The Dragon Slayer's Queen
Zayla is too wired to sleep, so she stares at the ceiling and tries to remember the last time she wasn’t afraid of what would happen in the dark.
She must drift off at some point, because she’s back in the palace, but it’s wrong. The walls are alive, pulsing with a heartbeat she can hear in her teeth. At the center of the grand hall: dragons, dozens of them, scales like hammered silver, like sapphires, like dusk after a thunderstorm. They’re coiled in a circle, their eyes fixed on the space between them. They begin to move, slow at first, then faster, a spiral that draws the air inward, whips it into a cyclone of magic and light. As they turn, Zayla sees the ground beneath them glow with run