The dragon's breath wasn't fire. It was refusal—a storm of black wind and white glare that shredded the air where flame should have lived. Elira cut at the edges with Breeze Edge, shaving crescents off the torrent; the gale only bent and reknit. Her Wind Barrier took the brunt and skittered sideways like glass on oil, saving faces, breaking nothing.
Mira pulled heat out of the scorch with thin veils of water, laying ice like sutures along the places the storm tore itself open. Each stitch held for a heartbeat and then hissed apart. Kael drove a tremor up through the packed dirt to steal the dragon's weight; the beast's foreclaws slid half a span, then the ground remembered it was only earth and let the monster keep its balance. Every mark they made faded as if the night had decided to tidy up behind them.
Around them the camp became a geometry lesson in panic. Ropes snapped. Poles toppled. Third Order squads tried ropes, grapple hooks, a freeze-plate aimed at the left wing joint. The chaos-breath tore the lines into streamers and blew the ice back as needle rain. A pair of knights did touch down on the wing's bones—good timing, better courage—only to be flung like dice into the dark.
"It keeps healing," Mira said, eyes narrow, voice clipped to save air. "No clear seam."
"It's not healing," Elira answered, tasting metal in the wind. "It's unmaking our cuts."
Kael took a half-step left, armor bracing as a falling tent scythed past his shoulder. "Then we make a cut it can't pretend didn't happen."
Another roar hit low, more felt than heard. The dragon's throat brightened; the breath tangled itself into a knot of glare and shadow and came down like a wall. Elira set a sliver-thin barrier at a slant, letting the flood scrape past them instead of through them. The backlash shoved her two steps; Kael's knee found the ground and refused to give it back. Mira's palm spun a disk of water—the breath hit it, hesitated, and broke sideways into steam.
"Back! Back three ranks!" a lieutenant shouted, trying to herd order out of the stampede.
Then Vaelis's voice cut cleanly across the yard: "All units, withdraw to the outer line. Do not engage. Clear the field."
The archers faltered, the mages swallowed their next glyphs, the hook teams let their knotted lines die on the dirt.
Mira's head snapped toward the command shadow. "You're pulling them now?"
"Do not interfere with them," Vaelis said, as if pointing out which way water flows.
The dragon gathered itself again, the mangled left wing shivering, the right beating hard enough to hammer the air flat. It wasn't choosing a shape for its breath; it was choosing that there would be no shape.
Elira dragged wind across the ground to pin the worst of the scatter, a thin tack-strip of pressure to keep the next collapse from engulfing the last men stumbling clear. "We can't keep taking it in the hands," she said. The blade trembled in her grip—not with fear, but with the strain of holding something that didn't want to be held. Lumeveil's presence steadied, cool and exact: Narrow. Never wide. Cut the knot, not the rope.
"We change the problem," Kael said, pushing to his feet. Draga hummed under his skin, not flaring, just ready. "You two make the breath choose a lane. I'll stand in the lane."
"Buy me a seam and I'll stitch it shut," Mira said. Her arcs coiled, catching every stray glow from the burning canvas and turning it into measured light. "But we won't last a third pass at this pace."
Elira looked from one to the other and didn't need to say the thing they were all already holding between them.
The dragon's chest hitched. Light slipped inside it like a knife. Darkness twisted to meet it. The next breath would not be a breath; it would be an argument that ate whatever it touched.
Elira set her feet. The decision came out of her mouth without hunting for courage; the courage had been waiting.
"Light, rend the dark—Lumeveil!"
The answer arrived as sound before it was shape, a thin, resonant thread that sang along the inside of her bones. Steel grew where her grip expected it, slender and cold, the blade catching lamplight in a clean gold line while a dusk-shadow ran the edge like an outline traced by a second hand. Elira rolled her wrist once; the sword balanced as if it had been invented for that motion.
"Lumeveil—veil the shadow, crown the light. To my blade."
The wind at her back pulled tight, a sash rather than a storm.
Mira's breath left her in a quick, delighted scoff. "Finally." Her voice rode the heat and the frost in the air at once. "Let the flood burn and the frost shatter—Aure!"
Twin rings lifted to meet her hands, not hovering so much as deciding to be exactly where they belonged. Firelight coursed the outer arc's etchings; the inner spun a slow halo of ice-mist. Between them water gathered into a steady, whispering thread. The three refused each other for a heartbeat, then agreed, the way three strong voices learn the chord that holds all of them. Mira brought the arcs together and parted them; lines of glyphlight bloomed and settled around her wrists like bracers.
"Aure—wreath of fire and frost, at my command."
Kael lowered his shoulders until the ground understood it had someone to lean on. He didn't shout. He spoke like a vow he'd been saving. "Stand with me, Draga—armor of the steadfast."
The answer was weight without crush, a second hide climbing his arms and chest, plates forming where muscle needed them and leaving space where movement would. Lightning skittered under the seams like thread being pulled through tough cloth. The visor slid into place and left his eyes free. He flexed his hands; the gauntlets flexed with him, not louder, just truer.
He looked at the dragon. "I'll take the first step."
The camp's noise seemed to step back a pace, as if the yard had suddenly discovered the manners of a chapel. The wind found its lane. The canvas fires burned quieter. Somewhere a dropped spear finished falling.
Three calls had been spoken, and the echoes didn't drift apart—they braided, crossing and recrossing until the air itself felt strung, a lattice of sound holding shape where chaos had refused to. The dragon's head tilted, one ruined wing ticking open by reflex, and for the first time its breath stuttered in its throat as if the storm inside had been made to hear someone else's rhythm.