Leon stood in the shade of a large, exposed sandstone slab. It was part of what must have once been a building of some sort, perhaps a temple, though its exact purpose was rendered unintelligible given all of the damage it had weathered. The uncorked glass vial, realistically no more than a few ounces, felt as heavy in his hand as if it were made from lead.
He hadn't been lying to Khari. He truly felt that unless this really worked, he was about to enter his very last fight.
The others had spent most of the afternoon hunting quillbacks and dragging the corpses to this spot, chosen because it afforded more cover than anywhere in the bare desert, while still being far enough from anyone that there was no risk of collateral damage. He suspected that the professor planned to find somewhere close by to watch, but no doubt he was smart enough not to interfere directly, so that was fair enough. They were about to end years of research, even if there was realistically little choice in the matter.
Leaning heavily on the staff in his other hand, Leon shifted deeper into the shade of the slab. Half a dozen quillbacks later, the sun had set almost completely on the desert, bringing a chill to the air that would never have been possible under the burn of daylight. He could hardly feel it through the layers of armor and linens. No doubt Séverine and Khari were more comfortable now, too.
He watched carefully as everyone took their hiding spots, marking each in his own mind just so he'd know where they'd be coming from. Dusk was apparently a habitual feeding time for the dragon—Rubis. Hard to think of giving a creature like that a name with such a texture of fondness, but perhaps it just went with the territory of following her around for so long.
It was hard to keep track of exactly how long they waited; the landscape changed in front of his eyes as the shadows grew longer and deeper, the sand shifting from orange to deep red with the fading of the light. A harsh breeze kicked up grains of sand, a few stinging the side of his face, but the stone protected him from the worst of it.
Leon felt her before he spotted her approach. Perhaps it was something in his blood recognizing kin, the magic that had soaked so close to his bones over years and years of calling upon it. It was invigorating, like a spike of adrenaline direct to the heart, spreading over his skin like needles of frost. Her shadow passed overhead; he craned his neck until he could see her, circling the clearing. Her head bobbed up and down like a hound scenting the air—most likely that was exactly what she was doing.
He saw it the moment she committed to her landing, and then there was no longer any time to wait. Lifting the vial to his mouth, Leon downed it in a swallow, the thick taste of copper sliding over his tongue, lingering bitterly even after he swallowed. And then he was alive, senses sharp and an almost-forgotten strength back in his limbs.
Once more.
The dragon landed, kicking up sand and stretching her neck towards the nearest dead quillback. Her eyes glowed like embers in the dark.
He dropped the staff, and charged.
Khari was just as quick on the ambush, only she shouted as she broke cover, immediately drawing the dragon's attention to herself—and away from everyone else. Though the sand had a way of slowing things down, she was light over the surface of it for someone in so much armor, bringing her enchanted sword around and down in a bid for an early hit on the dragon's snout.
Unfortunately, Rubis was too quick for that, lifting her head well out of the small elf's reach. She was easily as big as the lyrium dragon had been at Adamant—perhaps larger still. Undaunted, Khari redirected her momentum and went in for her front left leg instead.
Romulus immediately went after one of the wings. While there wasn't anything vital to attack there, damaging the wings enough could keep the dragon on the ground permanently, where they actually had a chance to fight back against it. He sank his blade into the relatively thin membrane there and tore through it several feet, leaving a bloody hole for the air to pass through when Rubis lifted the limb on reaction. She swiped blindly with a leg in his direction.
Séverine stepped in the way, catching the claws across her shield with a horrid screeching sound. The force threw her back, but she kept her feet under her and stayed upright, bringing her heavy flail around to smack and bludgeon against the leg. It had more success than a slashing weapon would have, but still the damage was negligible.
Leon took advantage of the ample distraction provided by his friends, lowering his shoulder and barreling into the dragon's back left knee. She roared at the impact, the joint buckling enough to interrupt her attempt to gouge Khari with her claws and lean her entire frame towards him. The sound indicated a solid impact, blunt like Séverine's flail and similarly not enough to do any lasting damage.
