By the time Tish hit the ground, people were cursing and lamenting.
She looked up, but she couldn't see beyond the watchtowers and trees near the city gate. It seemed the dragon wasn't dead, though. He was up and fighting again.
"Good," Tish muttered under her breath. "You don't get to die somewhere I can't see you take your last breath."
The Prince of Partha owed her too much. Too many apologies. Explanations.
And other bullshit.
Tish couldn't just let him die that easily.
The fire returned, lighting up the entire sky of Benevia in a ghastly red and yellow, lighting Tish's path as she ran to the stable. He was breathing fire again. It made Tish feel something. Not admiration. Definitely not that. But something she wasn't ready to name.
To her surprise, the stable by the city gate wasn't quiet, as she had expected. It was the opposite. The place was crawling with soldiers, gearing up for war.
The stable, usually smelling of hay and horse and quiet dark, was now a chaos of torchlight and shouting. Soldiers moved everywhere—some still lacing themselves into gear, while most were already prepared. Their armor polished, weapons sharp, their cloaks black to mix with the dark of the night, snapped and billowed around them as they moved.
Heads turned as she passed, murmurs rose. Tish walked faster before curiosity and questions could catch up with her.
"Saintess? Saintess!"
It was Prince Mamon. He stood by a horse—a beautiful great stallion, ash grey, with intelligent eyes. At first Tish couldn't recognize him. But then he lifted his helmet, tall and conical, narrowing to a point, with chain mail hanging down to guard his neck and throat, and greeted her with a crooked grin. "Came to give us Rāva's blessing?"
And then the ground shook. Tish felt it beneath her feet like the heartbeat of Mother Earth herself.
For one confused second, she thought it was thunder. But thunder didn't come from below.
Somewhere far beyond the city walls—past the Perma forest, past the dark line of the horizon—something enormous had hit the earth. The shockwave rolled toward Benevia like an invisible tide, faster than sound, faster than thought, and by the time Tish understood what was happening, it had already reached her.
Before Tish knew it, she was on the ground, feeling dazed and disoriented. The horses started running, hooves raised. Men shouted. Torches swung wildly on their hooks, throwing crazed shadows across the walls. The ceiling above groaned, cracks spreading like spiderwebs as dust rained down, covering everything in grey and brown. Somewhere outside, she heard it—a second, deeper boom, arriving late, rolling in after the tremor like the sound was chasing its own cause, so massive it felt more felt than heard, a pressure against her chest rather than a noise in her ears.
They'd fallen. Both of them. Rudra and the creature.
"You're alright," someone was saying.
Tish blinked, her vision still blurry as she looked up. The Prince was hunched over her, his frame dark against the light. His eyes were intense. "I can protect you—"
"We need to move!" Tish snapped at the Prince, surprising even herself. "Or we'll be buried here in seconds."
"Right," Mamon agreed. He stood up and helped Tish to her feet, even though she really didn't want any help.
And then they were running for the exit. The stable boys had gathered most of the horses, trying to calm them. Tish skidded to a stop near them.
"Saintess?" Prince Mamon asked.
"We need horses," she informed hastily, "to go down there!" For a second she was afraid Mamon would do the same thing—that he would try to stop her, like Percival had.
"No!"
There it was...
"Give me time to get my soldiers organized first!" he said.
Oh?
"We don't know what's happened! Why the Parthan Prince is fighting that thing, who the hell is winning—but," he took a sharp inhale, "whoever wins that fight may be coming for us."
Mamon pleaded with Tish with his eyes. "We need to be smart about it. More prepared."
Tish didn't say anything at first. She recalled how most people, including Percival, had gathered on top of the wall watching the battle in the sky, while the Prince had been here, preparing for the future.
"You'll make a fine king someday," Tish whispered, awed. A mixture of expressions passed over Mamon's face before it turned red. "Saintess, I—"
"I'll go ahead," Tish said.
"Understood.... wait, WHAT?"
But before he could stall Tish with more excuses—well, reasonable excuses—she was climbing onto the horse. "That's royal property, Saintess!" spluttered Mamon, trying to sound angry and failing miserably. "You know the punishment for stealing royal property?"
Tish closed her eyes and silently asked for forgiveness from Rāva. Then she looked down at him, smiling. "I don't know, Your Highness," her voice soft, "Are you offering to arrest me yourself, Your Highness? Or will you send someone competent to do it?"
Mamon opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again, looking, for one glorious second, like a fish that had personally offended him.
