INTERLUDE 6D: OLD WYRM’S WRATH
“Only at a sufficient remove can meaning be rarefied. Proximity to truth does not entail a complete view of its various aspects. You cannot judge the road until you reach your destination – and many fail to do so, falling by the wayside, tripped by their own caution. There is always a destination, though you know it not until you come upon it. That is the meaning of destiny. That is why Yune is Destiny’s Door. That is why you have opened this page tonight. You are following the road. But beware: you approach too quickly. Do not be tripped by incaution. Many of those who so fall never again rise.”
– from ‘The Syth Codex’, 39:115-122
I am the ghost. I am the hourglass and I am the sand. I am the walker of the ways. There are many paths. Most are hidden. Only one takes me into my future. I will find the path. And I will walk it.
Phanar crept along the dark corridor of roughly-hewn stone, night-vision spell active, armaments making minimal noise.
I swallowed my ghost. I crossed the sand. I smashed the hourglass and remade it in starlight. I walked every way. I took every path. I found my future. And I became it.
The mantras of the ancient days flowed strongest when he was in danger, when he knew that everything dangled over the precipice of combat. His father’s voice came back to him, echoing down from those barely-recalled first expeditions. Aged five or six, Father took him out to hunt the whiteclaws, and he carried Father’s bow… He remembered being confused about why it was kept unstringed, remembered waiting, longing, for the day he’d be permitted to carry the spear or the quiver…
A day that never came.
And the words of the other man of N’Lem whose face he remembered, the old man whose name time had stolen – that old man was constantly in Phanar’s thoughts these days. When he realised the danger into which he’d placed Anathta with his hiring of the Mundian archmage – realised how their hopes of slaying Ord Ylon now hung in the balance – the warrior had fallen back on his old training more and more, burying his thoughts, stamping down his fears.
The future flowed and he was a ship’s keel piercing its tide, choosing his own course.
This is nothing. Nothing, compared to what came before.
He knew hardship as no other.
The memories had been locked away, and no enchantment he’d ever undergone had plucked them from his head. He’d even had Ibbalat try, once, disguising his curiosity in the form of a game. The mage had discerned nothing more than a single glimpse, and that alone had mystified him. Phanar was unsure whether their sanctity was something to do with the memories themselves, their awfulness – or whether it could simply be that so long had passed…
Seven hundred years? Eight?
He had no idea exactly how long ago he’d been born – nor Anathta – but it had been many centuries, of this he was certain. Even now, he could remember the old man’s confusion. The last child of N’Lem was destined to make the journey. But Anathta could not be sent off on her own: she was too young – even fate surely could not bring a baby barely capable of taking a few steps out of that timeless void, the unmoving, windless desert? Was not Phanar the one whom prophecy decreed must cross the ashen lands? And was it not Phanar in whose mind the ancient liturgies of their people were stored, brought forward from the jaws of death into the light of the present?
The old man had used the end of his stick to draw the winged shape in the lifeless soil. Phanar had borne that shape with him in his dreams until the night of the attack. Until Ord Ylon came to the gates of Miserdell and spoke with his terrible voice.
But no. He’d never felt it. No hand of destiny. No guidance from fate. He spoke the mantras to himself as Father taught him, and he’d tried teaching them to his sister, many times – Kultemeren as his witness. She refused him each time, shirking her responsibilities at every opportunity, and made a point of paying him no attention whenever he spoke to her about where they came from and why.
Yet the doom, he was certain, remained hers.
Her voice, her desire for revenge – that was what had set him, set all of them, on this course.
And she was no less a child of N’Lem than him. Even without the training he’d undergone at a young age – training he’d thought responsible for his skills, his aptitudes – she excelled at what she did. What they both did.
Even now he saw her returning, darting back up the tunnel towards him, her graceful movements completely silent in her form-fitting fabrics, her oiled leather accoutrements.
The Potions of Unbound Speech and Visible Sympathy they’d all imbibed might’ve made them look and sound different to their enemies, but to Phanar his sister looked like she always did – a living shadow, slinking rapidly in his direction.
She first gave a thumbs-up, then held up eight fingers, and finally made the stabbing, two-fingered motion that meant armed kobolds.
He nodded to her; as she paused, crouching and regaining her breath, he made his way back to the others.
“Eight guards,” he reported quietly. “The gate is ahead. Well done, Kani.”
Ibbalat had tried to scry their path and failed every time; but where spells had failed, faith had succeeded. The night-vision let him see the way she blushed at his compliment, and he swiftly looked away, lest he spend too long regarding her and get distracted by the curly, flaming hair he longed to touch, the milk-white curvaceous body he longed to know.
It must be done, he reminded himself, moving his eyes to Redgate.
“Do you wish to take the lead in this?” he asked, forcing the words out with difficulty that he hoped wasn’t audible. “Or either of you, Kani, Ibbalat?”
Kani shook her head, as though she were embarrassed. Ibbalat just looked towards the ‘champion’, an expression of intrigue and curiosity on his face.
“No, I will conserve my strength,” Redgate demurred from behind his mask. “I have properly exercised my power in preparation; now I will rest, until the time arrives. Or you call upon me, in need, of course.”
The Mundian bowed his head gravely.
Phanar turned away so that the sorcerer wouldn’t see the scowl on his face, and he led them on into the darkness, towards Anathta.
You exercised your power by slaughtering hundreds, he wanted to say. Not just warriors, but likely the children too.
The archmage’s destructiveness was so obvious, so obscene, that Phanar partially blamed Ibbalat for the taunt that had sent Redgate pursuing the orcs. But there was nothing to be done for it; he knew it was only his anger at Redgate that was influencing him. The young mage hadn’t cast the stones; he had no way to know the sorcerer was really going to react the way he did. It was regrettable, but not unforgivable.
When Phanar reached his sister she looked around at the others, nodded, then fell in at the front alongside him.
“Halt!” squeaked one of the kobolds, a female, as they came into view around the tunnel bend. She was staring at the centre of Phanar’s chest, as though his head were twelve or more inches lower than it was in reality. “Red-Of-The-Fur didn’t say anything about this! Who’re you?”
Red-Of-The-Fur?
It took Phanar a moment to realise that the potion’s magic was somehow translating a kobold’s name, there.
He regarded the kobolds, standing there in front of the doors in their mismatched armour, rusty weapons leaning against the walls. None of them looked in good health. Upon those mostly covered in fur, their scales appeared like dry, mangy patches. Those with brilliant, glistening plates for skin had thick tufts of hair protruding from their flesh at random intervals.
Many claimed they were formed from an unholy union of rat-man with lizard-man – and Phanar had heard a few people espouse the notion they were originally demonic dog-men crossed with naga, fish-men. He personally fancied that they were just a mongrel race, a people of hybrids of all different kinds. Whatever the truth, each one was similar to its fellows in certain respects: they were both furry and scaly on different sections of their body, and four-fingered, long-tailed. Four feet to five-and-a-half feet in height. Humanoid, heavy-bellied.
But from there, none of them looked quite the same: their natural colouration ran the full gamut, white and green, blue and red, brown and black. Some had a long snout for a face, rodent or canine teeth glinting in their smiles; others had stubby faces, with forked, serpentine tongues lolling from their lipless maws.
The fact they carried weapons meant little. Kobolds were cunning, but only to a point. They could use what others had created, knew how to scavenge, make the most of scraps – but they had no artifice of their own. No true intellect. They were cannibals, and prone to in-fighting. They didn’t ever speak Mundic, and their natural voices were piping and growling noises; he’d picked up the meaning of a few phrases here and there, but getting a full sentence out of a kobold was a new experience.
“Red-Of-The-Fur didn’t say anything about us?” Ibbalat replied. Curiously, whilst Phanar could understand his friend perfectly-well, he could hear the faint shrill squeakiness of the mage’s voice, as though it were echoing back off the cave walls. “Is Red-Of-The-Fur a Spellborn? We’re from the Stair-Shadow. He wouldn’t know we were on the way.”
Stair-Shadow? That has to be Ikamax, the last place we came across kobolds.
The name was fitting, really. The structure of black stone in the centre of the Hintamar Bogs was a pyramid, twenty or more huge steps up each side leading to the apex.
He had no idea where Ibbalat got ‘Spellborn’ from though. Was that the translation of ‘magic-user’?
“The Stair-Shadow?” another of the kobolds replied in awe, glancing around at its mates in apparent perplexity. “No wonder you look so weird! I mean – so nice… And you – you’re a Spellborn?”
Ibbalat nodded. Clearly the magical masking effect allowed some portion of their true identities to shine through – his robe and mage-hat must’ve had some kind of analogue in the kobold’s eyes.
That dark, beady gaze had turned to Redgate, the kobold again staring with the low-down eye-level. “And you?” he squeaked.
The archmage nodded too, staying silent. A few of the kobolds actually bowed.
“We ask that you let us in,” Anathta said. Phanar knew his sister well enough to know that she was seeking to test the potion’s magic, trying a short, simple phrase.
“Of course, of course… I love your armour. Where’d you find it? Here, Shrunken-Tail, get the other handle…”
A small retinue of kobolds preceded them into the tunnel beyond the low, wood-and-metal gateway. They were jabbering on with each other, picking up others of their kind from different tunnels at intersections, informing them all of their sudden guests, these pilgrims from a far-off territory.
Phanar felt a smile spreading across his face.
This is the future I have chosen. I chose not to kill them. I chose to enter in peace.
Now, word spreads throughout the city. Now, the dragon will find out that we are here.
Ibbalat – I hope you are ready.
* * *
“When Derezo said go through the kobold city,” Anathta murmured without moving her lips, “no one said we’d have to take a tour.”
“How long, Ibbalat?” Phanar asked in like manner, ignoring her.
“Once their eyes aren’t on me!” the mage hissed back, barely checking his temper. “I’ve got it ready and it’s fit to burst and I need to finish the spell.”
Behind him, he heard Redgate’s bemused chuckle.
Phanar looked Ibbalat up and down. The magician did look unusually excited, even for him, almost dancing from foot to foot as they stood on the balcony.
The incline the dragon slithered down to enter his lair was a forty-five degree slope of flattened boulders and sanded stone; that slope was about two hundred feet below them now. The kobold city was carved into the rock above the slope, curving down into the pit at a similar angle. Beyond the rail, over on the opposite face of the cavern, Phanar could see countless other balconies and terraces carved into the granite across the roof of the cavern, and imagined many more were directly beneath him and above him, hidden from sight. Some of those he could see were occupied: kobold guards, but also traders and traffickers, shoppers and shamans… There was a group of ugly kobold children playing on one of the open spaces, dangling rats over the drop by their tails and braying laughter.
There had to be thousands in this place.
He returned his attention to the female kobold who’d first challenged him, Shrunken-Tail; she had taken the position of their unofficial guide. It was hard to pick her out of the crowd bustling around them but he knew her by her voice now, and he focussed on her as he realised what she was saying:
“… of course, the Great Master can be viewed when he comes in and out, up and down – but he doesn’t allow us to speak directly to him, only to his pets. Now why don’t we show you to Unbreaking-Tooth, the Grand-Spellborn-One, and he can tell your destiny!”
