High above the Blackspine Mountains, the great red dragon shattered the last of the invaders’ sky-ships. His claws had torn through enchanted hulls, his fire had melted iron and pride alike.

The armies below cheered as the final vessel exploded in a bloom of blue flame. Drago roared in triumph, wings stretched wide against the dying sun, the golden crest of the Free Holds gleaming on his scaled chest.

Then the arrow found him.

It was no ordinary shaft. Forged by the Pale King and tipped with a shard of star-fallen iron, it slipped between the scales just behind his left wing.

Pain lanced through him like lightning. His powerful body convulsed. One wing folded. The other beat uselessly.

The sky that had been his kingdom became a rushing, roaring void. He tumbled.

Wind tore at his ears. The mountains rushed upward in a blur of gray stone and green forest.

Below, the cheering turned to gasps, then silence. Soldiers who had moments ago raised spears in celebration now stood frozen, watching their champion plummet.

Children pointed. Old warriors wept.

Even the enemy survivors, crawling from the wreckage, stared upward in stunned disbelief.

Drago’s mind raced even as his body failed. He remembered the long years of war, villages burned, and the hatchlings lost.

He remembered the oath he had sworn to the mountain kings: that no sky-ship would ever again shadow their valleys while breath remained in him. He had kept that oath.

Yet now breath itself was leaving him.

In the final seconds, he forced one eye open. The ground was close—too close.

He saw the river that wound through the foothills, the same river where he had first learned to fly centuries ago. A strange calm settled over him.

Victory had been real. The invaders were broken.

The Holds would endure. If this was the price, so be it.

Impact never came.

At the last instant, a great silver shape slammed into him from below—another dragon, older, scarred, and furious with love.

His mate, Sarya, had been hunting far to the north. She had seen the flash of the star-iron and raced the wind itself.

Her talons locked around his chest. Her wings, though smaller, strained against the earth’s pull. Together they crashed through the treetops, branches snapping like bones, until they slid to a stop in a meadow of crushed wildflowers.

Drago lay still, blood darkening the grass. But he lived. The arrow had missed his heart by the width of a scale.

Around them, the army slowly approached, awed and weeping. The day that had seemed certain to end in death had instead become legend: the day Drago fell, and rose again in the arms of the one who would not let him go.