She kicked back against him, talons scraping over his chestplate with a furious screech, but it lacked the momentum necessary to punch through the armor outright. Leon dug into the sand, skidding backwards and carving deep furrows in it with his feet. But he didn't topple over, and the moment she'd spent focused on him was one in which someone else could act.
Cyrus, for one, took advantage of the opportunity, moving in on the opposite flank from Romulus and stabbing both falcata down into the membrane of Rubis's other wing. Her violent reaction tore one of his blades from his grip, flinging it somewhere Leon couldn't see, but he kept hold of the other, redoubling his grip and dragging it free, flinging drops of blood from the edge to the sand.
Rubis shrieked, the sound building until it was almost deafening, echoing inside their armor and helmets. With a great heave, she jumped away from them, landing several meters to the left, but still grounded. Whether she could even take flight anymore was hard to say; her wings both bore great bleeding tears, and she held them aloft and away from her body as if to protect them from further damage.
Khari gave chase, only to be intercepted by a heavy swipe of her front claws. The attempt to roll out of the way was only partly successful, and she flew no fewer than ten feet through the air, crashing into the sand with a heavy whump.
Rubis's jaws opened, neck arching back before she lashed out in Khari's direction. Again Séverine was there to intercept the blow; a blast of bright light illuminated the darkness in front of the dragon's face as her fangs came down. Judging by the way she recoiled and turned her head away for a moment, it had partially blinded her. It wasn't enough to hide Séverine from the next bite, jaws snapping shut on either side of her shield with the dragon's head turned sideways. It was just wide enough to keep the teeth out of Séverine's sides, but there was no escaping the clutches of those jaws without help.
Romulus attempted to provide it, grappling up onto Rubis's lower neck in the moment it was available to him. He'd sheathed his blade, likely knowing it wouldn't be much use against anything on the dragon's back. He went to work with his mark instead, pressing his palm against the dragon scales at the back of her neck and unleashing energy. The blast was enough to tear off scales and send a spray of dragon blood into the air.
In the moment it seemed only to enrage her. She reared back, throwing Romulus off and onto his back and simultaneously lifting Séverine up at least ten feet into the air by her shield arm.
They needed to force her to let go, before she decided breathing fire was the thing to do. Leon would have ordinarily tried to weight her down himself, wrestled her head to the ground with whatever means he could, but though his instinct demanded he try, he knew he simply wasn't currently strong or fleet enough to succeed.
"Cyrus! Can you climb? We need to force her head down!" It hadn't escaped his notice that, magic or not, Cyrus's balance was extraordinary and practiced.
For his part, Leon hurried to the front, throwing the full weight of his body into a kick aimed for the back of Rubis's foreleg. She was holding more weight on one than the other at the moment, and he aimed for the load-bearing side, hoping to throw off her balance and interrupt her attempts to chew through Séverine's shield.
The kick alone didn't quite do it, but he followed up with a pair of heavy punches, the reinforced steel bands around his knuckles landing in exactly the same spot, right at what looked like the tendon he needed. The precision paid off, and the leg collapsed underneath her, sending her shoulder to the ground.
A low whistle signaled Rubis's incoming tail; Leon braced for impact, unable to get clear in enough time.
This time, Khari got in the way, swinging her sword not at the incoming limb, but hard towards the ground, plunging her blade into the sand. The spikes at the end of Rubis's tail slammed into the metal with a hard clang, uprooting both the sword and its wielder, but also taking the momentum out of the strike.
Cyrus, meanwhile, had taken Leon's advice, pulling himself astride the dragon's back by reaching up her collapsed shoulder and grabbing the spike there with his free hand. His face was twisted in intense concentration; he pulled his legs under him upon reaching the base of her spine.