This seemed to capture the heart of the crowd, and the kobolds surged forwards, the hairy, scaly mass carrying them back inside away from the balcony, into the mouth of another rough-hewn tunnel – more gates were opened, guards were shooed aside, and a half-stair, half-slide was descended.
“Ibb!” Phanar growled.
He cast about for the mage, finding him on his left. There was a single male kobold between them, a guard in a (long-looking) mail skirt and leather breastplate. He reached across the guard’s shoulders, but the kobold didn’t seem to mind – the creature was babbling about the price of hooks to his friend in the row in front – and Phanar grabbed Ibbalat by the arm.
When the mage met his eyes, he used his glare to carry the statement:
You can’t let them take us before their chief magician!
‘I know!’ Ibbalat seemed to be replying with his thrust-out jaw, his glower.
I am the ghost, Phanar reminded himself. I am the hourglass and I am the sand. I am the walker of the ways. There are many paths. Most are hidden. Only one takes me into my future. I will find the path. And I will walk it.
Not even for a single moment would he consider turning to Redgate for help. The sorcerer would probably just kill all the kobolds. He just had to blind the creatures temporarily, until Ibbalat’s erasure-spell took hold…
When he craned his neck around and found Kani, she was already looking at him.
He screwed his eyes shut repeatedly.
It only took three goes in rapid succession before she nodded firmly, pressing her lips together in resolve.
He got Ibbalat’s attention and then Anathta’s – he gave them notice in like fashion, with a squint and a warning look. A glance towards Redgate showed the champion seemed to be just regarding him serenely from behind the mask; assuming this meant the sorcerer was prepared, he turned back to Kani and nodded to her.
He looked ahead again, treading forwards in pace with the crowd, then firmly closed his eyes one last time.
Three – two –
The flare of white light the cleric created was so bright his eyelids turned a vivid pink-red. The night-vision spell he was under probably didn’t help.
Gingerly, at first, he squinted at his surroundings. Finding he could still see without much issue, he quickly directed the others with gestures while the kobolds were screaming. The poor critters were clasping their faces, falling about in confusion – their native night-vision probably rivalled or surpassed Ibbalat’s magic, and they’d had no warning.
Phanar pulled Kani through the crowd, jostling the blinded kobolds no worse than they were jostling each other. Within seconds the two of them were regrouping on one side of the tunnel with Ibbalat and Anathta – Redgate simply used his shadow-form to float through the intervening kobolds towards them.
Ibbalat had been chanting away under his breath, and scattering what looked like shredded fish-skin, complete with glimmering scales, onto the uneven rock floor. Then he clapped his hands and looked up at them, a tight, satisfied smile on his face.
“Done. We’re invisible.”
“Ah – hate to break it to you –“ Anathta said, raising her hand and waving it in front of her face.
“Not at all, my love,” Redgate murmured. “Invisibility to enemies – is that not the way it’s worded?”
Enemies.
Phanar held his breath, watching Ibbalat’s reaction. Clearly the magician’s spell wasn’t reading Redgate as an enemy…
The mage managed to nod without much concern reaching his eyes.
“Inaudible, too,” Ibbalat went on. “Hello, kobolds!” He yelled in the nearest creature’s face, and it didn’t react, still patting its eyes and moaning. Phanar spotted Shrunken-Tail, flailing about madly with her arm over her eyes, asking for the ‘strange ones’ with a saddening note of concern in her voice.
She was probably just worried that ‘Red-Of-The-Fur’ would disapprove of her when he found out she’d let their guests from far-off lands get hurt. The unfortunate truth was that her boss would likely skin her alive for letting a group of dragon-slayers into their city…
“We don’t have long,” Ibbalat prompted.
“So where’re we going?” Anathta asked.
Phanar looked into the expectant eyes of the cleric once more.
“I’ve got it,” Kani said firmly, without pause. “This way.”
She took the lead, the hand of her shield-arm kept steady on the butt of her mace to keep it from swinging in its belt-clasp.
Phanar noted the way Redgate seemed to hesitate before following, as though something about Kani’s assertiveness unsettled him.
The warrior longed to walk behind the sorcerer, keep a closer eye on the murderer’s subtle tells, prepare himself for action if it were required – but he knew he couldn’t. He took advantage of Redgate’s hesitance and walked ahead.
He had to trust in his reactions. He had to keep his thoughts away from action, away from plotting his manoeuvres… He could never be certain when the sorcerer’s shield was active, when it could give away his ill-intent. He had to walk ahead, even knowing that the sorcerer could right now raise his arm and strike them all down from behind, without warning. He had to maintain the facade.
But his mind – his mind dwelt on it.
He had little care for his own death, his own continued existence. He’d long since accepted that he would pass on from this plane, and had almost done so many times. He’d had to accept it, when his life’s-blood poured out into the dirt, the night Kani discovered her true power. And Anathta, Ibbalat – they too had the mettle, the spine to face the grave without fear. But Kani – until the morning they disembarked in Tirremuir she’d seemed so fragile. Refusing to step off the Dremmedine during Mund’s Infernal Incursion was a turning-point for her. She’d accepted her doom, and went forwards now to face it – leading them, even.
Yet when Redgate took a moment to reassess the cleric – for that was surely what he’d been doing – Phanar’s ill-will swelled.
More than for himself – more than for his sister – he feared for Kani.
He spoke the mantras, letting them empty him out, hollow him within.
I swallowed my ghost. I crossed the sand. I smashed the hourglass and remade it in starlight. I walked every way. I took every path. I found my future. And I became it.
But that hallowed hollowness, the scourge of thought and emotion that left behind only the path cut by his will – it would not come.
He saw them in his mind’s eye, too many paths to follow.
And every single one was the future in which Phanar watched, looked on in helpless horror, as Redgate slew Kanthyre, over and over again in increasingly-abhorrent ways.
I am futureless, he realised. I am adrift.
He almost stumbled. He almost fell.
He followed, emptied not of emotion, but of purpose.
* * *
Despite the concealment spell Ibbalat had cast upon them, they stayed silent as they descended. While for weeks now Anathta had been playing the role of Redgate’s paramour, masking her troubles behind a jovial exterior, even she was silent here. The tension was high. It was one thing to know that your enemies could neither see nor hear you; it was another thing entirely to chat away nonchalantly as you traipsed through their city. Everyone had their eyes peeled for danger, turning at any sudden noise.
Minutes passed. As they neared the lower levels, the reek of accumulated filth began to fill their nostrils. It probably didn’t help that, wherever possible, Kani took them along less-populated corridors – moving invisibly, they got to see many of the hidden areas of this warren-metropolis. There were great vats of meal standing in one cavern, kitchen-kobolds hard at work grinding bones and separating rotting meat from clothing. Tribal dormitories, redolent with the odours of decade-old sweat and other, even less savourous scents. Abandoned mine-shafts, ropes and chains strung across the ceilings where carts had once hung. Mushroom farms, crude alchemical facilities, well-dipping rooms…
Every step was one step closer. And here, on the threshold of the battle for which he’d been waiting for so long, the warrior found his resolve wavering.
It is not Ord Ylon we face. It is the evil of our own making. The slayer we brought here to save us will be the death of us.
What was Redgate going to do if he won? Was he planning to drop the roof on them and leave their corpses there with the dragon’s? Or would he take them with him, as unliving slaves?
Those were the only two eventualities Phanar could bring himself to imagine, when he was being honest with himself. For certain, he could imagine a better end. He could picture himself giving up the adventuring career, settling down somewhere with Kani – she could open a healing shrine, and he could teach swordplay for coin. Ibb and Anathta would visit, and the four of them would…
Would what? Such imaginings always turned to ash. They were the flights of fancy that men clung to in their last moments, day-dreams and wishful thoughts. No. Dead, or undead – neither was a future he could become. Neither was acceptable. And they were the only options he could wrap his head around.
We have a few advantages, he reminded himself. The sorcerer has many more tricks up his sleeve than we, but that doesn’t mean we have nothing. It means only that every surprise has to count.
Feeling a little better, he flicked his gaze about at their surroundings, taking in a plethora of details at a single glance.
They’d come to a convergence of routes and there were lots of kobolds in this spot, many of them travelling uphill.
More and more guards had been passing them for the last five minutes, heading upwards.
Then he smelt it.
“Anathta!”
She looked at him, her gaze surprisingly calm, collected.
“Wolves,” he said.
She took a deep sniff, then her eyes widened in alarm.
“We’re covered, when it comes to scent,” Ibbalat advised. “They can’t pick us out.”
“Let’s hope you’re right,” the warrior replied.
They continued on their way, following Kani down a spiralling slope, keeping to the edge of tunnel and stopping in natural alcoves when the foot-traffic became too heavy to sneak around.
Redgate said nothing, gave no outward sign of protest, despite the fact these interruptions should’ve been an annoyance to him – crowds meant nothing to the sorcerer. Walls and floors meant nothing to the sorcerer!
Could it be that even he felt uneasy? That at this last step the archmage would falter?
Phanar supposed that, with all the hate flowing through him, he’d never paused to think about how Redgate must’ve been feeling. Even creatures of pure evil and arrogance could doubt, couldn’t they?
I hope Ord Ylon closes his teeth on you even as you cut off his head!
He drew a deep breath.
I am doing it again.
Then he realised just how much the odour had grown in the past thirty seconds.
As they rounded the next corner they saw it, heard it. It was berating what appeared to be a small coven of kobold shamans, the robed creatures clutching their staves defensively.
The dire wolf was roughly the size of a pony, black as pitch. Its eyes were vivid, startling green. The slobber that foamed from its massive jaw fell in congealed gobbets, plopping to the stone floor as it spoke.
The potion translated the dire wolf’s language just the same as it did the kobolds’.
“The Master says they’re already here!” it snapped into the face of a terrified-looking male kobold, the feathers upon his headdress and leather smock only amplifying every miniscule quiver of his shrinking flesh, making him into a shaking peacock. “They were to be taken prisoner. You – and you!” It indicated two of the magicians with a huge fore-paw, and they clutched their spell-rods even tighter. “Head up with the fighters and find out what’s happening. This failure will not be tolerated. The rest of you – work your conjurations. They must be found – now.”
Kani swiftly passed by the chamber, skirting the walls again, and the rest followed on her heels, eager to be away from the massive, magic-blooded beast.
Ylon knew we were coming anyway, Phanar thought with some satisfaction. It felt nice to have the confirmation. So he was looking for us after all.
If the dragon knew they were coming for him… Was there a sliver of a chance that Ord Ylon had experienced his own anxiety over this confrontation? Was it the night wolf’s frustration being expressed by its exhortations, or was it the wolf’s master’s?
But then, why would he have not capsized them while they travelled to Tirremuir aboard the Dremmedine?
He wants us, Phanar realised, and a coldness flooded him. He wanted us, all along. Here.
To torture. For the murders of his spawn.
He looked at the others, but none of them seemed to have put the pieces together; their faces showed none of the heightened concern he would’ve expected to see if they had.
Except the unreadable archmage. He might’ve been intuiting the likeliest possibilities, but, of course, there was no way to tell.
