Black Briar by Sophie Avett Page A

fleet of waves as she hovered above a tower of thorns. “You had help, remember?” She trained her ebony specter’s dragonhead on his heart. The emerald pearl caught in the beast’s black teeth pulsed with energy and the world rippled, registering the change. “Shall we play even odds this time?”
     
    One minute there was nothing…
     
    And then, a massive heraldic dragon smacked across the tower like a wrecking ball.
     
    But to see a dragon was not to hear it.
     
    No one ever heard a dragon make a sound beyond beating the sky with its massive wings or crushing rock and brick to rubble. No one ever heard a dragon scream unless it was to breathe fire. Talons hinged into the weeping stone and skulls, the black reptilian beast snaked around the tower and poised its long serpentine snout over Sybille’s shoulder like a medieval awning.
     
    Raptor-wings and elegant barbs, long and twisted horns. Maleficent was a drake queen   with smoldering amethyst eyes and glittering onyx scales. Mature. Royal. Her Majesty was once an ancient spirit roaming the Fade freely, she was all Sybille’s now. Mind captured and warped to the spindle witch’s will. No weak being could command that caliber of beast spirit. No, only the strongest could master mythology of that magnitude. A crazy bitch with a dragon in her pocket was hell on this plane as well as the next. Believe it.
     
    Sybille folded her sleek arms. Her long, black nails were as shimmering talons, eager to be put to use. “Scared?”
     
    “It was gargoyles that conquered and rode the first serpents creation had to offer.” Eyes blazing white suns, he rose higher into the inky stars like a soul wafting up from a dragon’s corpse. “I fear nothing.”
     
    Raising his arms like he was lifting the oceans, Nova hung, crucified in the cosmos as a snaking azure dragon with large fish-like scales and silver feathered wings burst from the Milky Way painted on the horizon. The beast was born and spun from his soul. Stag-like horns and a golden mane, it was savage and elegant in one breath, whirling and wringing its lithe body as it unfolded massive wings at the samurai’s back, gifting him flight even when he fell. Celestial King.
     
    “Well…” The spindle witch patted her dragon’s snout, each smoking nostril the size of her hand. Similar terrible smirks carved parallel paths from ear to horn. “Think they’re hot shit, don’t they?”
     
    “Surely, you jest?” Nova swirled his hand over his head to indicate her headdress, and Ryojin, the lung dragon, snorted, long gold whiskers flailing. “Such drama…”
     
    Her eyes narrowed into slits. “Go fetch me a hood ornament, Maleficent.”
     
    Maleficent shot from tower like a bullet with tattered black wings. RyMjin followed suit. Heraldic beast meeting Asian lung in a collision of claws, barbed and feathered tails. Bellows shook the heavens. Nearly toppled the gods out the sky. Awe was absent from only two beings, the wicked spindle witch and the gargoyle, locked in a battle of wills. Wielding their staffs like reins as they gazed at one another across an eternity of stars.
     
    RyMjin caught Maleficent’s neck between three rows of jagged teeth. She roared and backhanded him into a moon. The planet cracked and asteroids peppered the Milky Way like spectral dust. His beast fell but caught an updraft and launched himself in pure pursuit.
     
    Sybille’s lip curled. “Persistent.”
     
    Maleficent beat the sky with her slow but massive wings and swooped in a wide arc, only to dive directly toward the male. She pinned her wings, gaining an unnaturally high speed, with claws ready to grab and rend. RyMjin lagged his course, carving east, and she speared by him— snapping his ass with a fierce whip of her arrowhead tail.
     
    A muscle in the gargouille’s mouth ticked as he rubbed the lower end of the staff across his backside, like it would ebb the sting. “Sybille,” he growled.
     
    She flipped him off.