It was about then that she finally got her feet back under her, too, though, and the violence of her lurch back to a stand nearly threw him off, balance notwithstanding. He doubled down on his grip on the spike, keeping his center of gravity low and close to her body, before seizing the opportunity provided by a moment of stillness and rapidly ascending her neck, using more of the spikes as handholds. No doubt they'd have sliced his hands to ribbons but for his gauntlets.
When he reached as far up as he was going to get, he stabbed his blade just behind her jaw with all the force he could muster. He was probably trying to cut something that would force her grip on Séverine to loosen. Once the blade had pierced the smaller, less-tough scales at the hinge of her jaw, he swung himself to hang from the side of her neck, torquing his body in an attempt to pull her downwards with their combined weight.
It worked, at least partially. They started to lower, the stab from Cyrus's blade clearly having some kind of effect, but Rubis jerked her head sideways before they could safely reach the ground. Her clamp on Séverine loosed at the same time, resulting in her being thrown sideways and taking Cyrus with her. They smashed into the ground in a heap together, which looked more painful for Cyrus given the way Séverine in her armor came down on top of him.
Rubis stomped a foot down and fixed her eyes on the pair of them, nostrils flaring in more than one sense. A quiet curse escaped Séverine, and she seized Cyrus by the collar, hauling him up and throwing him along with herself behind a nearby pillar. Or rather, the remains of one. It was all the cover they had when Rubis unleashed an inferno from her gullet in their direction, temporarily causing them to disappear from Leon's sight in the fire.
Only a moment passed before it was cut short, however, as Romulus drew his blade again and plunged it into the dragon's flank, which she'd left exposed for the fire attack. He hit something important, obviously, as Rubis ceased her fire breath and lashed back with a front leg, hitting Romulus hard and separating him from his weapon. He landed in a puff of sand some distance away.
That, for the moment, left Leon alone with the dragon. She clearly noted it, too, lunging for him with impressive speed for a creature so large, swiping at him with one massive foreleg, claws hooked to catch him. He backpedaled furiously, both of them kicking up sand as he scrambled to avoid the hard crimson of her talons.
One of them caught his leg, pitching him onto his back, and she growled low in her throat, with a sound like two boulders being crunched against each other. Her second foreleg came down heavily over his body, pinning him to the sand firmly enough that his armor started to whine where the plates were pressed too hard against each other. All it would take was one joint to buckle, one side to give, and he'd surely be crushed to death.
She'd left his arms free, though, and he grabbed one of her toes with both hands, pushing back up against the pin with all the strength body and blood could muster. His arms screamed at him, pain lancing up through every nerve ending when the sheer force of the Reaver magic and dragon's blood began to shred his muscle fibers, too weak to support the force with which his instinct compelled him to push.
Rubis's rumbling grew louder, building as she bore down with more of her weight. Some combination of pain and fury bid Leon respond in kind, and he did, a snarl tearing free of his throat as he kept pushing up, the center digit of her talons loosening where it had speared into the sand, lifting inch by inch from where it banded across his chest. The little bit of give let Leon breathe again, black spots receding from his vision with fresh air in his lungs, and he bore upwards with everything he had left, until it was just enough—had to be enough—and he slid himself out from underneath her pin, armor scraping against scales and sand. He rolled to his feet, aware that he could not stop or he'd fall.
With a roar of his own, Leon launched himself forward, wrapping both arms around her foreleg and stomping, hard, on one of her protruding knuckles. She tried to lift the limb, to shake him off, but he held tightly as he could, pulling ragged breaths in through gritted teeth. He wasn't sure who was up, who was in any shape to help, but it had to be now. Rubis reared onto her haunches, exposing her softer underbelly.
It was Khari, helm gone and blood trickling from the corner of her mouth, who got there first. Darting in quickly, she took the remaining several steps to gather her momentum, thrusting her heavy blade forward with all the strength she had.