“We’ve got three minutes left on the spell,” Ibbalat said. “I can renew it two, maybe three times if I can stretch my reagents…”
“We do not know how far down the lair is,” Phanar reminded everyone. “Unless – Kani?”
She didn’t look back, but he caught her saying: “We aren’t three minutes away from the gate out, but how much farther from there – I don’t yet know. I have to trust it. It’s taking me on the best path.”
Her voice sounded tight, as though she were right on the edge of losing her nerve; she didn’t seem to be huffing with the exertion yet, but he could see the sweat glistening on her cheeks where it’d run from beneath her helmet.
“We cannot afford to waste resources,” Phanar said. “We will wait to surveil the next section before deciding whether you should cast it again, Ibbalat.”
“It won’t work on Ylon,” the mage said regretfully, “but if there are some more wolves down there, we’ll need it.”
“Perhaps,” Anathta said, a terse one-word reply. She was getting closer to her own combat-self, Phanar realised, now that she’d seen one of the wolves up close again. It was the first time in a long time – and he knew she had her own deadly state that came over her when it was time to kill.
When they came to the final gateway, the low metal-clad doors were of course barred. Eight more guards, loitering about with bored expressions on their faces.
Lingering just around the corner to discuss their options, Phanar suggested the obvious play, to which the others readily agreed.
The concealment-spell negated by a flick of Ibbalat’s hand, they ran (on what Phanar supposed would look like flapping kobold-feet) around the bend.
“Fellow kobolds!” Ibbalat cried. “You’re needed! Intruders in the upper levels! The wolf of the Master commands you!”
The guards barely waited a second – the notion of enduring a dire wolf’s wrath seemed to be enough to spur them into immediate action. Half of them left their posts without even taking their weapons with them.
The last guard to pass them did stop for a moment, turning her head –
“But what about you lot?” she asked, peering for a second time at their high-quality armour and clothing.
“Duh!” Ibbalat groaned, affecting a bit of panting. “We’re here to look after the gate, aren’t we?”
It didn’t seem to matter that it made no sense – the kobold just nodded and ran off after the other guards.
They lifted the bars, and walked through into the next dark tunnel, letting the gates swing shut behind them. There were no guards on the outside of these doors… Had Shrunken-Tail and the others been posted by Red-Of-The-Fur outside the upper-level doors, specifically to watch for the dragon-slayers? Yet they’d fallen for it? Phanar hoped there was another explanation. Surely even kobolds couldn’t be that stupid.
“Ibbalat, can you lock it behind us?” Phanar asked. “We do not want them following us, but if we can get back the same way when we leave – this would be for the best.”
The magician patted his pockets, his pouches. “Sure – I’ve got a sealing-spell…”
“Do not trouble yourself.”
Redgate turned, sweeping his head about in an arc as though studying the squared-off archway – measuring distances? Then, before anyone could discern how to properly react, whether to say or do anything, the sorcerer raised a hand and it was no longer a hand.
Protruding out of his sleeve was a gauntleted fist, formed from crimson-enamelled plates of armour, the metal articulated down to the fingertip. Swiftly the dark, shining surfaces spread along his arms, his sleeves transforming as they watched: the huge gloves covering the hands melded into spiked bracers along the forearms; jointed greaves at the elbows stretched up the biceps, forming jagged pauldrons over his shoulders. Then, even more quickly, the rest of his body was covered. A breastplate with its scarlet, bloody sheen. Leg-plates and heavy metal boots. Every inch of him was coated in the demonic metal.
The mask alone was left almost untouched by his transformation: the spider-face was now red instead of black. A high collar of plate rose up behind his head.
The archmage reached high, sank his fingers and then his whole hands into the rock above the gateway.
Within seconds, Redgate had created a cave-in.
The others backed away, breathing through cloaks or other bits of cloth as dust billowed into the tunnel. The din it caused was atrocious, and seemed never-ending.
After a solid fifteen seconds spent coughing and wincing at the continuing noise, it finally died down, and Phanar saw as Redgate floated through the clouds of dust towards them, drifting along without a care in the world.
“Too loud!” Ibbalat snarled, seemingly without being able to help himself. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Sealing-spells may be undone,” the champion said breezily. “To disintegrate or command-aside the weight of stone I have just brought down? This is not so-easily accomplished, and will likely require a significant expenditure, measured in both power and time spent at the task.”
“I know that!” the magician retorted. “We were supposed to go back that way, remember!”
“I can move aside the rocks.” The archmage affected a brief shrug. “Our routes both in descent and ascent are secured. Shall we continue, Sister?”
Kani’s gaze was steely as she nodded in response, her movements almost jerky as she spun on her heel and continued leading them down the tunnel.
And now only Redgate can get us out, Phanar thought. Was it calculated by him to be so?
At the thought, the warrior felt the gentle smile split his face, and he tucked in his chin to hide it, as though he looked at the ground to maintain his footing, something he hadn’t had to do since the cradle.
Where Kani had her faith, he had his instincts.
I swallowed my ghost. I crossed the sand. I smashed the hourglass and remade it in starlight. I walked every way. I took every path. I found my future. And I became it.
This time, the nothingness came over him, the cool sheath from which his mind could be redrawn again at need, a cold weapon to bisect his obstacles.
Even obstacles in crimson demon-armour.
* * *
“Here,” Anathta said, crouching and gesturing at the uneven rock-floor. “The dires are only using this side – even the big ones are avoiding the left side of the tunnel.”
“I mean, traps, I get it,” Ibbalat replied, “but what in Celestium are you actually pointing at?”
“There’s a thousand things,” she demurred, smiling and standing again.
“There – fur.” Phanar nodded to the spot as he spoke. “And there – weight depressions. Stone smoothed under a great weight. Bits of nail chipping over here…”
“Fine, fine, I get it.” The mage followed along behind Anathta, who was now leading the group once more. Kani went next, then Phanar. Redgate had volunteered for ‘rearguard’ and floated along at the back, wearing his red robes again.
As Phanar had suspected when he’d looked at the animal tracks, Ord Ylon did not keep only wolves for his pets. The wolves likely saw the most use because of their intelligence, their versatility… their diminutiveness.
When they ran into the dire serpent, a red thing with black and yellow bands, it had to be ten times the weight of one of the wolves. It was difficult to get a grasp of its size until they were done killing it, listening to its death-hiss, the potion mercilessly translating its piteous rasping for its ‘master’.
The slaying itself was the easiest, the smoothest part of Phanar’s life since they first set sail for Mund from Tirremuir. It had been months since the four of them had fought together, the longest gap between periods of action in their whole adventuring careers. He hadn’t realised it until they were engaged in combat, but a tiny part of his soul had been doubting them, their potency. It was as though the warrior inside him had been sleeping, an invisible presence whose very existence was brought into question with every unblooded moment that passed. When the awful slithering sound started to vibrate the air and Anathta looked back at them, giving them the look that said she was ready to kill, ready to die – that was what the warrior within had been waiting for. In the next instant they were unslinging weapons and evading a throbbing, thrashing whip two feet in diameter, hurtling and coiling at them with a speed and strength that could only be born of the dragon’s magic.
Anathta scuttled up to the ceiling like a beetle, aiming a ranged shot at its eyes with her crossbow, and when the snake batted its hooded head in irritation and tried to rise up, crush her against the stone, she shifted her hand- and footholds, moving clear. She took the opportunity to drop down and settle herself astride its back, then within seconds she was sliding down its length, scoring through its membranous scales with one of her favourite daggers.
The relatively-thin tail-tip was dangerously fast, scales forming almost feathered-looking patterns, a nest of black-hued blades – it came buzzing down at Phanar’s head, rapidly swinging from one side to the other, like the wings of a hovering hummingbird. The pick-end of his warhammer glowed a fierce radiant blue, and as the warrior rolled beneath the attack he wedged it deep and wrenched; a strip of the tail-tip longer than he was tall came tearing away as he flipped to his feet once more.
As it opened its fanged maw wide enough to fit a full grown wild bull sideways, emitting a crackling noise that could have been laughter or screaming, it thrust its head towards the seemingly-defenceless Ibbalat. His spell came to fruition when it was ten feet from him, specks of ground-up diamond drifting from the mage’s hands; the snake smashed its lower jaw into the stony wall that came rising up out of the tunnel-floor in front of it.
When Kani stepped forward, the strike of her hammer into the side of the thing’s head didn’t look heavy – she barely dealt it a glancing blow – but as the attack connected she cried, “Maiden’s Light!” and a stream of yellow-amber light billowed like smoke around the serpent’s face.
The fight lasted all of fifty seconds. A minute, being generous.
And through it all, Redgate floated at the rear, watching. Phanar felt the sorcerer’s gaze moving between them, like a tongue of cold shadow falling upon each of them in turn.
He felt the sorcerer’s gaze, and no longer cared.
As they came upon intersections, Kani’s sight led them unerringly onwards. Twenty minutes and several more encounters later, Anathta doubled back to inform them that the fourth large chamber they’d run into, dead ahead, contained a clutch of giant spiders – more than ten of the things, each bigger than she’d ever seen before.
“Time for one of my Ibbalat Specials, then.” The mage stepped forward. “Let’s see… Fireball, Limit-Lifter, how do you go…”
A calm voice was raised behind him, still displaying no outward irritation:
“Might I intercede?”
Phanar turned to look at the arch-sorcerer, and nodded, keeping his expression neutral.
As Redgate drifted past, the warrior caught the offended look Ibbalat shot him behind the archmage’s back. He swiftly shot a glare in response:
Conserve resources!
They followed the crimson-shrouded spectre, and watched from the tunnel opening as he moved through the spider-chamber.
The thick, gelatinous webs stretching wall to wall and floor to ceiling didn’t impede him but he waved a hand anyway; flames leapt up and consumed them in his wake, allowing the adventurers to trail after him. Several spiders came at the sorcerer and were caught in the air, trapped by invisible webs of incomprehensible strength and pulled apart, as if done so effortlessly, by the very air itself. His magic bound them all, and relieved from them the burden of continued existence.
That was how it looked – as though they simply fell apart in his vicinity. It was almost tranquil, the silence that accompanied their deaths. Almost tranquil in its unthinkable horror.
But most tried to run, hide, flee on their huge, desperate legs. Those ones Redgate caused to erupt in flames, the sorcery working on every last one of them – even the younger, cat-sized ones Anathta hadn’t spotted, secreted in the corners. These deaths were less tranquil – louder, smellier.
How Redgate so consistently ruined everything he touched, Phanar could not guess. Somehow the eradication of even these horrible entities, these monstrous arachnids, felt so unethical, when it came at the sorcerer’s hands. The warrior wondered why it was he thought it would’ve been cleaner to just let Ibbalat Special them – he couldn’t actually isolate the core of the difference in his mind.
When it was over they picked their way through the chamber, avoiding the strewn-about body-parts as well as they could manage.
“I thought you wanted to rest,” Ibbalat called, somehow making it sound respectful, awed.
Redgate turned back to them, and chuckled lightly. “My boy, that was merely yawning. Though, I must admit, I am having more fun now. Shall we continue?”
The champion helped Anathta up into the only other exit from the chamber, a narrow crevasse on the far side. Ibbalat clambered up the slimy rocks without much hassle, and Phanar climbed half-way before offering Kani his hand.
