>>Draken
The wind tore past my ears like screaming arrows. Every beat of my wings was a thunderclap in the storm-choked sky. I held Vesper tight in my arms as we soared above the ruins of the valley, the remnants of the ritual site now nothing more than a scar of fire and blood beneath us.
But our eyes were fixed on something much worse.
The serpent.
It moved through the sky like a mountain with a pulse—its scaled body coiling through the clouds, so massive it cast a shadow over entire towns. Its abyss-forged body shimmered with an oily sheen, black as tar with veins of pulsing red energy that throbbed like a heartbeat.
We had never seen anything like it.
And it was heading north
Below us, scattered squadrons of soldiers and city guards fought to hold back the tide of smaller abyss monsters still spilling from rifts, doing what they could. But this… this was no fight for them.
