This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Silver200061 on 2025-07-05 20:44:01+00:00.
The road to Frankonia was a river of despair. Allusia shuffled in its current, her habit grey with dust, her arms cradling the small, warm weight of the child, whose parents were nowhere to be seen. Whimpers rose from the swaddling cloth, a constant counterpoint to the dull thunder of war still echoing from the fallen Lupia plains behind them. Around her, the refugees moved like ghosts – Lupian men, women, and children, their ears flattened against their heads, tails tucked low, eyes hollow with exhaustion and fear. The air tasted of dust, sweat, and the metallic tang of distant smoke. Frankonia meant safety, they whispered, rumors of thunder of their man-made sky-machines driving back the dragon-lords of Albonite.
Then, the sky darkened not with clouds, but with leathern wings.
A shriek, unlike any bird or beast, ripped through the air. Panic erupted before the first fireball even fell. People screamed, pointing upwards as monstrous silhouettes banked against the sun. Lupian ears swivelled frantically, catching the terrifying whistle of descent.
The first gust of dragonfire struck the head of the column. A wagon, laden with meagre possessions, vanished in a blossom of orange and black, the concussion slamming into Allusia like a physical blow. Splintered wood, hot metal, and worse rained down. Screams, raw and terrible, replaced the weary murmurs. People scattered, abandoning carts, bundles, children, scrambling for the ditches, the meagre shelter of skeletal trees.
“Run!” someone bellowed, the word swallowed by another deafening whoosh and the sickening crump of impact closer this time. Heat washed over Allusia, singeing her eyebrows. She clutched the wailing infant tighter against her chest, her own tail lashing in terror. She ran, stumbling over ruts and discarded belongings, the world reduced to smoke, screams, and the shadow of death overhead.
Another whistle, sharper, closer. Instinct screamed. Allusia threw herself forward, curling her body around the baby, shielding it with her own back and hooded head.
The explosion lifted her off her feet. Light seared her closed eyelids. Sound vanished, replaced by a high-pitched ringing. Weightlessness, then a brutal impact with the unforgiving earth. Darkness swallowed her, the frantic cries of the infant muffled against her robes.
Pain dragged her back. A sharp, insistent agony in her right leg, pulsing in time with her frantic heartbeat. The ringing in her ears subsided, replaced by a cacophony of suffering: the crackle of flames consuming wagons, the moans of the wounded, the choked sobs of the terrified, and piercing through it all, the terrified, hungry wail of the baby still clutched tight against her chest, miraculously unharmed.
Allusia coughed, tasting blood and ash. Her head throbbed. Slowly, painfully, she pushed herself up onto her elbows. Dust coated her tongue, filled her nostrils. Her leg screamed protest. Glancing down, she saw a jagged spar of wood, as thick as her thumb and slick with her blood, embedded deep in her thigh just above the knee. The sight made her dizzy.
She looked around. Chaos. Bodies lay sprawled, some still, some twitching. Fires guttered from shattered carts and charcoaled bodies. Survivors huddled in ditches or behind overturned wagons, their faces masks of terror, their ears pinned flat. The acrid stench of burning wood, fabric, and flesh choked the air.
Then she saw it.
Down the road, perhaps fifty yards from where she lay, a dragon had landed. It was smaller than the monstrous beasts that had strafed them, but no less terrifying up close. Its scales were a deep, burnished bronze, catching the firelight. It shifted its weight, claws gouging deep furrows in the packed earth of the road, tail lashing like a whip. Its head, horned and crested, swung slowly, surveying the devastation with cold, reptilian eyes. Smoke curled from its nostrils.
Astride its neck, encased in dark, ornate armour that seemed to drink the light, sat the rider. An Albonite Dragon Knight. He held no lance, only the reins. His gaze was fixed not on the scattered survivors, but on the road ahead, where the panicked remnants of the column were still trying to flee towards the distant Frankonian border.
Allusia’s blood ran cold. She understood. The knight wasn’t just surveying. He was positioning. Blocking the road. Preparing.
The dragon lowered its massive head, jaws gaping wide. Deep within its throat, a furnace glow ignited, growing rapidly brighter, casting flickering, hellish light onto the bronze scales of its neck and the dark armour of its rider. A low, guttural rumble vibrated through the ground, felt more than heard.