She didn’t look at him. Wouldn’t meet his eyes. The cleric found her own grip on the stones, pulled herself up without his assistance, and he watched her attempts in silence, waiting patiently until she made it.
Breathing heavily, she squeezed into the gap and headed after the mage. Phanar followed, now in the rearguard.
Now Redgate was leading.
* * *
Phanar walked on numb feet. He went last through the seventh chamber, and this time he kept his eyes on Kani’s feet in front of him rather than looking around at the madness of it.
The fifth and sixth had been hard enough to look at, even for him. He had no squeamishness. This was not an offence of disgust.
He had honour. This was an offence of… of humiliation.
Of blasphemy.
“The cavern, the tunnel, the lair,” he caught Kani saying as they left behind the smouldering remains of the dire bats.
“What is this?” he asked, taking a couple of long strides to come closer to her.
But she did not reply, even when he prompted her again.
It was only a couple of minutes before her meaning was made plain.
Hidden from sight and sound and scent, they followed a narrow stream of water up to the lip of a drop where it became a little waterfall. They peered over a ledge Anathta found, looking down into the vast cavern, a space dwarfing all the others they’d come across till now.
Phanar had no phobias to speak of. Heights and coffins, lightning and spiders, blood and oceans… None of the common fears of which he’d heard had ever been a cause for concern, for him. But he’d felt a touch of it, the irrational terror, when he’d detected the wolf’s odour back in the kobold city – yet there’d been only the one of them, and seeing it had dispelled the worst of the horror that gripped his throat and heart in bony fingers.
Now, looking down at this – it was as though time had reversed. He was standing there on Miserdell’s battlements, looking out onto the sea of fur, the army of dire wolves that dripped with the blood of the townspeople.
They were here. Hundreds and hundreds of them. A pack of wolves of such size, such organisation that its like would never be found in the wild, even amongst dire wolves. No – this pack had a pack leader the likes of which the mind of the wolf had never before conceived. A leader whose dominance could not ever be put to any kind of meaningful test. A master whose slightest flicker of annoyance could mutate them, drown them in their own insides, even as his favour might upraise them, heal them of their injuries and swell their musculature, their bone structure, without limit.
In the centre of the cavern, they were lounging atop a huge, smooth outcropping of grey rock, feasting on vast quantities of meat. On the right side, they warmed themselves before massive open coal-pits, above which natural vents in the high, jagged ceiling captured the smoke. And on the left side they were fighting each other – not for real, but not quite play-fighting either. It looked to have the character of duelling, more than just sparring, to Phanar’s eye. Some of the biggest, meanest-looking dire wolves were circling groups of lesser ones, growling their drills like battlefield sergeants.
The warrior could smell the stench of wet wolf-fur, and leaned over even further, looking at the base of the rock-wall beneath him. The little waterfall beside which he was crouched wasn’t the only one – the waters of several streams ran down the cliff-face nearby, and had pooled together in a depression at the bottom. A couple of dozen wolves were languishing down there in the coolness of the puddle, right below him.
He shuddered, and drew back.
Then he returned his eyes to the first thing he’d spotted when he first looked down: their goal.
On the far side of the cavern, in the wall opposite them – a squared-off opening, leading downwards into darkness. A final tunnel, as Kani mentioned.
The cavern. The tunnel. The lair…
Suddenly, as though they’d all heard some signal simultaneously, the wolves stopped whatever they were doing, even letting half-chewed mouthfuls of food drop from their open jaws. They drew themselves up, raised their eyes towards the cavern-roof, and fell silent.
An eerie stillness seemed to spread throughout the open expanse, broken only by the tinkling trickles of the waterfalls. Phanar held his breath.
Then, all at once, the wolves poured into formation, the biggest to the fore, and started racing up the wall to the left. They reached the level of the adventurers within seconds, then went thundering past, following a different path into the network of passageways to the one Kani had chosen.
It took them almost a minute to go by, a minute of paralysis for Phanar, of daunting, ever-worsening dread. Slaying the snake had felt like it took four seconds. This felt like half an hour, time broken down into an infinite, unending series of moments in which the certainty that one of the wolves would see through the concealing-spell only grew and grew inside his mind.
Then the infinite, unending series ended. They were gone, every one of them. Their scents, however, lingered behind.
“How very dramatic,” Redgate mused.
Phanar got to his feet and looked around at the others before holding out his hand to Ibbalat.
“R-rope.”
He marvelled at the way his voice shook – this had never happened to him before.
“If they know we’re here,” the mage said, already pulling out his demiskin, “I suppose I won’t need to disintegrate the rope once we’re at the bottom?”
“We’re coming back this way, aren’t we?” Anathta gazed at him quizzically before moving, skirting the cavern so that they wouldn’t land in water. “The only other option is climbing the wyrm’s own route, through the kobolds’ wards – we’d be caught out in the open in moments. We’ll leave it.”
“My concern,” Phanar said, taking the first few loops of rope from Ibbalat, “is that none of the wolves were sleeping.”
“A trap?” Ibbalat asked. “I mean, the other kind of trap. You think… they were waiting for us to arrive?”
The warrior rolled his shoulders. “I think Ord Ylon was waiting. Yes.”
Phanar knotted the rope around a boulder and cast off the end. His sister went first, taking the coarse length of material loosely in one hand and basically leaping off the cliff’s edge.
Ibbalat went next, and as the magician descended Phanar noted Kani’s troubled expression, freckled face creased in consternation.
He wasn’t alone in noting it.
“Sister Vael?” Redgate said with aplomb, holding out a hand in a gentlemanly fashion. “I too was not intending on using the rope. I can convey you to the basin far more quickly and without any untoward sensation, I assure you.”
“Why… thank you,” she murmured, and, without meeting his arachnid face, she took his hand.
As they too vanished over the edge, Phanar, left alone at the top, hurriedly hauled on the rope and abseiled down.
When he found his feet and turned to regroup with the others, he saw that his three friends were standing in a row before the floating Redgate, staring with slack jaws into the air between them and the sorcerer because there was… there was…
A demon. A bird. A beautiful bird wrought of pure nothingness, keeping itself steady with lazy swipes of its black wings.
Everything Phanar had ever sought – it was there, before him, embodied in this frozen instant. Redgate had it. Redgate possessed it. Just as Redgate possessed everything.
Floating there behind the demon was a tiny, beautiful crimson cloud… He felt the way it drew his gaze, his eyes falling into it the way an anchor falls to the seabed.
An uncomfortable warmth, flowing not over his flesh but through it…
Vivid black lightning.
Dull, distant thunder.
Redgate was speaking to them, and their lips were moving in response.
They were giving him answers. He was enchanting them with one of his eldritches. He wanted to know – wanted to know – what they knew –
Redgate possesses the emptiness but he squanders it. He defecates upon it! He is the antithesis of free! He was swallowed by his ghost! He drowned in the sand! He smashed the hourglass and ate up the shards until he died inside!
His future found him, and became him.
Something about the insulting nature of the sorcerer’s acts, the unendurable mockery of what he was doing to them all, to their minds – what he was doing to his sister – something about the situation brought Phanar to the surface.
With a titanic effort, the warrior wrenched his attention away from the awful eldritch and its awful, awful cloud.
“Phanar of N’Lem.” The archmage sounded surprised, turning from Kani’s blank face to look over at him. “You are no longer my foe?”
“No, I am,” Phanar growled. “But… you are not mine.” It was the hardest thing he’d ever done, biting back his anger. “Mine dwells beyond yon tunnel.”
“Well-spoken.” Redgate affected a despondent sigh. “I fear that I shall be inconsolable for weeks, now the charade is ended and the game is over. I have enjoyed this ruse, more than you can know.” He looked across the others, eyes lingering on Anathta. “I really was going to let all of you go, afterwards, you know. I would’ve erased many of the events of our trip from your mind – erasing is so much easier than the other options – but now, alas, I fear that chance has passed us by. My eldritches are limited, and I am a poor enchanter. It would require a form of innocence you no longer possess, for you to volunteer to undergo the process.” The sorcerer cocked his head. “But surely you will permit me to slay your true foe for you, before you pass into my service? You would want to see that much, at least, yes?”
“I do not know the reason for your hate,” Phanar replied quietly. “I do know that you would never have let us go. I know that you always intended to press us into your… service.”
Redgate laughed, trembling upwards and downwards in the air as he floated.
“Oh, tell yourself what you must, dragon-slayer. The truth is, you would have lived, but for your own powers of inference which have doomed you. This is not the first time I have utilised the pedheliorph to query you. I knew you knew, the day you knew it… No, do not trouble yourself. You will not remember the evening when you first fell under its spell. And as to this hate… My good man, you speak only to a mirror, a reflective cage of your own imposition. It is your heart harbouring hatred, Phanar of N’Lem, your heart that dwells upon the inevitability of murder. I must confess, I am myself merely apathetic, where your continued existence is concerned. Nonetheless – I believe you shall make a fine deathknight.” His head tilted towards Kani. “What shall be made of the Sister of Wythyldwyn, I wonder.”
There was no fierce shout, no battle-cry or word of warning.
Phanar pounced, his hammer and sword singing in his hands.
But the air itself was like an unseen dome of solid steel, rebuffing his leap, repelling him – he landed lightly, coiling to spring at his enemy once more –
“Enough, Phanar.” Redgate sounded bored. “I have a much more-entertaining confrontation to attend. Come – you are invited to witness. Speak with him. Distract him, while I secure the best position for my attack. We do not even yet know for certain whether he is aware of my presence, or my particular capabilities.”
Redgate simply turned his back, and the bird-demon vanished – the sorcerer drifted away towards the tunnel on the far side of the cavern, not keeping an eye on Phanar, clearly confident in his invulnerability.
The others were shaking their heads, looking about in a confusion he hoped would only be momentary.
“He knows!” he hissed at them while they tried to focus their eyes on him, on their surroundings. “He has known all along. He moves to slay Ord Ylon, and invites us to watch before we join the ranks of the undead at his command!”
“He… he knows?” Kani said in disbelief. “H-how?”
“We could – could we run?” Ibbalat suggested, looking back at the rope and patting his pouches.
“From him?” Phanar snarled. He cast a quick glance at the sorcerer’s receding form, still floating across the cavern, then whispered as quietly as he was able: “He would enjoy the hunt. We will not give him such sport. We will follow him, and hope Ylon weakens him. We will do this thing ourselves. If we fail, it will be on our own terms. We will extract such toll for our souls that clutching them shall bind him in pain eternal. In so doing we earn ourselves divine reprieve from his malice. Such is my will and prayer.”
Anathta didn’t respond in any way, her own gaze fixed on Redgate in the distance. Ibbalat chewed on a fresh leaf of wane and ducked his head in acknowledgement, while Kani just looked past Phanar at the passageway leading to the dragon’s lair and nodded distractedly, her mind and spirit clearly far removed from this Material Plane.
The warrior turned and, trying not to breathe through his nose due to the disgusting scents of this place, he strode after the sorcerer, leading his sister, his brother-in-arms and his beloved towards their not-so-final resting place.
