Stay

Purple. It was hard to miss.

The sight of it streaking through the air above stopped her in her tracks, and she paid dearly for it as the monster's cleaver tore through her chest. Blood soaked her dark robes as she dropped, the grublin immediately looming over her with its fleshy plant arms raised.

It wasn't going to end like this, not after everything she'd done to get this far. But as she raised her sword defensively, the creature jerked once, twice, three times, then collapsed to the ground beside her, a row of arrows sticking out of its back.

“Miss!”

The distant call came from a higher bastion, but the girl ignored it, frantic eyes scanning the sky. She prayed that she had somehow been mistaken, a dragon's blue scales mixed up with violet or a sunlit cloud catching the light wrong.

But she caught sight of them just as they rounded the top of a tall golden building. Purple. Black. And, almost invisible in the sky, the tiniest speck of gold.

Three heroes. Three harbingers.

The girl slumped, her sword dropping out of her shaking hands. And then she fell onto her back in the middle of the empty courtyard littered with grublin corpses.

She'd known it the moment the bells tolled out the herald of a siege, the moment the Guardians went racing off and left her under the command of Warfang's soldiers. It was summer, three years later. It was around the right time.

But still, she had hoped. Another season. Another month. Another week, even. Just a little bit longer, a little more time...

“Miss!” She opened her eyes to find the kindly dark ones of her dear mole friend Addison, now twisted wide in panic as he hovered over her. “Are you alright?!”

With effort she managed to pull herself up, probing at the bloody hole in her robes. She'd liked this outfit. But at least she wasn't dead. “I'm fine. Where next?”

Addison lifted his gaze above the tall towers and empty, evacuated buildings. “Fire in Warfang North. I'll get the others.”

North, right towards where the party of heroes had gone. Of course there was a fire there. It was all lining up, every beat of the story playing out perfectly.

Dragging herself to her feet and retrieving her discarded sword, she ignored Addison's cries of protest and took off that direction. With every pounding footstep, she was trying not to think.

Spyro was here. The great siege of Warfang underway. And she knew what that meant.

In less than one day, Ignitus would be dead.