Twenty-One: Chronicle of the Headless Knight

Lilith’s pure-white wings budded from her back, like moonlight unfurling through silk. After her winged-growth phase, the Little White Dragon could manifest them outside her clothes, a blossom over fabric, no more backless compromises.

Now she flared them with ease, feathers ringing like light on water. Half a flight ace now, she could snap into the air and find balance like a hawk riding a gust.

She had to face more than gravity. Down on the bog, a headless brute on a skeleton horse leveled a bow at the Little White Dragon, like a shadow hunter on a reed-choked lake.

Worry pricked like thorns before thought. “Damn it, where did Nidhogg go?” Lilith widened her eyes and swept the mire for the Black Dragon’s tall silhouette, like scanning a treeline for smoke. She found nothing. The Little White Dragon sighed, a soft wind over cold water, cursing Nidhogg’s unreliability even as a seed of fear warmed in her chest.

Reason tried to cool her like rain on embers: a thing like this couldn’t touch Nidhogg. Yet unease flickered like a moth; that unreliable woman might actually get hurt by this thing.

Anxiety tightened like a knot. No sign of Nidhogg. Lilith bared her teeth and chose the quick kill, like drawing a blade to cut a tangled net.

She heeded the restless beast in her blood, a drum in a cage. She opened her snowy wings, and in the dim underground world they flared like a miniature sun hanging in a cavern sky. Instinct loosened; white scales drifted from her back like winter flurries.

Light bent around those falling flakes like water around stones, refracting until every pale shard poured back onto Lilith like dew. The faint gloom pooled and condensed, and she blazed like a sunlit coin in a dark well, catching every eye in the dungeon air.

Clang! The towering Headless Knight rapped his two-meter bow with a gauntleted hand, a bell struck with iron. He jerked the reins, and the skeleton horse of bone and Moonswallow Mist reared, loosing a piercing whinny like a knife of wind.

From the rolling Moonswallow Mist he shaped a horn, antler-pale as frost. He set it where his head should be, into the blue fire on his neck, and—under Lilith’s frowning stare—he blew it, like a ghost piping through reeds.

She had no idea how a mouthless knight played a horn, but logic evaporated like breath in winter; the sound simply was.

The mellow call washed over the swamp like a low tide, drowning the recent clang. He lowered the horn, yet the music lingered, a ribbon of sound hanging in the fog.

Inside that echoing note, the Knight hefted his giant bow, and another arrow of mist floated to the string like a pale fish to bait.

Draw, nock, no real aim—he loosed, clean as thunder splitting a cloud.

The massive shaft arrived in a blink, a spear of night. Air shredded around Lilith like silk, and the arrow’s path blurred beyond sight.

Speed didn’t matter. She folded her wings tight, white wrapping her like a cocoon. Dark-red Taint coiled up her body like barbed vines, and she turned into a cannonball. She skimmed past the arrow like a swallow past rain, then slammed the towering Headless Knight from his saddle like a falling star.

Armor rang as he crashed, a drum dropped on stone. Tentacles on Lilith’s back thickened in a heartbeat like roots bursting soil, and before the skeleton horse could twitch, they ripped it into jagged pieces like dry branches.

Her body ran wild, a river after a dam break. Her vision clouded like stirred silt. Thought lagged, yet her jaws opened on instinct, and she bit down on the Knight’s neck like a wolf on kindling.

Biting fire defied words; it was eating weather. This blaze burned on Moonswallow Mist, tasteless as fog and yielding like a jellyfish with no chew.

Still she tore and fed, mouthful after mouthful of azure Moonswallow Mist, smacking twice like a child with shaved ice before gulping it whole. She bit again, ripping off another burning chunk like tearing moss from a stone.

Strength came from nowhere, a spring under rock. She pinned the towering Knight with ridiculous ease, straddling him like a rider breaking a bull, her tentacles lashing to fix her in place, and she gnawed again and again.

He thrashed like prey under a predator’s paws, iron plates clanging like pots in a storm. No matter the bucking, Lilith kept him nailed to the mud like a stake.

The fire atop his stump dwindled under her bites, blue turning to ashen dusk like a dying sunset. As the light thinned, his fight faded. At last she tore free the final flame, and he sagged into stillness, a husk of empty armor on wet earth.

Only then did awareness return like a tide, cold and late.

The Little White Dragon sat dazed on the steel shell, a pale bird on a cold anvil. In the feeding frenzy she’d lunged past the blue fire and snagged a few filthy black grasses, like weeds in a ditch.

Lilith spat out a leaf like a cat with a burr. Mud smeared her mouth; the soil’s bitterness spread like steeped tea, and she stuck out her tongue with a grimace.

She rolled off the Knight and pushed against the iron to stand, her fingers cold as nails. She stared around, blank as fog, still not grasping what she’d just done.

She felt unlike herself, as if some wild thing had worn her skin—a hawk gone mad over prey, feathers and fury.

She didn’t know why it happened. Her upper canines itched like sprouts under bark, and she pressed them with a finger like calming a drumbeat.

Sour and swollen, the ache crawled like ants—unbearable. She frowned with a small hum, then shook her head like flinging rain off feathers. Forget it. Find Nidhogg first.