He was going to incinerate the road. Incinerate everyone still on it, everyone trying to flee. Including the huddled survivors near her, and the baby in her arms whose cries had subsided into frightened whimpers.
Allusia tried to move, to crawl, to scream a warning, but the pain in her leg was a white-hot brand pinning her to the earth. She could only watch, frozen in horror, as the dragon drew in a final, hissing breath, the fiery light in its maw intensifying to a blinding, sun-bright core. The knight raised a gauntleted hand, not in command, but almost in benediction of the slaughter to come.
The inferno was poised to erupt.
The furnace glow in the dragon’s maw swelled to a sun-core intensity, painting the road, the smoke, the petrified faces of the survivors in hellish hues. The heat washed over Allusia even at this distance, a dry, suffocating promise of annihilation. She twisted, curling her body around the swaddled infant, burying its face against her dusty habit. Her own eyes squeezed shut. Ash gritted between her teeth as she whispered the Litany of Shielding, the words ragged, stolen by terror.
It never came.
Instead, the world tore.
A sound like nothing conceived on earth erupted from the heavens – a furious, mechanical banshee shriek that ripped through the moans and crackling flames. It was a jagged, tearing noise, a thousand angry hornets amplified a thousandfold, mixed with the violent, rhythmic thud-thud-thud of some monstrous, invisible drum beating impossibly fast. It was alien, terrifying, devoid of life yet imbued with a brutal, focused fury. It came from above, from the smoke-choked sky.
Simultaneously, the dragon and its rider simply… ceased.
Not burned. Not blasted backwards.
Annihilated.
Within a glimpse, several golden bolts hit, and a sphere of pure force and fire engulfed them. Bronze scales vaporized. Dark armour flared white-hot and shattered like glass. The concussion hit Allusia a fraction of a second later, a physical blow that slammed her back down onto the road, driving the splinter deeper into her leg. She cried out, the sound lost in the overwhelming CRUMP of the explosion and the lingering, skull-splitting shriek of the unseen attacker. A wave of superheated air, smelling of cordite and charred meat, rolled over the survivors. Pieces of unrecognizable debris rained down, pattering on the earth like grotesque hail.
Silence, profound and shocking, fell for a single, suspended heartbeat. Even the baby’s cries hitched. The ringing in Allusia’s ears was the loudest sound in the world.
Gasping against the pain, blood slick on her thigh, she forced her head up, her eyes wide with disbelief and primal terror, scanning the smoke above where the dragon had been.
And then, it emerged.
Through the billowing, greasy smoke left by the dragon’s demise, something burst out. It was impossibly fast, a blurred shape resolving as it leveled out just above the ravaged treetops flanking the road. Sunlight, momentarily piercing the overcast gloom and the pall of battle, struck it full on.
Allusia’s breath caught. Her vision blurred, tears of pain and awe mingling.
It was white. Pure, dazzling white, like sun-bleached bone or newly fallen snow on the high peaks. It gleamed. And it had wings – two sets, one above the other, rigid and angular, unlike any bird or bat. They were not feathered, but seemed crafted from light itself, or perhaps some unearthly metal that drank the sun and threw it back brighter. On these wings were strange, perfect circles of colour: blue, white, red – like stained glass, but vibrant, alive. And streaming behind it, whipping furiously in the wind of its own passage, were two long, vibrant blue ribbons, like pennants of celestial silk.
The memory surged, as the image in her eyes correlated with an old tale.
Father Borin’s finger tapped on the manuscript page. “So, it reads: Hark! an Angel of Four Wings shall descend, in his hand a spear of flame and fury, of thunder and lightning, It shall strike the beast down, banish it to the void beyond!”
It climbed and banked sharply, a movement both graceful and brutally efficient, the furious buzz of its unseen heart filling the air again, a sound both terrifying and exhilarating. The sunlight caught its form perfectly as it turned – a sleek, predatory body, a rounded and heavy snout, the cruciform shape of its double wings stark against the smoke.
An Angel.
She muttered.
Four-winged…Angel…