Page 248 of The Reckoning of Starlight

Three years ago, he’d been the smallest of the four. Now he stretched nearly twice Serenna’s length from tail to snout, his shadow engulfing hers.

Skyshatter folded his wings and dropped straight at her.

“Oh, don’t you dare,” she seethed as the young Stormstrike opened his jaws.

Serenna twisted, but his teeth clamped around the reinforced leather at her shoulder, hooking deep into the armor. The impact jerked her sideways, yanking one wing forward while the air snatched the other and ripped it back.

Serenna shoved his snout. “Let go!”

He thrashed his head. Cloud, stone, and open blue traded places in a dizzying spiral until Serenna snapped lightning from her palms, violet sparks scattering harmlessly over his scales.

Another Stormstrike slammed into Skyshatter’s side.

His jaws tore free. Leather split as both young dragons tumbled away, wing claws hooking into each other while they fought.

Serenna flared her wings wide and wrestled herself level. A sliver of white protruded from the ragged tear at her shoulder.

When the horizon stopped spinning, she reached for it.

A fang slid free into her palm, long and slightly curved, the root slick and warm. The young Stormstrikes had been shedding teeth and scales almost as quickly as they grew, their bodies lengthening in violent spurts.

An outraged shriek ripped across the sky.

Skyshatter tore free of his sibling, clipping the other dragon across the snout with his tail before wheeling back toward Serenna. His tongue flicked through the fresh gap between his teeth, pupils contracting to slits at the sight of the fang.

“Give that back!”

The words hissed through her mind, sharper than the impressions he usually managed. He circled beyond her reach, gaze fixed on the fang in her palm.

Serenna curled her fingers around it. “What, so you can choke on it?”

“It’s mine.”

“You left it in my armor.”

Skyshatter tucked his wings and arrowed toward her.

Serenna dove and folded close to the wall of the nearest island, stone rushing past until a gap opened between the lower chains. She peeled away and shot through it.

Lightning struck the cliff she’d left behind, blowing a crater into the rock.

Skyshatter pursued on long wings that had once looked absurd on a hatchling. Now they ate through the distance separating them.

A shadow swept over Serenna.

She pitched left as Skyshatter’s sibling dropped onto him from above while another surged up from below. Membranes collided with a crack. All three dragons folded into a tangle of gnashing fangs and slicing wing claws.

The struggle rolled into the clouds, lightning flashing through the mist long after their bodies disappeared.

Serenna watched until no dragon burst from the clouds after her, then banked toward the spectator islands.

Druids, wraith, humans, and elves crowded stone terraces carved along the isles’ slopes, their attention fixed on the trials. Serenna descended toward the largest.

Koln stood taller than everyone around him, Sharyne perched on his shoulders. Her boots knocked against his chest whenever she twisted to follow another flier through the course.

A thick blue coat swallowed her to the knees. At least they’d remembered.

At the sight of Serenna, Sharyne lurched forward with a shout, nearly pitching herself from Koln’s shoulders before he caught her by one ankle. Serenna settled into a hover above the terrace, her wings working against the crosscurrent. She lifted Skyshatter’s fang, the ivory point wickedly sharp against her palm.