41 – The Father’s Eye

Paco folded his wings and plunged straight at his father’s giant eye.

Smulknefire was still drawing the chamber into his jaws, too focused on the current dragging Ashley toward him to look up in time. Paco struck claws-first and vanished against the curve of his face, driving himself deep enough into the socket that only his back, wings, and lashing tail remained visible.

Smulknefire’s head snapped back, and the suction died at once.

Ashley was flung backward through the suddenly still air, the staff jerking in her grip as the half-formed [Jade Misericordia] shivered above the dragon’s skull.

The spell did not stop.

Jade light kept drawing itself out of the diamond in thin, merciless lines, sharpening into the shape of a blade while her mana bar continued to drain. Ashley clenched her teeth and fought to steady her grip. The cast had already begun, and now the magic was taking what it needed to finish.

Smulknefire screamed.

It was not a roar, not the sound of an ancient creature answering pain in battle. It was rawer than that, torn out of him before pride could shape it into anything else, and it filled the chamber until the Eternal Flame trembled with it.

His neck lashed from side to side, each wrench dragging the rest of his body with it and sending shock waves of displaced air outward.

Paco held on, his small body trapped beneath Smulknefire’s clenched eyelid, with only his tail and the edges of his wings hanging free.

“I can’t stop it. Damn it.”

Ashley caught herself twenty feet away, wings beating hard as she forced herself steady. The diamond tip crackled with unstable mana, and above Smulknefire’s skull the green blade finished taking shape, suspended and ready to fall.

The dragon’s cry finally broke into something close to words, aimed at the small violet shape clinging to his face.

“Out,” he rasped, his voice wrecked and hollow. “You will leave me now.”

Paco pressed deeper.

Above the dragon’s skull, the jade blade pulsed in heavy, rhythmic waves, fully formed and straining at the absolute edge of release. Her mana bar drained continuously.

The spell had no awareness that the target had stopped attacking. It did not care that Paco was half-buried in his father’s eye, or that Smulknefire was holding himself suspended in the air, every wingbeat controlled with terrible effort instead of thrashing the hatchling loose.

The cast was locked in. The magic demanded its resolution.

If it drops now…

“No dragon,” Smulknefire rasped, “has ever raised a claw against his own blood.” His voice fractured on the final word. “Not in all the eons I’ve been in this world. Not once. And now you, my own blood—”

His bulk shuddered under the strain of restraint, wings beating in uneven, punishing strokes to keep him suspended. One foreclaw rose, then stopped short of his own face, talons flexing uselessly in the air. He could not tear Paco free without tearing him apart.

So Smulknefire did something worse.

His jaws parted, and a long, crimson tongue slid out, curling upward toward the eye clamped shut around his son. It searched blindly along the armored ridge of his cheek, trembling with the effort to reach without crushing, without burning, without making the pain unbearable enough to break his control.

Paco’s tail twitched once beneath the sealed eyelid.

The scream had died in Smulknefire’s throat, leaving only the ragged drag of his breath and the wet scrape of his tongue against his own scales.

Ashley kept her staff leveled, remaining silent.

Then a pale hand closed around the hilt of the misericordia.

It appeared all at once, thin and translucent, its fingers wrapping around the hilt.

The sword plunged down.

Ashley felt the pull through the staff, and her jaw locked, yanking it hard toward her chest, forcing her will back through the falling spell.

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“Come on,” she snarled through clenched teeth. “You’re my magic. I decide where you land.”

The point dragged away from the center of Smulknefire’s skull by inches, then farther, the pale hand pulling one way while Ashley forced her arm toward the other. For a heartbeat, the edge ran down beside his neck, close enough to shave scales from his neck without striking deep.

She had to pull harder.

The misericordia was not only a blade. Its guard was broad, heavy with gathered mana, and it was coming down too fast. Smulknefire felt the cut along his neck and began to twist away.

Then he stopped.

Maybe he could have moved fast enough. Maybe he could have thrown his whole body aside and let the spell pass cleanly. But Paco was still wedged beneath his clenched eyelid, and for one fatal heartbeat Smulknefire chose not to risk what a violent turn might do to his son.

That single hesitation was enough for the misericordia to complete the line Ashley had forced on it. The blade slipped past Smulknefire’s neck in a searing blur, but the guard was wider than the cut, wider than the narrow margin she had managed to carve out of the spell’s path.