The enchanted sword flared with some inner light, its green hue brightening for a moment before dying down again, the front half of the blade now deep within the dragon's body. From the way Rubis went slack so quickly, she had to have found something vital, and when she wrenched the blade free, it released a cascade of blood nearly the same color as the dragon's scales. Khari was drenched in it, only just managing to get out from under the massive body of the beast before she was crushed beneath.
Rubis stilled completely where she'd fallen. Her death had, at the last, been a quick one.
“We're alive, right?" Khari sounded unusually weary, perhaps understandable in the circumstances. She was also definitely favoring her left leg again, now that Leon could see her move. “I'm alive. Is everyone else alive?"
“Technically, I suppose." Cyrus was only just emerging from behind the pillar Séverine had pulled him to. His arm was bent at an unnatural angle, and his limp was even more pronounced than Khari's, probably due to the gash on the outside of his thigh. It looked like something had unluckily slipped around the armor there.
Séverine emerged as well, armor and mangled shield blackened from the dragon's fire. It looked to have singed off some of her hair, and there were no doubt some burns that needed treating, but she was otherwise in one piece.
Romulus offered a half-hearted grunt of confirmation from where he sat in the sand. He looked dizzy, to say the least, the blow he took from the dragon likely leaving him with a concussion.
"Leon?" Séverine called, her concern apparent.
It took him a moment to blink away the last of the effects of his rage, and truthfully he almost wished he hadn't. He lost all grip on Rubis, tumbling to the dirt without the ability to catch himself. What he'd done to himself was becoming clear: neither his arms nor his legs would respond to his commands, muscles and tendons ripped beyond the point of function. The blinding pain was replaced with a sort of numbness that felt more cold than anything. Even when he gained the wherewithal to speak, his words slurred heavily, his head swimming in the same dizzy way he recalled from his few adolescent benders.
"Can't... move," he mumbled. "Sorry to make you... carry me again."
But unlike the last time, he retained the barest hold on consciousness now, and it was enough to get him back to the camp and astride his horse, fortified with enough potions to get him to the healers at Griffin Wing, at least.
He wasn't dead.
Hopefully that meant something good for his chances.
He hadn't been lying to Khari. He truly felt that unless this really worked, he was about to enter his very last fight.
The others had spent most of the afternoon hunting quillbacks and dragging the corpses to this spot, chosen because it afforded more cover than anywhere in the bare desert, while still being far enough from anyone that there was no risk of collateral damage. He suspected that the professor planned to find somewhere close by to watch, but no doubt he was smart enough not to interfere directly, so that was fair enough. They were about to end years of research, even if there was realistically little choice in the matter.
Leaning heavily on the staff in his other hand, Leon shifted deeper into the shade of the slab. Half a dozen quillbacks later, the sun had set almost completely on the desert, bringing a chill to the air that would never have been possible under the burn of daylight. He could hardly feel it through the layers of armor and linens. No doubt Séverine and Khari were more comfortable now, too.
He watched carefully as everyone took their hiding spots, marking each in his own mind just so he'd know where they'd be coming from. Dusk was apparently a habitual feeding time for the dragon—Rubis. Hard to think of giving a creature like that a name with such a texture of fondness, but perhaps it just went with the territory of following her around for so long.
It was hard to keep track of exactly how long they waited; the landscape changed in front of his eyes as the shadows grew longer and deeper, the sand shifting from orange to deep red with the fading of the light. A harsh breeze kicked up grains of sand, a few stinging the side of his face, but the stone protected him from the worst of it.
Leon felt her before he spotted her approach. Perhaps it was something in his blood recognizing kin, the magic that had soaked so close to his bones over years and years of calling upon it. It was invigorating, like a spike of adrenaline direct to the heart, spreading over his skin like needles of frost. Her shadow passed overhead; he craned his neck until he could see her, circling the clearing. Her head bobbed up and down like a hound scenting the air—most likely that was exactly what she was doing.