Redgate reached the wall when they were still a hundred feet from the tunnel, and vanished into the rock without once looking back.
Phanar stared at the dim hole ahead as he drove his body forwards, nervelessly accepting the potions Ibbalat passed into his hands, draining them without question or interest. The opening in front of him was redolent with the odours of wolves and their waste, yes, but also that other familiar scent: charred flesh; an ancient mustiness that no other wyrm he’d ever encountered had possessed – none save this one, this prince of dragons called Ord Ylon.
For a moment, he was back on Miserdell’s battlements one more time, beaten and battered by the noxious tempest of the behemoth’s wings.
I am here, he thought. Finally, I am here. And still, I do not know which of them I most want to die.
* * *
There was no way even for the last children of N’Lem to move silently, not across the surfaces of these gleaming lakes, this river-like road that led them between shifting pillars of living gold, silver, electrum. Each footfall elicited that most pleasing of sounds, the inimitable song of many different precious metals caressing, ringing like bells as miniature avalanches erupted, showering coins and other precious little jewels, brooches, and trinkets down upon the boot that rudely trespassed in this hallowed place.
Seeing such a thing stole away all his thoughts of dread and disaster, if only for a moment. But it was not greed – it was only wonder. Even the surface of this shining roadway would ransom a nation. How deep down did it go? How many continents’ wealth was stored in this one place?
And so many coins minted… Few bore the Mundian stamp, and he recognised none of the others – many were simply unmarked discs.
How far back do we go, treading here? How old is our dimension?
In any case, Phanar would have had Ibbalat cause them to fly or hover, would have eagerly spent resources on obtaining stealth, if there had been a need. But the motionless person sitting on the boulders beyond the gold lake, the sole occupant of the lair, already knew they were here. Ord Ylon was awaiting them in the darkness with grace and patience, watching them approach from his vast rocky throne rising above the treasures – the stony landscape that was suggestive of his true size.
But they went forward with a magical shield like Redgate’s active, according to Ibbalat; this would stop him sending an innocuous little stinging- or biting-creature at them to paralyse or poison them, and would even extend beneath the clinking ground they strode upon, defending them against any potential attackers below the surface.
There was no light in here. The tremendous shaft on the left side of the chamber, leading up past the balconies of the kobold city, admitted only the night’s blackness at this late hour. Still, the potion that allowed Phanar to perceive his surroundings without difficulty did not let him read the face of the dragon – it was a human face, of ordinary human dimensions. Even if its expressions had also betrayed a trace of this borrowed humanity, that visage was too distant for the warrior to make out clearly.
Still, they neared. Not speaking, barely even breathing… As they came closer to him across the coins, details slowly resolved themselves.
Ord Ylon wore the shape of a man in his thirties or forties, tall-looking but not abnormally-so. He was clad in simple white linens, his skin pale green and his hair a spiky bush of bronze stalks. Glittering stubble was on his cheeks and around his lips. He was almost sprawled across the rough stones, his posture one of languor, relaxation, rather than anything approximating battle-readiness.
But the expression, painstakingly coming into sharp relief –
Hatred. Such a hatred that at first Phanar thought he imagined it, thought the words of Redgate about a reflective cage were haunting him. But no – they reached the edge of the stones protruding from the gleaming lake, the floor before which the boulder-throne of the dragon rose up, and from here the snarl frozen upon the green-tinged face was no longer mistakable.
“No closer,” he murmured. If Phanar was right about the speed with which the dragon might transform, another ten steps might put them within reach of his breath… and if he used his magic to enlarge himself, who could say if any part of his lair would be far enough from him for safety?
He noticed that Ibbalat was also murmuring under his breath, but this wasn’t a response, or anything intended for mortal ears in fact – Phanar recognised the intonation and a couple of the strange syllables; the mage was already casting his spells.
Then it began.
“Hail, Phanar and Anathta, Kanthyre and Ibbalat.” The voice that came rolling down at them was low, hollow, yet far from quiet. “It is well that I can look at last upon your faces. How I have longed to behold them; how oft have I seen them in my grief. And now – here you are, like phantoms sprung full-formed from nightmare’s subtle substance. For that is what you have been to me; surely this you know? This is what you were, and what you are… But as regards what you shall become? To me, this eve will be the sweetest dream of all recollection; my inner eye, whose lid first opened in the days of your grand-sires, ancestors no less than a score of generations removed – that eye shall be blinded at the ecstasy of the sight! And this I promise, my brave, wicked heroes: even then shall you be remembered when five more centuries have passed, and I look back a final time in wistful remembrance, before at last I forget you. You alone of all your generation shall be so upraised as to live on in thought; such have been your misdeeds.”
I have lived longer than you, wyrm, Phanar thought, and, living or undead, I will this day go forth from your lair into a world freed from your pestilence.
“Murderers all, then, are we not?” the warrior called up to the man-dragon sitting on the rocks. “Yet you it was whose stroke fell first. We slay your kin in turn, as ours were slain… Even while you exceed us, outstrip us in every way – still, we are superior. We act now out of justice, duty –”
“My stroke fell first? Upon whose skull did the lord sit, him you served in Miserdell?”
Yet where is the skull? Phanar wondered. Was Kani wrong about his collection?
“You dare speak the word duty?” Ord Ylon was crying out now, no longer restraining himself, and the thunder of the voice was daunting – more dragon than man. “Justice?”
Ylon came up to his feet suddenly, and the boulder cracked beneath his heel.
“You know not the meaning of such words! You do not even know this world! What it once was, and what it shall become again. Usurpers! Defilers of honour! It is only a Returning I seek.”
“Kultemeren defies you!” Kani roared out of nowhere, swinging her mace in readiness. “You are a life-shaper with no respect for life, a healer whose touch only rots! Wythyldwyn shall encompass your end. You give me words – I would rather take acid from your mouth than this pitiful mewling!”
“And Kultemeren defies you, ill-begotten child of Wythyldwyn. I know of what I speak.”
“Speak not the Maiden’s name!” the cleric gasped. “You sully it, letting it fall from your black tongue, child of the Dark Lady!”
Ylon grinned, and coppery fangs gleamed there between his lips.
“You think we worship Chaos, do you not?” He shook his head slowly. “You, and I, and Wythyldwyn alike; all were birthed from the Grandmother’s womb. Yet we do not deny what we are. We know each god has their place. Can the same be said for your low kindred?”
Kani seemed to be taken aback, and didn’t reply.
“No…” Ylon went on. “The depths of your arrogance, your insolent, intolerable arrogance, cannot be overstated. Vermin, all of you! Did I not promise you the slow death? Am I not upright before Glaif? Is what I do now not fore-ordained?”
“Yet thou shalt be forsworn,” the cleric breathed, not for the dragon’s ears.
Still, he heard.
“Put it to the test, then!” Ord Ylon roared. “In the names of my children, I will destroy you with human hands! You are fit for nothing more. Ausan! Givelfor! Chalibros! I beckon!”
The druid-dragon leapt down towards them through the air, still man-shaped.
“Finally!” Anathta chirped, already darting aside. “I thought he’d never shut up.”
As Ord Ylon landed in what should have been their midst, they had already scattered; the druid jumped out of the crater he’d created, moving through the billowing cloud of stone-dust with the nimbleness of a mountain goat and the unrelenting strength of a fiend.
They had all scattered, all of them except, seemingly, Ibbalat – the mage stood there, transfixed, staring at their foe.
The green-tinged face smiled cruelly, and Ord Ylon sprang at the paralysed magician; there was only a momentary interruption in his forwards momentum as he broke through whatever meagre shielding Ibbalat had been capable of forming – then the dragon was upon him, ripping and kicking.
Upon the illusion.
Phanar, looking back over his shoulder as he slipped over the uneven ground with his own mountain-goat nimbleness, couldn’t blame the dragon for falling for the glamour – Ibbalat was getting better at his clutch-casting.
It paid off. The warrior spotted the first ranged attacks landing on Ylon, hitting him in the upper-arm and the side of his head – a bolt shooting unerringly from Anathta’s crossbow, shining with fierce silver fire, and a bolt of literal silver fire arcing out from Kani’s extended mace.
Ord Ylon shrugged off the magical damage, physically brushing away the glowing spell-effects from his seared body and clothing, letting the silver flames pool at his feet. The metal head of Anathta’s shaft was spat out of his bicep and fell into the gleaming fire.
He was ignoring the others, trying to fix his eyes on Phanar – and then the warrior noted the way the dragon’s eyes fell behind him as he continued circling the creature.
This was how the dragon was going to try to trick them, trap them – if they closed on him, or he closed on them, he could change without a moment’s notice and kill them with his sheer body-mass.
This was how he was going to fail.
Before Ylon spoke and he replied, Phanar had been wondering what better opportunity Redgate might find to slay the monster – the dragon’s head was human-sized, and would surely be easier to remove from his shoulders in this form.
Now, he couldn’t even remember who Redgate was or why he mattered.
He grinned back at Ord Ylon over his shoulder, preparing his brace of anti-dragon throwing daggers.
This final confrontation – it was everything for which he’d longed, sunlight bursting into a place that had heretofore known only darkness.
I smashed the hourglass! I remade it in starlight! I am my future!
“What is this?” Ord Ylon hissed, bounding in Phanar’s general direction, creating more craters, more dust-clouds – but plainly moving without a real lock on the warrior’s location.
Thank you Ibbalat, Phanar thought, rubbing his thumb against his new ring fondly.
Kani landed another blow, using her weapon this time – she ripped across from one side of the boulder-strewn landscape to the other, her mace connecting with a violent clang, an explosion of golden smoke around Ord Ylon’s head –
That’s her new ring, Phanar realised.
He looked over to check she’d successfully left Ylon’s vicinity, and he wasn’t disappointed – she’d travelled three hundred feet in something like one-and-a-half seconds – but with another glance he saw what had happened.
Her mace – the weapon she’d wielded through dozens of battles – now deformed, a shapeless, sloppy lump of metal atop a stick.
She’d struck all manner of enemies with that thing – he’d seen it dent and batter plate armour without suffering the slightest imperfection – yet a single blow against the arch-druid’s skull had left it broken beyond repair. It would need a full reforging, whatever ancient magic that had flowed through it probably lost forever.
Dust erupted about the dragon suddenly, but not as he moved – before he leapt, this time.
Ibbalat didn’t raise just one pillar of stone – he raised four, and the rock-fingers twisted inwards, pinning Ord Ylon in place.
It only took the dragon a split-second to burst free, but by then two shining arrows were protruding from his face – on the far side of their foe Phanar saw Anathta, sprinting again into a new position.
It was with a grimace of irritation this time that Ord Ylon brushed the bolts free of his flesh, scooped away the sharp pieces of metal and the silver radiance they bore. He’d just shrugged off the last of Ibbalat’s stony obstacles when the first of the mage’s fireballs reached him, detonating off his chest.
They wailed through the air in series, growing as they went.
Ka-koom! Ka-koom! Ka-koom! Ka-koom! Ka-koom!
After the fifth fireball, the warrior saw the dragon’s body being flung, tossed unnaturally upwards by the force of the last explosion. Clothing gone. Pallid skin unharmed.