"That's—" he started. "I'm plenty competent—"
"Then chase me." Tish beamed, "This weekend. Bring the whole army if it makes you feel better."
Mamon stopped. Just stopped. Eyes wide, shoulders rigid.
Tish fled like the nasty sinner she was, pulling at the reins of the horse, head lowered until she could feel the gallop of its hooves vibrating in her chest, matching her rapid, beating heart.
__________________________________________
The night air was hot and humid—a strange thing to notice when the season of snow and dry had arrived. It took Tish a moment to understand why. The fire in the sky had been so bright, so close to the sun's own heat, that even from this distance it must have warmed the air for miles around, the way a hearth warmed a room long after the flames themselves were out of sight.
Her mind traveled back to the riverbed, where she had seen Rā's water flowing and alive in the dead of winter, weeks after Rudra had rained fire down on Benevia's outer walls and dams a month back. The walls had burned, the dams had broken, and the river had unfrozen and flooded the lowlands of the riverbank. It had taken several weeks for the water to freeze back—and even now, Tish knew, patches of it hadn't. Here and there along the banks, black water still moved sluggish and stubborn beneath a thin, fragile skin of ice, refusing to fully surrender to the season.
And now the Perma Forest was covered not in its usual mist but smoke—thin, drifting threads of it, rising here and there from the canopy like the forest itself was exhaling. Tish had braced herself for fire. She'd expected acres of trees burned to ash, or still burning—a nightmare of its own kind, one she doubted Benevia had any means to deal with. Forest fires weren't a thing here. Not until now. Not before the dragon's arrival.
But there was no fire, not really. The battle had happened too high above the canopy for the flames themselves to reach the ground—only the heat had traveled down, relentless and invisible, until it found something to mark. Scattered patches of leaves had gone black and curled without ever catching, crisped at the edges like paper held too close to a candle. A few still smoked faintly, thin grey wisps rising into the humid dark, and here and there Tish spotted long dark scorch streaks scarred into bark, as if some great unseen hand had dragged a hot coal down the length of each trunk.
The snow beneath it all had melted, disappearing underground and leaving behind an uncomfortable layer of mud and dirt, softened further by half-thawed patches of old floodwater that hadn't quite managed to freeze again.
As she neared the place of destruction, she noticed how most of the trees had bent or broken, as though something invincible from above had shoved down on their necks, forcing them to bow to whatever had happened in the sky above the Forest of Perma. The horse made uncomfortable, nervous noises. Tish patted the side of its neck, shushing it, hoping it was enough to calm the animal down.
And then she heard it—well, felt it more than actually heard it. A deep rumble that shook the trees around her, vibrated the very bones in her. The horse threw its front legs up, in the universal gesture of this is as far as I'm coming with you, lady. But Tish kept holding the reins.
It was just Rudra. She had heard that annoying rumble enough times to know it. It was the sound he made when he didn't like something but was too much of an asshole to voice it using a human tongue.
It meant he was alive. Tish felt relieved and annoyed in equal measure.
By the time she broke through the line of trees, she caught a glimpse of the "thing" that had been fighting the Parthan prince—already retreating, wings beating hard against the night sky, climbing higher and higher until it was swallowed by the dark. It looked like a bird. More than a bird. And it was leaving.
Which meant whatever was happening on the ground now had nothing to do with it at all.
Tish's eyes dropped to the clearing below, and that was when she saw them. Two figures in the dirt—not the creature and Rudra, but Rudra and someone else. A woman, dark hair loose and wild, one side of her face matted with blood, currently had him locked in a headlock with the sheer, committed viciousness of someone who had been perfecting this exact move since childhood. Rudra—four hundred feet of obsidian scale and ancient terror reduced to a fraction of that in human form—was on his knees in the mud, one hand clawing uselessly at her forearm, the other braced against the ground like he was seriously considering just letting his face live there permanently rather than deal with this indignity.
Nayan.
They were... fighting. Not verbally—physically.
No shouting, no snapping insults. Just grunts, elbows, and the occasional undignified yelp, the kind of scuffle that looked less like enemies and more like two people who'd been doing this exact thing since they were children and saw absolutely no reason to stop now, world-ending battles and shockwave-inducing crash landings notwithstanding.
Tish watched the Prince of Partha—a creature capable of leveling a city, currently held hostage by a headlock—and felt some of the tension leave her shoulders, replaced almost instantly by something closer to exhaustion.
Right. Of course. This was fine. This was normal.
And Rudra was naked.
Tish closed her eyes.