He saw it the moment she committed to her landing, and then there was no longer any time to wait. Lifting the vial to his mouth, Leon downed it in a swallow, the thick taste of copper sliding over his tongue, lingering bitterly even after he swallowed. And then he was alive, senses sharp and an almost-forgotten strength back in his limbs.
Once more.
The dragon landed, kicking up sand and stretching her neck towards the nearest dead quillback. Her eyes glowed like embers in the dark.
He dropped the staff, and charged.
Khari was just as quick on the ambush, only she shouted as she broke cover, immediately drawing the dragon's attention to herself—and away from everyone else. Though the sand had a way of slowing things down, she was light over the surface of it for someone in so much armor, bringing her enchanted sword around and down in a bid for an early hit on the dragon's snout.
Unfortunately, Rubis was too quick for that, lifting her head well out of the small elf's reach. She was easily as big as the lyrium dragon had been at Adamant—perhaps larger still. Undaunted, Khari redirected her momentum and went in for her front left leg instead.
Romulus immediately went after one of the wings. While there wasn't anything vital to attack there, damaging the wings enough could keep the dragon on the ground permanently, where they actually had a chance to fight back against it. He sank his blade into the relatively thin membrane there and tore through it several feet, leaving a bloody hole for the air to pass through when Rubis lifted the limb on reaction. She swiped blindly with a leg in his direction.
Séverine stepped in the way, catching the claws across her shield with a horrid screeching sound. The force threw her back, but she kept her feet under her and stayed upright, bringing her heavy flail around to smack and bludgeon against the leg. It had more success than a slashing weapon would have, but still the damage was negligible.
Leon took advantage of the ample distraction provided by his friends, lowering his shoulder and barreling into the dragon's back left knee. She roared at the impact, the joint buckling enough to interrupt her attempt to gouge Khari with her claws and lean her entire frame towards him. The sound indicated a solid impact, blunt like Séverine's flail and similarly not enough to do any lasting damage.
She kicked back against him, talons scraping over his chestplate with a furious screech, but it lacked the momentum necessary to punch through the armor outright. Leon dug into the sand, skidding backwards and carving deep furrows in it with his feet. But he didn't topple over, and the moment she'd spent focused on him was one in which someone else could act.
Cyrus, for one, took advantage of the opportunity, moving in on the opposite flank from Romulus and stabbing both falcata down into the membrane of Rubis's other wing. Her violent reaction tore one of his blades from his grip, flinging it somewhere Leon couldn't see, but he kept hold of the other, redoubling his grip and dragging it free, flinging drops of blood from the edge to the sand.
Rubis shrieked, the sound building until it was almost deafening, echoing inside their armor and helmets. With a great heave, she jumped away from them, landing several meters to the left, but still grounded. Whether she could even take flight anymore was hard to say; her wings both bore great bleeding tears, and she held them aloft and away from her body as if to protect them from further damage.
Khari gave chase, only to be intercepted by a heavy swipe of her front claws. The attempt to roll out of the way was only partly successful, and she flew no fewer than ten feet through the air, crashing into the sand with a heavy whump.
Rubis's jaws opened, neck arching back before she lashed out in Khari's direction. Again Séverine was there to intercept the blow; a blast of bright light illuminated the darkness in front of the dragon's face as her fangs came down. Judging by the way she recoiled and turned her head away for a moment, it had partially blinded her. It wasn't enough to hide Séverine from the next bite, jaws snapping shut on either side of her shield with the dragon's head turned sideways. It was just wide enough to keep the teeth out of Séverine's sides, but there was no escaping the clutches of those jaws without help.
Romulus attempted to provide it, grappling up onto Rubis's lower neck in the moment it was available to him. He'd sheathed his blade, likely knowing it wouldn't be much use against anything on the dragon's back. He went to work with his mark instead, pressing his palm against the dragon scales at the back of her neck and unleashing energy. The blast was enough to tear off scales and send a spray of dragon blood into the air.
