Chapter 29: Golden Dragon

The Little White Dragon’s harsh words drew no answer. The two dragons stood distant and still, heads held high like cold peaks, refusing even to meet Lilith’s eyes.

They looked down on Lilith—no surprise. The Golden Dragon’s remnant soul reeked of hatred for its own kind. Lilith was barely past her fledgling phase, so she never even registered to them.

She wasn’t discouraged—in fact, delight flickered like a lantern in her chest. Lilith wasn’t a child craving an enemy’s approval. The more the Golden Dragon’s bones and blood underestimated the Little White Dragon, the easier they'd be to carve apart. They wouldn’t even combine; it felt like they truly didn’t see her at all.

“Good opportunity,” Lilith murmured, voice cool as mist. The Little White Dragon raised the Primordial Ark. Her greatest edge was wild mobility. The Ark’s space-cutting trick was spent; all she had left was her own speed.

As if that skeletal behemoth and the gold-slime of congealed blood could ever catch her on foot.

She tightened her grip on the weapon and pressed her other hand to her lower belly. The constellation etched there hummed to life, a deep-blue resonance like starlight over water. Feathers flared behind her; Lilith hauled her speed to its peak.

“Hey!” Lilith drove forward, muscles strung tight like bowstrings, wings beating at full tilt. Those small feathers birthed a burst of impossible acceleration. She slammed straight into the bone dragon’s face and drove a blade into its eye socket.

The eye socket held nothing, of course. She’d thought there might be something brainlike to steer the bones. But the Primordial Ark went in clean and came out clean; inside was nothing but the brassy tang of Bosaklie’s air.

Her ambush didn’t land perfectly, but urgency beat like war drums. Lilith caught a bone spike as thick as her forearm, twisted in midair, and hacked down—splitting half the skull.

The bone dragon felt no pain, yet it bellowed and flung the Little White Dragon away. Lilith trimmed her focus in the air, flipped backward, and landed steady as a cat.

While she struck her little superhero landing, the golden blood that had gone quiet beside the bone dragon suddenly yawned open a bloody maw. A brilliant gold beam lanced straight at her head.

Lilith tipped back like a reed and the beam hissed past. She dove sideways, out of the Golden Dragon’s blood’s kill zone, and flicked a hand—one frost ray. Ice skinned the golden surface. Its motion lagged a beat, and that opened Lilith’s window to keep pouring on pressure.

She closed the distance in a few steps. The Primordial Ark, a blade sharp enough to cut a god, slid through the golden body like a hot knife through butter and shaved off a slab of blood.

Blood is fluid; no matter how much you slice away, once it runs together, it remembers its shape.

So Lilith thrust several tendrils straight into the Golden Dragon’s blood and drew the frozen chunk into herself, a bright gold shard swallowed by night.

She meant to press the advantage, but the bone dragon didn’t grant her that breath. No sooner had she gulped down that gold than a talon swatted for her skull.

Lithe as smoke, she slid past the swipe and went to riposte—aiming for the neck. The Golden Dragon’s blood spat a beam from behind, forcing her off the line.

With no clean line to strike, the Little White Dragon stepped back, shedding the two-dragon pincer like a cloak. She vaulted away. Even without room for the blade, Lilith didn’t waste the Star Energy steeped in her core—two neat spells flicked out. Ice scored the blood and the bone, one mark apiece.

“You’re a troublesome little thing. It seems we must show a bit of real skill,” the Golden Dragon’s bones said, voice rasping like grinding stone.

The smaller blood-dragon surged toward the bones at once. Alarm thudded in Lilith’s chest. She darted to the bone dragon’s side and cut at the onrushing gold.

But blood flows as blood does. The Primordial Ark might lay a god bare in one stroke, yet the bisected tide slipped around Lilith like water around a rock and splashed over the bones.

Damn.

A sharp curse cut across her thoughts. She knew exactly where she stood now: despite all her scrambling to keep blood and bone apart, they married against her will.

This was trouble. The Little White Dragon could handle a bone dragon—or the Golden Dragon’s Wraith—without breaking stride; she’d toppled similar stacks before. But she hadn’t crossed blades with its blood. She didn’t yet know its way, even if it was probably close.

Once bone and blood fused, the thing stopped being simple. Lilith could feel it—the Golden Dragon now carried the hardness of a Divine Fragment.

She let out a slow breath that tasted of iron. “Looks like a hard fight coming.” The Little White Dragon held the Primordial Ark crosswise, forced a few thin smiles, and steadied her stance.

A golden film wrapped the vast skeleton, like skin, like nascent scales. It pulled Lilith’s gaze, and she watched it for a long beat.

While the Little White Dragon plotted how to take apart a dragon born of joined bone and blood, something around her opened—an iron mouth yawning in the dark.

She looked up. Above loomed the largest furnace Lilith had ever seen, a sky-bellied kiln breathing heat.

Not just in Bosaklie—nowhere in this otherworld had she seen a forge of such scale.

Atop that colossal furnace, she saw a small figure.

A figure identical to her—a mirror cut from her own shadow.