Dragons and Princes - [COMPLETE]

3. Marquis

MARQUIS

It was forbidden, what Marquis had done, and now he feared his people would pay for his mistake.  Morgana's black mind threatened him even now, and he felt her dangerous ire and her terrible hunger as she approached on the black sky.  Her eyes narrowed at the scattered fires below, and she swooped down and snapped up friend and foe alike.  And it left a terrible taste in his mouth.

His brother Eirik.  Marquis's fear pushed the dragon forward, his anguish, but he himself could not move.  His lungs expanded urgently, filling with air, and then his ribs came crushing down upon them over and over.  The Freyja prince, his brother killed, but not before the golden-haired killer had plunged a blade into Eirik's belly.  Not before Eirik's wolf had been killed by the enemy's armored war cat with a stroke of luck and the swipe of a clawed paw.  Marquis had to save his brother.

But what if he could not reach him in time?

His face twisted with menace, and when Morgana's sharp vision fell upon the Freyja who had surrounded his brother below, upon the enemy princess who had found Eirik and drawn her dagger, his heart stopped for one long and terrible moment.  "Eirik--"

Marquis Morganthe's horror cut short the plea caught in his throat, and he watched as his men crept through the forest with their giant wolves, silently encroaching upon the company of Freyja who were about to take his brother's life.  Was his brother's death inevitable?

Through Morgana's gaze, he watched a female warrior come upon his wounded brother.  She was flanked by others of her kind, and crowned with the demonic silver horns of a gilded Freyja helmet.  It was Faeana Dagur, for it could be no other.  She was the final heir of the Eye; after her there was only her father, the Freyja king.  Marquis channeled Morgana's focus upon her--only her.  For the moment she knelt to end his brother, he would unleash Morgana's fury upon all Freyja.  Morgana would cover the world in a blazing blanket of death.

And then something unexpected occurred.  It shattered his grievous rage, and with it, everything he'd believed about the Freyja.  Their kind had hidden something so well that even his bestial dragon had failed to sense the danger of it.  Because of it, the great beast tumbled from the sky in agony.

Impossible…