Phanar had circled enough – his friends were getting to have all of the fun.
He closed on the dragon, feeling the exhilaration of letting go, trusting to the magic of his ring to protect him while he was running full tilt like this –
Two of his daggers went wide, but three struck Ord Ylon even as their foe was still being flipped wildly through the air.
The dragon landed in a heap, slamming into the ground head-first like a ten-ton iron hammer, and Phanar kept sprinting towards him.
Supposedly the weapons he’d slung were bound-over with potent anti-draconic magic, and each dagger gleamed a different colour every time he looked at them; there was surely some ensorcellment placed on them, even if identifying the exact nature of the spell had stumped Ibbalat. Despite this, the ensorcellments didn’t stop the dragon from flipping to his feet, picking the knives out of his upper arm, chest, cheek, dropping them to the floor seemingly undisturbed by their stings –
The ensorcellment on Phanar’s sword appeared to work, though, when he drove it straight through the dragon’s chest from behind.
As he dashed by and delivered the stroke, he felt the sword’s blade jar from the bones within the chest cavity, but it didn’t break, only twisting; its keen tip came out the front with a spatter of acid, protruding between his ribs just over his stomach.
And the last son of N’Lem was was running past – running away.
We need something that goes through his bones, he thought desperately. Where are you, Redgate?
Looking back at Ord Ylon kneeling there – naked upon the rocks, staring down in shock at the white, pulsing blade upon which he’d been impaled – Phanar slowed, then stopped.
May I never invoke him again, he swore to himself.
The sorcerer rose up through the uneven ground right in front of Ylon, a thing of blood and shadow, altogether unlike the pale, scintillating druid.
Unlike – yet they were kindred, each steeped in power, in heinous deeds.
“How disappointing,” Redgate murmured, reaching down towards the dragon with a hand that could slay almost anything using just a gesture –
“Finally,” the dying druid spoke – and now it was indeed the dragon’s voice, not weak or broken but grating and strong, blasting out of the man’s mouth as though he held within his slender frame a bellows the size of a war-galley.
Redgate recoiled, up and away.
Ord Ylon changed, Phanar’s sword seemingly disappearing inside him as he swelled into immensity.
It took only moments, giving them at most three seconds to start reacting, retreating – but the great black slit, the pupil of the wyrm’s gargantuan eye, focussed on Anathta’s slinking form first, ignoring the champion floating right there.
The voice was a hideous roar, steely jaws like twin armies in conflict, gnashing the words.
His laughter was deafening.
“Finally… Ha-ha-ha-ha! I thought he would never show up. Now – the slow death as I promised,” the great head whipped about, a sinuous motion of incredible speed, focussing at last on Redgate, “and all the rest to come.”
* * *
Phanar took refuge behind a small hill of gold cups and necklaces and jewels and coins, coins, coins – he saw the others doing the same, finding spots that would be hard to douse in acid, tucked up against weird statues or outcroppings of rock, locations with multiple escape routes. Each prepared themselves in their own way for the changed situation – Anathta selected a new knife, the spring-loaded one on a chain; Ibbalat gesticulated madly with his head bowed, fingers raking the air to summon magical energies; Kani had her chin raised and eyes closed, lips murmuring silent words.
Above, the words were not silent.
“This is more like it,” Redgate called approvingly, staring across at the dragon and hovering at eye-level, as though he still felt they shared equal footing. His voice shook – only a little, but Phanar heard it. “I-I’d feared this trip a waste of my time.”
“My hoard, a waste?” The druid-dragon laughed on, unfolding and then refolding his wings – he would have no room to fly in here, unless he adjusted his stature. “You amuse me, little archmage.”
“It’s not only about the money, you must understand. It is an honour, to say that I spoke with – to say I slew an Ord.”
The Mundian was only hovering fifty feet from the dragon’s maw, well-within range of the acid breath –
Does he recognise how close to death he is? Phanar wondered, smiling a little at the thought.
“Many Ords have died these last moons,” Ylon growled, and took one step forward.
The huge clawed foot fell half on the boulders, half in the gold.
Stone cracked. Coins hissed. Redgate backed away.
“None so great,” the champion said in a tone of agreement.
“No… more… will… die.”
The next foreleg followed, and Phanar noticed that the barbed end-section of Ylon’s tail was swaying back and forth portentously.
Redgate had no response.
“Those whose lives were stolen you shall find for me,” the steel voice grated on. “Their bones await you. Your city will be theirs for the reaping, when the time comes and all is put right in the world once more.”
“Mund itself is on the scales, is it?” the champion asked at last.
Redgate sounded only faintly interested.
“Your entire fetid empire,” the dragon gnashed.
“Good, good. Well… I suppose I shall have to do something about that, then, shan’t I?”
Phanar’s mind had hardly been keeping up with this banter. There was the implication that Ord Ylon knew Redgate was coming all along, or at least for a significant time – which was bad enough on its own! – but in addition to that, the implication that the recovery of Nil Sorog’s skull meant more to the dragon-prince than as an act of respect for the mother of his spawn…
And then this – Redgate’s insulting bravado! The warrior drew a breath of surprise and awe. Surely now Ylon would lash out, the tail that had been twitching, preparing –
But no – the champion lashed out first.
A scream of crimson wind went blasting straight into the dragon’s face from beneath Redgate’s shadowy hood.
Ord Ylon endured it, and then started to laugh once more. After a few seconds, the sorcerer’s scream faltered, died away, the crimson cloud evaporating.
“But you, little archmage. You will be mine. I will keep you from death’s door, rest assured, and if you behave yourself I shall allow you some autonomy – a trace only, befitting one of your lowness. One day, I will let you go, release you from this plane – but not until I am finished with you.”
On the last word, the dragon started to draw in his breath.
Phanar could see the way Redgate was pulled in, fighting to fly away against the airflow in the gargantuan lair, all streaming like a gale into the thing’s gargantuan lungs.
And even as the monstrous druid spewed his acid he threw himself at the sorcerer.
At first the warrior had no idea how Redgate survived the deluge of acid – the horrid, air-burning substance came over the champion not like rain in a shower, but a true wall of the stuff, all at once, more akin to the waves crashing over the deck of the Dremmedine that night when the sea was magic-mad than anything else Phanar had ever witnessed –
Then the red shadow-armour gleamed green briefly, the humanoid shape visible there in the midst of the acid as the dragon finished retching. The half-vaporous, half-fluid stuff fell about Redgate, spattering the ground below him, dissolving more wealth than any man had ever possessed in a single instant.
The archmage’s eldritch plate appeared to absorb the stuff, before the shadows consumed him entirely and Phanar could no longer see the sorcerer.
Ord Ylon shouldered his way through the acid-storm completely heedless of its corrosion, letting the stuff splash over him, his feet disappearing into the burning gold, head twisting, casting about, tail whipping again –
A scream of annoyance burst from the tremendous lips, and then the dragon turned, fixing his eyes on Kani’s hiding spot.
Except they couldn’t hide from him. You couldn’t hide from arch-druids – well, maybe Redgate could, but he wasn’t really a human anymore. Kani was human. Kani wasn’t hiding – she was waiting, only waiting for her doom to come get her…
This will not be, Phanar thought, rising to a crouch and judging the distances, gripping his hammer-haft tightly in his right hand. Kani, come to me, before it’s too late! He cried out the thought inside his head, as though by yelling he could make her hear it.
The sucking breath. The insistent breeze, pulling the air from Phanar’s throat and into the dragon’s.
It’s too late.
He broke out of his hiding place, running towards her.
Only then did he remember her ring – with its speed-spell she could leave it till the last moment, ensure that Ord Ylon wasted his second go of the breath-weapon before departing from the safety of the statue she was leaning back against –
And now Phanar was here, out in the open, protected only by his own ring –
He looked about madly for somewhere to hide, recalling only that he had to keep moving, moving as quickly as possible to ensure his location was masked –
It didn’t matter. Ord Ylon’s breath caught in his throat, and the dragon choked.
The immense creature reared back, coiling in on himself and clawing at his own chest – the great green-bronze scales shifted at his command, iron-like flesh flowing aside to let him reach into his own ribcage –
Redgate was there in the void of the dragon’s torso, a shadow slipping through the druid’s innards. His gauntleted hands were currently reaching between the giant ribs, tearing chunks out of the throbbing, drumming heart beyond – the sorcerer was absorbing or phasing-through the acid sloshing about him as he worked. Now that the chest cavity was open, the putrid stuff went spraying out into the air like horrid fountains, erupting from any number of lacerated organs.
Even as Ord Ylon reached in he stabbed Redgate with a talon, piercing the sorcerer through – but the titanic blade of a claw found no purchase on the champion’s flesh. It was like a lance dipping into water; when the talon was pulled free, it left behind no effect in its target.
Still, the sorcerer ripped at the dragon’s vitals.
“Your anatomy is truly bizarre,” the sorcerer said conversationally. “I shall have to devote some time to the study of it, afterwards.”
“For you there will be no afterwards!” Ord Ylon howled. “Enough! This ends.”
Phanar reached Kani’s side and placed his hand on her shoulder, but without opening her eyes or ceasing her constant voiceless praying she just shrugged him away.
Then he heard it, before the scent of it even came to his nostrils, seconds before the first of them started pouring from the tunnel behind them and bounding across the gold.
The tide of dire wolves.
We should have used another invisibility spell, he thought ruefully. At least Ibb’s got his ring.
And the wolves were not alone in responding to their druidic master’s silent will. The cavern roof was suddenly alive, the darkness descending towards the dragon – there were not thousands, not millions, but billions of insects dropping from above. The angry swarms were so densely-packed with wasps and beetles and flies that they seemed to be singular, separate living entities, a dozen or so of the thick, tangible clouds plunging down like fat black worms at Ord Ylon. At the champion.
Phanar couldn’t watch what happened to Redgate. His own challenge had been made clear – the very same hounds whose teeth had closed upon his people’s flesh.
He would stand over the praying cleric, sell his life dearly in order to protect hers for as long as possible.
Ismethyl, come. Heed my appeal. Give me the grips of your swords.
The wolves came, and he looked out on them now without fear. This many of them, all at once – there was no way they would survive this. The realisation brought only serenity, forcing the emptiness on him whether he wanted it or not.
The withdrawal of the pack had been a trap, indeed; Ibbalat’s instincts, and his own, had been right after all. These soldiers were being held back in reserve for the perfect moment to strike, hundreds of them, untouched, fresh and ready for the fight.
Some were barking intelligible orders: whole regiments of the massive, snarling beasts were peeling away from the pack in practised wedges, each unit fanning out behind its howling leader. They did not move like wolves in the wild. They had been drilled like men, like a militia.
Somehow that made it even easier, and he ran out to meet them. If he tried to stop them too close to her, they’d both get crushed together. He might be able to buy her a few more seconds this way.
The leader is the biggest one, Phanar said to himself, studying them in the three or four seconds he had left before that very leader crashed into him – before they crashed into each other… Before Phanar was chewed, trampled under the waves of rancid furred flesh.
He studied their gait. He studied the looks in their eyes, the set of their jaws. The lengths of their bodies. Shapes of their skulls. The eye-sockets, ears.