In the moment it seemed only to enrage her. She reared back, throwing Romulus off and onto his back and simultaneously lifting Séverine up at least ten feet into the air by her shield arm.
They needed to force her to let go, before she decided breathing fire was the thing to do. Leon would have ordinarily tried to weight her down himself, wrestled her head to the ground with whatever means he could, but though his instinct demanded he try, he knew he simply wasn't currently strong or fleet enough to succeed.
"Cyrus! Can you climb? We need to force her head down!" It hadn't escaped his notice that, magic or not, Cyrus's balance was extraordinary and practiced.
For his part, Leon hurried to the front, throwing the full weight of his body into a kick aimed for the back of Rubis's foreleg. She was holding more weight on one than the other at the moment, and he aimed for the load-bearing side, hoping to throw off her balance and interrupt her attempts to chew through Séverine's shield.
The kick alone didn't quite do it, but he followed up with a pair of heavy punches, the reinforced steel bands around his knuckles landing in exactly the same spot, right at what looked like the tendon he needed. The precision paid off, and the leg collapsed underneath her, sending her shoulder to the ground.
A low whistle signaled Rubis's incoming tail; Leon braced for impact, unable to get clear in enough time.
This time, Khari got in the way, swinging her sword not at the incoming limb, but hard towards the ground, plunging her blade into the sand. The spikes at the end of Rubis's tail slammed into the metal with a hard clang, uprooting both the sword and its wielder, but also taking the momentum out of the strike.
Cyrus, meanwhile, had taken Leon's advice, pulling himself astride the dragon's back by reaching up her collapsed shoulder and grabbing the spike there with his free hand. His face was twisted in intense concentration; he pulled his legs under him upon reaching the base of her spine.
It was about then that she finally got her feet back under her, too, though, and the violence of her lurch back to a stand nearly threw him off, balance notwithstanding. He doubled down on his grip on the spike, keeping his center of gravity low and close to her body, before seizing the opportunity provided by a moment of stillness and rapidly ascending her neck, using more of the spikes as handholds. No doubt they'd have sliced his hands to ribbons but for his gauntlets.
When he reached as far up as he was going to get, he stabbed his blade just behind her jaw with all the force he could muster. He was probably trying to cut something that would force her grip on Séverine to loosen. Once the blade had pierced the smaller, less-tough scales at the hinge of her jaw, he swung himself to hang from the side of her neck, torquing his body in an attempt to pull her downwards with their combined weight.
It worked, at least partially. They started to lower, the stab from Cyrus's blade clearly having some kind of effect, but Rubis jerked her head sideways before they could safely reach the ground. Her clamp on Séverine loosed at the same time, resulting in her being thrown sideways and taking Cyrus with her. They smashed into the ground in a heap together, which looked more painful for Cyrus given the way Séverine in her armor came down on top of him.
Rubis stomped a foot down and fixed her eyes on the pair of them, nostrils flaring in more than one sense. A quiet curse escaped Séverine, and she seized Cyrus by the collar, hauling him up and throwing him along with herself behind a nearby pillar. Or rather, the remains of one. It was all the cover they had when Rubis unleashed an inferno from her gullet in their direction, temporarily causing them to disappear from Leon's sight in the fire.
Only a moment passed before it was cut short, however, as Romulus drew his blade again and plunged it into the dragon's flank, which she'd left exposed for the fire attack. He hit something important, obviously, as Rubis ceased her fire breath and lashed back with a front leg, hitting Romulus hard and separating him from his weapon. He landed in a puff of sand some distance away.
That, for the moment, left Leon alone with the dragon. She clearly noted it, too, lunging for him with impressive speed for a creature so large, swiping at him with one massive foreleg, claws hooked to catch him. He backpedaled furiously, both of them kicking up sand as he scrambled to avoid the hard crimson of her talons.
