All of them well-used and warm and breathing.
He snapped his fingers.
His trousers materialized. His shirt. His traveling clothes — dark, practical, road-worn. The red cloak appeared last, settling over his shoulders with the familiar weight. He was dressed in two seconds. He turned.
The petite woman was there.
Rika’s fake husband. She had been sitting at the edge of the clearing with her knees drawn up and her short hair still damp from the night before, watching everything with the careful stillness of a woman who had been told her fate and was not sure whether to run or accept it.
She looked up at him.
He looked at her.
He reached down. He gripped her by the back of the collar. He lifted her. She was light — a petite body, compact and wiry, the body of someone who had spent years pretending to be something she was not and had the taut, guarded physicality that came from permanent performance.
She made a startled sound.
He settled her over his shoulder.
Her stomach hit the ridge of his shoulder. Her feet dangled behind him. Her head hung in front. She gripped the back of his cloak.
"Wh— where are you taking me—"
"Quiet," he said.
He looked at Edda.
She was standing at his side. Her amber eyes were forward. Her white hair was catching the morning light. The scale-shimmer was invisible now but the presence of it was not — she stood differently than she had eight days ago. Something in the posture. Something in the eyes. Something had been filled in her that had been empty for fifty years.
"I am going to the nearby dungeon," he said. "Your grandson is there. I gave him a task. When I bring him back—"
"I will handle what needs to be handled here," Edda said.
He looked at her for a moment.
"Make sure the women are ready."
"They will be."
She pressed her fist to her palm. She bowed. Not low — a warrior’s bow, a precise angle, the gesture of someone who had accepted a command and intended to execute it completely.
He looked at the pond. At the sleeping women. At the lava light still faintly visible in the far distance over the ridge.
He lifted off the ground.
Not dramatically. Not with visible wings or crackling energy. He simply went upward — feet leaving the grass, body rising, the petite woman on his shoulder swinging her legs in surprise.
"WAIT—" she said. "Wait— I— I have a fear of heights— I—"
He was already above the trees.
Edda watched him go. A dark shape against the pale morning sky, moving south toward the guild town, the petite woman’s voice audible for a few seconds more before the distance ate it.
She turned.
She looked at her women.
She looked at her hands.
She raised one palm. She pulled on the dragon fire inside her — carefully, the way you pull on something new that you have not learned the full weight of yet. The mana that responded was not what she had used for fifty years. It was hotter. Denser. It came faster and it came in more of it than she expected. Her skin shimmered orange for one full second before she controlled it.
She breathed.
She spread both hands.
The mana burst outward in a wide, gentle pulse — not a weapon, a carrier. The women in the clearing lifted. Each one rose from the grass or the water or the rock where she had been sleeping, still asleep, bodies hovering in a loose formation around Edda. Nara’s wet hair dripped. Rika’s arm hung loose. Fatima murmured something and pressed her hands together without waking.
From Edda’s back, wings.
Not feathered. Not dragon-scaled. Something between — the ghost of both, semi-translucent, catching the morning light in orange and amber panels. She rose.
She rose above the pond and the clearing and the dead zone, her women floating in the mana field around her, and she turned south toward the village.
She breathed.
For the first time in fifty years, she felt like something more than the last thing standing.
She flew.
### The Dungeon Below
The screams reached the surface before the runners did.
The Margrave Dungeon sat three miles east of the guild town, its entrance carved into the base of a limestone bluff that the locals had always found unsettling without being able to name exactly why. Three levels. Classified as a C-rank breach risk. Standard goblin infestation — the kind that adventuring parties cleared twice a year for the bounty coin.
It had been reclassified overnight.
The goblin population had not doubled. It had not tripled. It had exploded. The creatures that poured from the lower chambers were not the scrawny, weapon-shy goblins that new adventurers used for confidence practice. These were thick. Corded with muscle under the green skin. Their eyes were red-orange, inflamed, the pupils blown wide with the particular frenzy of a hive that had found something to accelerate around.
An orc had moved in.
The adventurers on the first level had not known this when they entered that morning. There were seven of them — a rotation team, confident, moderately armed, expecting a standard clear.
The screaming started in the second level corridor.
Sister Amara had been assigned to this party as healer support.
She was twenty-four. Pale. Soft-bodied in the way of a woman who had spent her young life in temple study rather than combat training — wide hips, full chest, the kind of body that the temple robes were designed to contain without drawing attention. Her healing staff was ash-wood and amber-capped. She was good at her work. She had healed eleven parties without incident.
She had never been on a dungeon clear when the goblins were in frenzy state.
The first one hit her from the side.
She did not see it. She was channeling a heal on a fighter’s cut arm when the impact came — a shoulder slam from a goblin that had been running full speed down the corridor, low and fast and absolutely focused on her specifically. She went down. Her staff bounced away. The corridor was dark and tight and the sounds of combat were everywhere.
Then there were four of them.
The goblins were not tall. But they were strong in the compact, explosive way of creatures built for this — for seizing, for pinning, for using numbers where individual size was insufficient. Two went to her arms. One went to her legs. The fourth stood between her and the main corridor, blocking line of sight from the rest of the party.
She screamed.
"SOMEONE— HELP— THEY ARE— HELP ME—"
Hands tore at her robe. The thick, dark-green fingers were clumsy but relentless. The fabric was not built to resist this. It came apart. Her waist. Her thighs. The cold dungeon air hit her skin. She screamed again.
"IT HURTS— IT HURTS— SOMEONE—"
The first one mounted her.
Its cock was disproportionate to its body — thick, dark green, with a blunt head that was wider than the shaft, veined in a way that was evolutionary rather than erotic, designed for the brutal, selfish efficiency of creatures that did not practice subtlety.
It pressed against her entrance. It did not prepare her. It did not pause.
It drove.
PAH—
"AAAAAANGHH~!! HIIEEEENGHH~!! IT HURTS— IT— SOMEONE— PLEASE—"