Prologue - The Fallen Wings (Working Title)

Thorn awoke in the cold on the morning air, leaving the tip of her nose numb, every breath sending another cascade of the chill into her throat.

Thresh grumbled and shifted above her, the grey light starting to filter in through the gaps on the edges of his wing, that was stretched out over the top of where she lay curled up under the embroidered blanket.  

The dragon was still fast asleep. She could tell as much as she hadn't been awoken by its rough tongue scraping across her cheek and matting her hair with saliva. This was her companion's customary morning greeting and something she'd resigned herself to now they had been bonded.
Jae was only to happy to remind her most of the time how childish it was to still sleep next to one's dragon at sixteen years of age, and, eager to prove her maturity, Thorn had done her best to try and persuade the dark grey beast to sleep outside, but always she'd awoken at some point to find the creature curled round her, and would have to venture outside each day with Thresh in tow to the cool disapproval of Sera, her mentor.

Sera.

It took a few moments to realize the problem with the picture. It was dawn already. Sera was supposed to have woken her up to take the watch hours ago. Many other mentors she could have put it down to some kind of maternal or paternal affection toward their charge that'd fuel something like that, but Thorn would never credit the sorceress with indulging her apprentice that much.

Sera was critical, though in a quiet, measured way that tended to unsettle Thorn far more than the shouting or punishments dealt out upon the fledgers by some of the other riders. And oversleeping was one of the many things she had no patience for.  Plenty of times Thorn and Thresh had been awoken by a bucket of ice water being emptied over the top of them when they didn't stir fast enough.

It was only with these memories that the strangeness of this began to creep into the girl's consciousness, and Thorn slipped the blanket off her shoulders, slipped the deerskin cloak out from under Thresh's tail, pulled on her boots and stumbled out into the misty morning.


The sixteen year old shivered as the temperature hit her, making her grasp hold of the corners of the cloak. The campsite, sat in a  clearing on a wooded hillside, was covered in a fine layer of moisture.

The fire was completely gone, the burned wood bearing the same dew as everything else.

Thorn could recall the intense disapproval she had been met with last time she'd allowed the fire to go out while on watch.

Sera was nowhere to be seen.

Neither was her dragon, Valkin.

It was easy enough to lose sight of a willowy human woman in the pine forest, but not Valkin, whose black, feathery crest brushed the tops of the smaller trees when he rose to his full height. He was usually sat down near the fire when they camped, even if fast asleep. Indeed Thorn could see the indentation of swept up needles and twigs where he had been lying.

Thorn suddenly felt very vulnerable out in the silence of the misty forest. Moreso than she had felt before when surrounded by trees. She was one of the people of the eastern woods, she had lived out her childhood in the deepest depths of the most treacherous woodland and felt entirely at ease...but this... something about the place that morning felt...wrong..

Something brushed against her hand. Torn out of her thoughts, Thorn whipped around to meet Thresh's great green globes as the young dragon stood next to her, regarding her quizically as he turned his gaze toward the empty camp.  He gave a rough chip of confusion, rattling his large, bat-like wings before starting to sniff the ground.

Thresh was a forest-dwelling subspecies, if what ___ read in his books was accurate. Even at full size he would be smaller than most of his kind, mean for being able to chase quarry through dense trees and nest on large branches. At that time, he appeared around the size of a rather gangly pony, though he was a good few years from being full-grown, and much of his body was still covered in the downy fuzz of a fledgling.  

Still, what he lacked in intimidation, Thresh more than made up for in his senses. The king's best hounds could not rival Thresh in his sense of smell, and, having caught onto something, the creature let out a shrill warbling, and bounded up the path, compelling his partner to follow.

Thorn jogged up the uneven, root-choked slope. The pat was wide, wide enough for Valkin to walk, but was still a bit of a struggle. She could see clawmarks in the damp earth, but it was hard to tell if they belonged to their friend, or to Thresh who was bounding about erratically from edge to edge, his wedge-shaped snout pressed into the dirt, tail swishing wildly, covering too much ground for Thorn to catch up, the best she could do was to keep him in sight at the edge of the mist. Until his disappeared over the brow of the hill.  Thorn was quickening the pace to try and catch him when there came a yelp from that direction, and she broke into a sprint.

"Thresh?" the young woman called, alarmed, as she scrambled up.
"Thresh! What's wrong?"

She hauled herself over the top to find her companion standing, feet planted out wide in the centre of a large area of broken trees and flattened foliage. The bristly mane on the back of his neck was stood on end and his long ears drawn back against his head. Thorn slid down to where he stood, trying to fathom the source of his reaction...and that was when she saw the blood.

Red splashes across the bodies of the fallen pines, and long streaks on the ground, too much and too widespread to be a human or deer.

"Dragon?" Thorn asked, her voice barely above a whisker.

A low snarl from her friend gave her the answer she really had not wanted to hear.

"Try and find where it goes from here." she commanded, after a short pause.
"We need to find them."

