Chapter 11.3- The Seadragon's Roar

Igneel and I banked to the side, seeing some of the Ships make the wise, if cowardly choice o trying to retreat back to the harbour. In a single pass of dragon fire, we taught them why that was far from a wise choice. And then we were back at it again. They hadn’t anticipated facing a dragon, and it showed. Their scorpions were aimed too low to he ground to have any chance of hitting Igneel and I as we made our semi-irregular patterns. We still varied our flight pattern as much as we could, taking sharp dives and banks whenever we would afford to to avoid getting into bad habits. Bad habits like flying in the same predictable way all the time. An arrow hissed its way passed my head as we made one such dive.

Lucky shot or impossible skill? I wondered as we covered another trio of ships in dragon fire in a single staffing run. Igneel was pacing himself here. We weren’t trying to incinerate the ships in one go. While that would have been fearsome and useful, it was less useful than just setting the ships on fire. For one, the fire had a risk of spreading to the other ships, so the other ships had to constantly worry about that. Secondly, the burning ships and their wreckage acted as a natural barrier, hemming in the Tyroshi where I wanted them to be hemmed in and given them free rein anywhere I did not strike. It was herding them to follow a very predictable set of movements.

Any captain worth their salt could see that I was practically baiting them o escape East, but the only other choice they had was sitting still and just waiting for me to get on with it, so they just did the only thing they could and began to sail East. The ones who sailed East I ignored while I wrecked havoc on the rest. It was a brutal killing field, the kind of which stories were told as we savaged the Tyroshi fleer within watching distance of those walls of theirs. The magisters were probably watching the whole thing and shitting their pants. Even if they knew that we were not going to turn our forces on the city when we finished— although there was n o way for them to sure of that. They had to realize tat this loss was one that could cripple them for the short term and would be very expensive to fix in the long term.

Tyrosh’s fleet was why they did not mind the pirates in the stepstones. They could afford to guard their trade routes and the disadvantage it placed others in meant it was worth it to them to expend those extra resources. I wondered how that would change now that the fleet was nothing more than driftwood and charcoal. It took an hour more for us to be certain that all the ships were destroyed, and then Corlys Velaryon turned his attention East, beginning to sail.

I flew after him. I had paced Igneel because the fight with the Tyroshi at their harbour had not been he end all be all of today’s plan. Even if we’d destroyed them, that did nothing to help the ships we had lost. That was where the ships that I had allowed to escape would come in.