Vingaard, the advance elements of the dragon wings were
visible on the horizon to scouts on dragonback. The
dragonarmies would reach the dry ford sometime around
the middle of the day. The captains heard the reports of
the vast numbers of the enemy and were dismayed. Defeat
seemed inevitable.
But Laurana had a final element to her plan, a part she
kept secret to the last possible moment, fearing enemy
spies. Some of the hidebound knights – who refused to
recognize an innovative tactic until it all but knocked
them out of their saddles – must have guessed what it was.
Still, concern grew through the camp as dawn passed into
full daylight. The battle was six hours away, and no
barrier stood between the armies – yet Laurana retained all
of her dragons in the camp.
Mellison relates that the captains gathered privately,
muttering with concern as the sun rose steadily into the
sky. They had just agreed that Sir Markham should go to
the general when Laurana surprised them by calling them
to her tent.
“I’ll be leaving now, for a short time. I’ll be taking
most of the dragons with me.”
The knights were certainly astounded by this
pronouncement. If any of them mustered the wits for a
reply, it has been lost to history.
“I’ll leave you the silvers and the coppers. Form a line
of defense along the riverbank. By tonight, we’ll have
opened the road to Kalaman … or to the Abyss.”
The knights argued vehemently, but the Golden
General held firm. She seemed unusually somber –
perhaps even severe – as they watched her mount
Quallathon. Gilthanas stood beside her and clasped her
hand for a moment. Then, turning toward the army of
metallic dragons around her, Laurana signalled with a
wave of her hand. The great flight of brass, bronze, and
gold dragons sprang into the air. The morning sun flashed
on their wings as the monstrous serpents soared aloft,
riding the updrafts. Lifting themselves above the trees,
they bore south, along the line of the empty riverbed
below.
Shortly after, from the riverside entrenchments, the
dragonarmy came into sight. Bakaris proved as aggressive
on the battlefield as he had been in the march. His dragons
– massive waves of red and blue serpents bellowing their
challenges through the skies – slashed into the silver and
copper dragons protecting the Army of Solamnia.
Gilthanas and Silvara, together as always, fought in the
great aerial melee. He wrote to Porthios.
“I saw a dozen good dragons fall in the first pass,
wings seared off by fiery breath, wounds gaping in their
flesh, ripped by the lightning bolts of the blue. Silvara
wheeled sharply, ducking below the crackling lightning
bolt spit by a great blue dragon. I raised my lance, tearing
the wyrm’s wing as it whirled past. The two dragons met
with a brutal crash, slashing at each other with rending
talons as we plummeted toward the ground.
“The dragons split apart at the last instant, both of
them torn and bleeding. Silvara struggled to regain
altitude. I lost sight of my enemy in the chaos of the
smoky sky, but drove my lance through the belly of a
small red that attacked us from overhead. Mortally
wounded, the dragon and its doomed rider plunged to
earth, bellowing smoke and fire in a spiralling trail.”
Yet such victories were rare. Gilthanas saw many
corpses of silver and copper sprawled across the landscape
below. Finally, after a half hour of savage battle, the elf
was forced to accept the grim truth: the good dragons had
lost this fight. More than half of them had perished.
Hellish fireballs spewed by the red dragons continued
to erupt. Crackling bolts of lightning spit by the blues still
crisscrossed the skies, rending copper wings and scorching
scales of silver. The numbers made the outcome
inevitable, and ultimately Gilthanas and Silvara were
forced to order the surviving good dragons to retreat.
During the course of the screaming fight in the sky,
Bakaris’s ground troops quickly reached the bank of the
ford. Hordes of goblins and hobgoblins, mounted upon
howling wolves, immediately charged across the dry
passage.
Sir Markham, commanding a large force of the