that the entrance was well-concealed, and she could only hope that the Dark Queen’s wyrms had not yet found the treasured clutch.