Common sense told Thorn that whatever had happened was more than the two of them were going to be able to deal with. Whatever could have gotten the better of Valkin was going to make short work of her and Thresh... but they were sworn to the Order. And one of the most important of her agreements was loyalty to their mentor. Loyalty to your fellows was the cornerstone of their kind.  And she cared for Sera and Valkin, in some way. Perhaps simply familiarity, perhaps she had learned to feel more affection for them than she'd realized...but either way she was prepared to seek them out.

And then the shadow passed over.

Thorn became aware of it suddenly, the change in the light. No noise, like a hunting owl...just a sudden sense of darkness over head.  Her gaze snapped upward as a shape, large and indistinct, swept over them in the fog.  Thresh was staring at it too, trying to make out some recognizable shape in the haze, when it turned and dived at them.

Thorn half collided with Thresh's back as she sprang forwards, trying to get every limb where it needed to be as something bore down on them.  They'd left the saddle up at the campsite and she was precariously clinging onto handfuls of fur as the dragon broke into a run and took flight, large wings snapping out to their full length and sweeping downwards to jolt them up. It was as they lifted that the rider turned and saw it break the mist.  A black, misshapen jaw and two blue lights that seared through the fog as they reached the same level in the air.  Layers and layers of uneven teeth and rows of spikes. She caught only a brief glimpse before necessity drew her gaze back as the veered up over the trees.

'We need to turn!' she thought to her companion, summoning up the images in her head. That was what they'd always been taught in regard to speaking to their dragon with their mind, particularly in a crisis. Pictures and words. Not just words.
'There are only mountains this way. Mountains and snow.  We need to go south.'

Images flowed back into her mind, of diving down into the trees, beneath the thing, the natural reaction of any of his kind when faced with a predator, and before she had time to answer, she felt the lurch of her stomach as they entered a sharp dive, then they'd crashed into the treeline, and she was getting battered by twigs and needles, assaulted by the scent of the pine sap.  She pressed down against Thresh's back and pulled a hand across her face, trying to shade her eyes enough to see both ahead, and up above them, to track the thing coming after them.    She had no idea what direction they were going in, and could only hope he could tell, only being able to see the speeding trees.  

It seemed like forever that they were crashing through the foliage until it cleared, down a narrow gap where a river ran, skimming over the surface before veering up onto the path down the mountain.  By the time Thorn could orient herself she found they were nearly at the road, and scanning the sky seemed to produce no hint of that beast.

"What...what was that?" Thorn asked, pushing herself up against the dragon's back once more, realizing she was pretty out of breath, having hardly drawn any during the dash down the slope.

She felt a response from her friend. Horrible smell. Disgusting smell. Death and metal and cold. Wrong smell. Not just bad, wrong. It should not be.

"We need to go...tell some of the others." Thorn stated, as they started to glide, some way above the road, as the mist had begun to give way to an overcast sky.  
"We can got get them, come back, find Sera and Valkin. We got time...right?"

She had no idea, and had no reason to think Thresh would either. Whether that thing had attacked Sera and Valkin during the night, whether they had fled from it and left Thorn and Thresh behind, or something else entirely had taken place, she couldn't begin to work out. Her mind was still racing with fear and adrenaline. She'd been in training long enough to deal with most things, most creatures you were likely to run into in the wilderness of the Fellspire Mountains. And that was none of those things. It was not a dragon.  I was the size of one, perhaps even a similar shape. But it was not a dragon. Nothing about that face she had glimpsed bore any relation to the beasts she'd spent most of her life around. It was an...abomination.

It was there.

Without warning it came from the clouds, plunging down on top of her and colliding with them in the air.  Thorn was crushed against Thresh's back by its chest, the air forced out of her lungs as bone and scale and metal hit her at such speed. She could see only frantic ragged wing beats and claws, snarls and hisses before they lurched back with a shriek from her dragon. Pain seared through Thorn's arm and shoulder, almost causing her to lose her grip on the fur.  They began to tumble, away from the horrid thing, downwards. In her peripheral she could see the tattered shreds of Thresh's right wing, the membrane chewed up and useless, Thresh's frantic wing beats doing nothing but causing their drop to jerk and shudder.

The ground was rising to meet them. All she could catch from the dragon were flashes of panic and pain as he struggled desperately to stop the descent.

There was a splot of blue-grey somewhere beneath them. Blue. Water. A lake. Thorn seized the fur and tugged, holding the image firmly in her mind.

' The water, Thresh! Aim for the water!'

They veered, the wind against the torn wing causing the dragon to cry out piteously, somersaulting over and dropping with his back toward the water, his rider pinned up against his shoulders as they hit the surface of the lake, creating an eruption of white spray, bubbles, and then silence.

Silently, overhead, the wrong thing circled a few times, two pairs of eyes staring at the surface, scanning for the slightest movement, before it banked away, and was absorbed into the fog.