Chapter 19.5- The Seadragon's Roar

After dealing with the second castle, I noticed that Caraxes and meleys had begun to tire. It was nothing terrible, but it was there in the way they flapped their wings— taking a second too long, doing it with even more strain than I’d ever seen them do it before. Interesting. Igneel was still relatively fresh— most of our endurance training had focused on being able to project his flames for long periods, after all. Vhagar, to borrow a phrase from someone else, looked like she could do it all day. The bitch probable could. Somehow, Laena had managed to turn the oldest dragon in the world into a stamina and physicality monster. She was making me eat my previous expectations. Being completely honest, I hadn’t initially wanted her to claim Vhagar. I felt Vhagar might have been big, but her best days were already behind her and it was better to start with a younger, more teachable dragon that could potentially have a higher season. Look at me being proven wrong in emphatic fashion.

The third ‘castle’ was even less worthy of the name than the second. This one was made mostly of wood and the second Vhagar was close enough, she belched out a torrent of green flames that managed to cover half the castle with how wide they spread. She flew around it and in a matter of minutes, the castle was thoroughly on fire. We kept the flames up to make sure that nothing within it had any chance of surviving and partially to send a message. It took what felt like less than a quarter an hour to turn the ground castle to nothing but ash. This castle had fewer pirates in it from what I could tell from the screams, and that was not much of a surprise.

Only the first castle was probably fully manned. The others must have retreated to the caves once Daemon’s arrival was known. It was why he had not bothered with the castles. They were near useless as targets especially with how much effort it would have taken for Caraxes to do the burning on his lonesome. With four dragons though, work that would have taken at least a few days (with rest in-between days), had been concluded in a matter of hours.

So, we flew back to the camp. The camp was already in motion, packing up for the next target. Some pirates had been tracked down to a cave only a dozen miles from here. They had stopped making assaults on Daemon’s camp due to fear of Caraxes, the arrogant Prince had assured us, so now they waited to die in their caves. Of course, I could not necessarily see the logic of that. Sure, they bled Daemon for each cave he cleared out but they would run out numbers before he did. And what kept convincing the pirates that hiding in the caves was a good idea when they had word of the other caves being cleared out?