One of them caught his leg, pitching him onto his back, and she growled low in her throat, with a sound like two boulders being crunched against each other. Her second foreleg came down heavily over his body, pinning him to the sand firmly enough that his armor started to whine where the plates were pressed too hard against each other. All it would take was one joint to buckle, one side to give, and he'd surely be crushed to death.
She'd left his arms free, though, and he grabbed one of her toes with both hands, pushing back up against the pin with all the strength body and blood could muster. His arms screamed at him, pain lancing up through every nerve ending when the sheer force of the Reaver magic and dragon's blood began to shred his muscle fibers, too weak to support the force with which his instinct compelled him to push.
Rubis's rumbling grew louder, building as she bore down with more of her weight. Some combination of pain and fury bid Leon respond in kind, and he did, a snarl tearing free of his throat as he kept pushing up, the center digit of her talons loosening where it had speared into the sand, lifting inch by inch from where it banded across his chest. The little bit of give let Leon breathe again, black spots receding from his vision with fresh air in his lungs, and he bore upwards with everything he had left, until it was just enough—had to be enough—and he slid himself out from underneath her pin, armor scraping against scales and sand. He rolled to his feet, aware that he could not stop or he'd fall.
With a roar of his own, Leon launched himself forward, wrapping both arms around her foreleg and stomping, hard, on one of her protruding knuckles. She tried to lift the limb, to shake him off, but he held tightly as he could, pulling ragged breaths in through gritted teeth. He wasn't sure who was up, who was in any shape to help, but it had to be now. Rubis reared onto her haunches, exposing her softer underbelly.
It was Khari, helm gone and blood trickling from the corner of her mouth, who got there first. Darting in quickly, she took the remaining several steps to gather her momentum, thrusting her heavy blade forward with all the strength she had.
The enchanted sword flared with some inner light, its green hue brightening for a moment before dying down again, the front half of the blade now deep within the dragon's body. From the way Rubis went slack so quickly, she had to have found something vital, and when she wrenched the blade free, it released a cascade of blood nearly the same color as the dragon's scales. Khari was drenched in it, only just managing to get out from under the massive body of the beast before she was crushed beneath.
Rubis stilled completely where she'd fallen. Her death had, at the last, been a quick one.
“We're alive, right?" Khari sounded unusually weary, perhaps understandable in the circumstances. She was also definitely favoring her left leg again, now that Leon could see her move. “I'm alive. Is everyone else alive?"
“Technically, I suppose." Cyrus was only just emerging from behind the pillar Séverine had pulled him to. His arm was bent at an unnatural angle, and his limp was even more pronounced than Khari's, probably due to the gash on the outside of his thigh. It looked like something had unluckily slipped around the armor there.
Séverine emerged as well, armor and mangled shield blackened from the dragon's fire. It looked to have singed off some of her hair, and there were no doubt some burns that needed treating, but she was otherwise in one piece.
Romulus offered a half-hearted grunt of confirmation from where he sat in the sand. He looked dizzy, to say the least, the blow he took from the dragon likely leaving him with a concussion.
"Leon?" Séverine called, her concern apparent.
It took him a moment to blink away the last of the effects of his rage, and truthfully he almost wished he hadn't. He lost all grip on Rubis, tumbling to the dirt without the ability to catch himself. What he'd done to himself was becoming clear: neither his arms nor his legs would respond to his commands, muscles and tendons ripped beyond the point of function. The blinding pain was replaced with a sort of numbness that felt more cold than anything. Even when he gained the wherewithal to speak, his words slurred heavily, his head swimming in the same dizzy way he recalled from his few adolescent benders.
"Can't... move," he mumbled. "Sorry to make you... carry me again."
But unlike the last time, he retained the barest hold on consciousness now, and it was enough to get him back to the camp and astride his horse, fortified with enough potions to get him to the healers at Griffin Wing, at least.
He wasn't dead.
Hopefully that meant something good for his chances.