There were too many of them to study their number.
He did study the cacophonous sound of the Ibbalat Special over on his left side, and the sharp rays of light splashing in at his surroundings from that direction. He studied the way he hoped Anathta was with Ibbalat, that they’d found their way together in these last moments, as he had done with Kani.
Yes, he studied that hope, and knew it was his way of saying goodbye.
He couldn’t look to his left, to check, make sure they were fighting side by side as they died. The dire wolf in front of him was opening its mouth, ten feet from him now, charging at full speed. The coins were singing under its paws.
He studied his need to protect Kani at all costs, and it did not remove him from the emptiness – it only exacerbated it. He’d heard tales of the champion coated in ice, a wizard legendary in Mund – he felt like that wizard must, covered in chills.
I swallowed my ghost.
The leader was eight feet away – he met its eyes again –
That wolf, six feet from him, did not fear him –
No, the wolf four feet from him thought it would consume his head in a single powerful bite –
He knew better.
The wolf two feet from him would consume the head of his hammer, pick-end first.
The weapon clove down through its huge leathery tongue and split the magical beast’s lower jaw open – with a twist of his wrist Phanar reversed the motion, letting the upswing tear through the roof of its maw, up through its brain and out the top of its skull.
It collapsed instantly but it was still being propelled forwards by its own momentum and that of its pack mates wedged behind it – but it didn’t matter; he leapt up on its shattered face even as it moved, onto its shoulders, assessing the two dire wolves immediately behind the dead leader, the exact positions of their heads.
He couldn’t waste time swinging left then right, taking two strikes to kill them, not when he was about to be borne under in less than a second – he had to stay on top – so he spun instead, trusting to the weight of his hammer when loosed in an arc to help him deliver the blows quickly-enough –
The pick entered the nostril of the first dire wolf and carried its scalp through the air, punching half its face into the back of the second wolf’s head.
Both of them ended up needing another blow to stop them struggling, but halting the momentum of the charge was his focus, and that much he’d achieved. It was their fault, really, for putting the biggest, scariest ones up front. He was on a mound, created from the bodies of the three meanest dire wolves in the pack. The charge faltered, and the next ones to crash into him he slew faster, striking their throats, temples… The more rapidly he moved, the more they missed him – the faster he ended the threat they posed.
Only once it was over did his mind look back, reflect on the carnage.
The hammer’s head stuck, buried inside one wolf’s brain.
Flicking out the remaining anti-dragon daggers bound to his forearm in order to blind the next assailants.
Spattering them in blood and bone-chips.
Pain spreading up his thigh, jaws closing savagely about his leg.
The sound of the beast’s spine shattering as his under-swing missed its ear, hitting its neck instead, popping its head loose and killing it instantly.
The warmth of Wythyldwyn’s amber light emanating from his wound.
Bearing down on them, howling at them louder than they howled back.
It was only as the wolves became noticeably smaller that the battle-coldness began to dissipate, and he looked about in wonder – he’d gone through almost thirty of them, and these remaining, younger wolves had no anger left in their eyes – they looked terrified.
They weren’t used to this. Usually when they died, Ord Ylon was free to heal them, keep them in the fray. Now their master was occupied, and their leaders were dead, never to return.
He laughed, but couldn’t hear his own laughter over the strangled screaming.
Screams?
It wasn’t the wolves.
Suddenly realising that an ear-splitting shriek was coming from behind him, he back-flipped off the corpse-hill, racing towards Kani before he even knew what he was doing.
But he realised in less than a second that it wasn’t her – he’d done his job, protected her – she was still sitting there, deep in conversation with her goddess… Over on what was now his right side, Ibbalat and Anathta were aloft, flying to evade the jaws of the dire wolves pressing at them even as they laid waste to them with ranged attacks.
No, this was a voice he’d never heard scream, never thought to hear in such distress.
Redgate was lying before the dragon, rolling about on the treasure, the huge swarms of insects moving over him, through him. Ord Ylon was watching him, clawing at him experimentally.
The demonic armour didn’t appear to be protecting the sorcerer; the stinging things were pouring into the darkness covering his face, and he was writhing, his hands clenching and beating at the gold coins. His ghostly form was pulsing in and out, off and on again. If not for some hidden power extending his time on this plane, extending his suffering, the sorcerer would’ve long since departed for the shadowland.
His screams…
The world hangs in the balance, Phanar thought. What are our souls, before the dragon’s menace?
Ord Ylon might’ve been lying, but if there was even a chance he’d been telling the truth about his plans…
His mind finally made up, the warrior looked down at Kani, her enticing red curls hanging in her face, not disturbing her serene expression.
How many times, he’d longed to touch those curls, move them behind her ear – cup her face in his hands, bring his lips to hers –
“I am sorry, my Kani. To think, what you and I could have been…”
He knew the remaining dire wolves would close on her, devour her. He knew that even now they would be pouring around the bodies of their pack leaders behind him.
He knew it, and yet he had to sacrifice Kani to save Redgate. The emptiness afforded him that much sense, but the irony was not lost on him, abandoning a saint to rescue a murderer.
He charged towards the dying archmage, the insects, the behemoth of a dragon.
Air burned like fire in his lungs, and he breathed it deep, enjoying the pain it brought him, enjoying life for the final time. Gold coins beneath his boots granted poor purchase, yet he increased his speed with each footfall.
When he judged the distance was correct he halted suddenly, cried, “Azgalam!” aloud, and kicked the toe of his right boot against the heel of his left.
The effect was instantaneous.
The password triggered the magic coursing through his Boots of Unbelievable Leaping, instantly making them feel hot to the soles of his feet – it would be hours before they cooled down, their magic ready to be used once more.
Phanar had little doubt he would be dead long before that.
He sailed high into the air – fifty feet, a hundred, coming closer and closer to the stony ceiling – had he misjudged it, he might’ve ended up impaled there on the blade-like rocks protruding from the cavern’s roof –
He landed on Ord Ylon’s neck, the last effect of the boots’ spells absorbing the impact, and as he set down his feet he drove the pick-end of his hammer into the thin gap between the scales.
The paltriness of the damage he was able to cause to the behemoth was ludicrous. Still, even if he was like a gnat in comparison, the bite of his weapon was nonetheless painful to the druid – half of the dragon’s insects reacted to Phanar’s presence right away, swarms moving almost automatically in concert, rising up to smash into him, flick this gnat from their master’s flesh –
Ka-koom!
Phanar shielded his eyes just in time as one of Ibbalat’s fireballs crashed into the swarms, obliterating millions of the critters with a bright-orange explosion.
But more and more rose up, in even thicker swarms than before – some were beginning to get through, flying into Phanar’s eyes, his mouth – he smushed them against his skin by bashing his face into the greaves on his upper arms, growling, teeth clenched and lips firmly pressed together –
Desperately, the warrior twisted his hammer’s haft, widening the hole his pick-end put in the softer flesh between the dragon’s scales – he felt the grating of ensorcelled steel against bone, and now Ord Ylon hissed in pain.
At that very moment a crossbow-bolt, streaming silver fire, came flying unerringly out of nowhere – from his vantage point Phanar couldn’t tell where it landed, but given the trajectory and the dragon’s thrashing reaction he guessed it’d sunk into Ord Ylon’s eye.
The second set of insect-swarms missed Phanar, as his enemy entered a series of stomach-churning rolls. He did his best to maintain his position on the dragon’s neck as Ord Ylon coiled, writhed and screamed. The warrior’s world turned upside down, tipping him forwards and backwards, left and right – one moment the scales were crushing in on him, and then in the next the floor was rising up at him –
Still, he clung on. He had his wrist through the hammer’s thong; Ord Ylon wasn’t making him let go unless he tore Phanar’s arm clean off.
The dragon raged, and the warrior heard more arcane attacks landing –
Kani? Kani! Are you alive, Kani?
He couldn’t see, couldn’t check; he could only hold on, could only listen –
The buzzing in the air had died down – the wolves’ barking too –
Then suddenly the dragon froze, and Phanar found his footing once more, using his grip on the hammer to steady himself atop the curve of the dragon’s neck.
He could hear hacking laughter.
He peered down, casting about for Kani in the chaos, but he couldn’t see her –
Is she still behind the statue?
He couldn’t tell, and in front of the dragon –
Redgate was back on his feet, coughing in both pain and mirth – and now he stood something like twenty feet tall. For just a few moments the huge archmage’s very substance seemed to flicker violently: at first he appeared entirely black, a sorcerer-shaped void – then entirely red, then white – and then he simply vanished. At last, he resumed his previous crimson shadow-armour, and fell silent.
While this went on, all about the champion the insects were falling limply from the air, separated from their wings that drifted slowly after them. Behind Redgate, tall orange flames walled off the wolves who hadn’t yet fled the lair.
Ord Ylon was panting – not drawing in breath to spew acid, but actually panting – and he seemed to be listening to the sorcerer’s calm words, the wyrm’s entire body frozen in shock at this turn of events.
“I must confess that initially I had thought to do this thing without recourse to summons, shields,” Redgate proclaimed, a bit self-contemptuously – exactly to whom he was speaking was unclear, but Phanar got the impression it might’ve been him. “One must always strive to improve oneself, must one not? I regret that I have failed. No longer, however, am I disappointed. If a crude approach is required, who am I to gainsay fate? If I must break your spine to be done with you, so be it. There is, theoretically, no substance through which I cannot cut. While it lives. But you? I’m going to pull your head off.”
The archmage threw his arms wide, as if in greeting, crying out commands in some unknown tongue. An arc of dark colours sprung up out of nowhere in response, scarlet flames and purple fogs forming a circle around Ord Ylon –
Phanar looked down from his perch atop the dragon as eldritches came racing into the material dimension. Undead stepped forth in vast quantities, the purple mists pulsing again and again, disgorging more and more of the creatures; as his sister and Ibbalat had guessed, the orc tribes of the Obarsk Waste had been turned into Redgate’s thralls. Hundreds of corpse-pale, skull-decorated warriors, both male and female, hurled themselves at Ord Ylon. Their crude axes and daggers were no match for the great wyrm’s scales, but some of the fastest-moving orcs had eyes that glowed amethyst, burning far more fiercely than the others’, and these orc-wights used their clawed fingertips to gouge deeper wounds than their blades could avail.
Yet these were all distractions, meaningless marbles scattered at a foe’s feet to trip them, make them falter and stumble. It was the demons – the demons were what most seemed to cause the dragon pain. They were seemingly everywhere, not only on the ground but in the air, climbing over his body. Ord Ylon whipped left and right, raking through the fiends with his claws, crushing them to dust with heavy thumps of his tail, slicing at them with the tip.
But he was still breathing heavily, moving with the frantic jerkiness that characterised panic, and it was all Phanar could do to keep holding on, riding the insane waves of Ylon’s undulating body. Many of the hellspawn could not be raked, crushed, sliced. There were things that looked like men made out of mirrors, and when one of them was smashed two would rise, whole, from the pile of shards left behind. Other demons were simply made from hair or darkness, or even less-comprehensible substances. Ylon continually tried to stop a tendril-covered sphere of viscous yellow fluid, stamping on it over and over, but the ball went trundling on in spite of the huge claws shearing through its gelatinous body. It was throwing out its tendrils regardless, barbed hooks piercing the softer hide between the scales, burying themselves within the ancient flesh.
A moment arrived when the dragon’s head was low to the ground, chewing on the yellow jelly-demon, and Phanar took the opportunity to yank his pick free; he jumped down, rolling over his shoulder across the churning surface of the hoard. It was only then, turning back to look at Ord Ylon, that he recognised why the dragon-prince was so distraught.
Firstly, Anathta’s missile hadn’t just pierced his eye – it had destroyed it. Silver stuff was gouting forth from the blackened socket – it was entirely possible the bolt was in his brain.
He wasn’t healing it.
Probably worse, for the wyrm at least, the now-gigantic Redgate hadn’t just summoned his minions around the dragon – he’d summoned them all over him. Inside him.
The chest cavity was somehow still open, its edges burning with a greenish radiance; but inside the pit which contained the dragon’s heart was a whirling maelstrom of crimson light. A demon in white armour was standing there in the gap, boots and gauntlets planted steadily to keep the flesh parted while imps poured out of the stick-man behind him, and allowing a horde of vampires to feast on the druid’s tender innards.
Then the sorcerer himself lunged forwards through the air, bringing his big plated fists crashing down into Ord Ylon’s nose, taking advantage of the fact the dragon was distracted with the impossible-to-swallow demon he was chewing.
Each one of Redgate’s punches burst a scale, cracking it, releasing jets of putrid green pus – but that wasn’t why the wyrm started squealing, thrusting away, turning aside.
No, it wasn’t the strikes from the heavy metal gloves – it was the sorcerer’s other weaponry doing the damage. Phanar saw the sprays of acid-blood that came from the dragon’s throat where Redgate’s invisible razors cut into it. Over and over, new cuts were appearing, the fluid gushing out to consume the sorcerer’s troops – but neither Ord Ylon nor Redgate paid them any heed as the things screamed and smoked away into oblivion. The two impossibly-powerful entities were focussing on their contest.
The dragon twisted, contorting, pressing himself up against the cavern walls in a futile attempt to rid himself of the demons infesting his body, shattering tons of stone in the process – the sorcerer pursued, hurtling around and reversing direction effortlessly, as though he had attached himself by a cord to Ylon’s jaw. All the while, the unseen weapons sawed into his opponent’s neck, again and again.
Then without warning the acid-blood stopped flowing, and Ord Ylon suddenly leapt for the ledge that would lead him out of his lair, up past the kobold-city and out into the chill mountain air.
He no longer bears Redgate ill-will? He seeks to flee, not fight?
It didn’t matter – Ylon’s tremendous reach exceeded his tremendous grasp and, borne under by hundreds, perhaps thousands of the sorcerer’s minions digging into his vitals, the dragon collapsed, a single claw resting on the ledge. His screaming ceased.
Redgate’s cold laughter replaced it, filling the air, and Phanar gritted his teeth against the sound of it, worse by far than the dragon’s wailing.
“Come, now,” the sorcerer said gloatingly, hovering above the wyrm’s stuporous head. “Are you not in truth an Ord? Is it perhaps conceivable that you stole your wealth, fr-“
The dragon raised his face and roared acid at the sorcerer, but it was a negligible amount – much of his stores of the stuff had long-since been expended, spreading all around in pools, continuing to eat the stone and dissolve the treasure. The miniscule amount that splashed on the sorcerer hit an invisible barrier and turned into smoke.
And, at the resurgence of ill-will, another series of devastating gashes appeared in the wyrm’s throat.
The severely-wounded dragon could take no more – Phanar could see it in his posture, the desperation of his movements as he put forth a titanic effort, teeth gritted against the pain of the things crawling through his insides, and wrenched his vast belly up onto the ledge. Tail dragging, wings brushing the walls, he scrambled for the safety of the outdoors.
“This is most unsporting,” the titanic Redgate commented.
The wicked wings came shooting from his shoulders, giving him the wingspan of a dire vulture – then the sorcerer gave chase.
As soon as Redgate departed, his remaining summons all charged after him as one, flying and leaping and climbing up the wall to reach the ledge.
Then within two seconds there was a great cracking sound, a thunderous thudding coming from up the incline, shaking the ground, making the coins stir and hiss – but Phanar paid it no heed. He had already fixed his purpose.
“Kani!” the warrior bellowed, spinning on his heel and sprinting towards the last spot he’d seen her in, heedless of the gold moving beneath his feet – in his mind’s eye he could see the cleric lying there, spread-eagled on the gold in a puddle of her own blood, half-eaten, white-skinned… But his mind’s eye was a traitor, it could lie, it was designed only to look into the empty spaces –
He sensed the calmness entering his body even before he rounded the corner of the statue, then felt the smile spread on his lips when he saw her.
She was still sitting there, still praying, while Ord Ylon was being destroyed somewhere just out of sight.
“Kani,” he gasped. Then, raising his voice over the din: “Kani, please…”
He didn’t want to disturb her, but he couldn’t let these seconds vanish into the emptiness. Not without his voice. Not without his affirmation. His words had to be birthed before they could be allowed to die.
Yet throughout the battle – and even now, while this apocalyptic tumult pounded at the cavern walls, the dragon and champion locked in deadly combat upon the slope – she’d been sitting here in a reverie, the Shield of Wythyldwyn tossed aside and her mace across her lap –
Her mace?
Phanar looked down at the weapon, and his eyes widened in surprise. Where before it had been a thing of steely appearance, now it was blue and gold, the colours banded like a snake all up the length of the shaft and the heavy, spiky head.
The heavy, spiky head that no longer looked like it’d been melted down to slag.
What in the name of Celestium…?
He looked up as Anathta and Ibbalat arrived, crossing the treasure-lake with faces flushed by exertion.
“If I’d known she could do that,” his sister shouted, eyeing the mace, “I’d have given her Toothdrill when it got all drillified.”
Phanar glared at her. “Not now, Ana!” He winced as another crack resounded down from the slope, shaking the whole lair.
“Oh, who cares, brother?” she yelled. “We’re dead. Why not enjoy our last seconds?”
She turned, threw her arms around Ibbalat’s neck, and kissed the mage forcefully.
It took Ibb a few moments to come to terms with what was happening, to settle his arms around her.
Phanar couldn’t help but chuckle a little, then another resounding crash rocked the chamber.
The rogue and mage broke apart, and she turned to face him.
“Since when do you call me Ana, anyway?” she asked.
“You two should run!” he cried, looking between Kani and his sister. “It is you he wants most of all.”
Ibbalat, still looking stunned from the impromptu kiss, was nodding wordlessly.
“But you know we won’t,” Anathta remarked. “Right, Kani?”
“Right.”
The cleric’s reply shocked all of them; the battle between Redgate and Ord Ylon was still continuing and it was so loud that at first Phanar thought his senses had to be deceiving him…
But no. Kani was looking at him without the faintest hint of blushing on her cheeks, cool determination in her eyes as she rose to her feet.
“We’re going nowhere,” the cleric went on, as though he needed clarification as to her meaning. She spoke in a steadfast voice, filled with holy fervour. “The real battle’s still ahead.”
Her words heralded a cataclysm.
At first they just shrank down, throwing their arms or hands over their ears to protect their hearing, trying to hold their brains steady while the whole world seemed to shake.
It didn’t take long – perhaps thirty seconds.
A vomit of rubble poured down over the ledge, carrying the limp-limbed wyrm on its wave then sliding him over the rim; he crashed down into the lair, landing unceremoniously on his back atop a pile of gems. The eldritches in his flesh were gone, but his legs and tail were flaccid, his head barely moving – the burning eye was still aflame, while the other was closed. He was lying on his wings, trapping them in what looked to be a painful manner beneath his colossal weight, and for the first time the dragon-prince didn’t look threatening. He just looked like an overgrown, dying lizard.
Huge chunks of stone and gravel showered down on his titanic serpentine body, and he didn’t react.
But Phanar could not pity him, in spite of the evil mage who came drifting down after him. He could, however, pity the kobolds whose annihilated bodies protruded in pieces from the rubble – a scaly tail here, a furred hand there…
“I’m afraid there’ll be no escaping me, Ord,” the sorcerer murmured. His size was such that Phanar could make out his softly-spoken words, even from here. “Not that way, at least.”
He destroyed the city?
But even as Redgate spoke the dragon seemed to put on a final burst of energy, wriggling over, burying his head in his hoard beneath him, attempting with sinuous motions to dive below the surface of the treasure –
Redgate stepped down from the ledge – the sorcerer had grown again in stature, standing taller than a fire-giant – and grabbed Ylon’s twisting tail.
The huge, shadow-red gauntlets gripped the dragon tight, the crimson armour clanking as Redgate braced his feet in the boulders and heaved back.
Phanar watched with awed, terrified fascination as the dragon was dragged, bodily hauled back out of the gold.
He watched, as those gauntlets plunged down into the trembling, steely flesh, then he could watch no longer. He closed his eyes, seeking the emptiness.
But he couldn’t help but listen, the sound reverberating across the lair, the dreadful cr-cr-cr-cr-crack, like an ancient tree being splintered in two.
The ripping noise, the soft spatter of acid against rock walls.
Redgate tore off Ord Ylon’s head, and it was all over.
It was beginning.
* * *
It was beginning. Phanar opened his eyes. He could feel it. For the first time since they’d arrived in the lair, true silence had settled. There were now only a few seconds left before Redgate cast aside the gigantic head in his arms, and turned around to face them – the demons were gone, but there was at least a hundred feet of distance between Phanar and the sorcerer – would there be a better opportunity than this, or would acting now just get him killed sooner rather than later?
He couldn’t. Couldn’t act. He had to feel. He had to say it –
He looked down, reaching for Kani’s empty shield-hand, but she was already holding it out to him.
He looked up into her eyes in surprise, then took it from her fingers, and nodded.
“Words will wait,” Kani breathed, “in this world or the next.”
He saw the tears in her eyes, mirroring his own.
“For us there will be no next world. I love you, Kanthyre Vael.”
He heard the ringing slam of the Ord Ylon’s skull as it was tossed unceremoniously aside.
He slipped her ring onto his left hand, and ran like the wind towards his doom.
He went in an arc, to come upon Redgate from the far side, heading for the boulders beyond the treasure-lake; as he darted he cast his gaze across at the sorcerer, at the others.
Redgate was shrinking back down even as he floated into the air – the wings and armour disappeared into the fabric of his flickering crimson robes. Then he reached up, removing his mask and throwing back his hood. He shook out his brown, sweat-soaked hair, and laughed lightly.
“That was, truly, worth the trip,” he called down to the dragon’s severed head.
Then the voice of the Sister of Wythyldwyn rang out. Its tone was cold and formal, but the terror couldn’t be kept from it.
“You th-think I don’t know what you are.”
Redgate turned in the air and looked upon her, his curiosity plain. “I don’t know what you are, Sister Vael. I must admit, you most of all your merry band intrigue me; it is you who most frustrates my inquiries… It is you whose life might persist longest – this will depend on the results of my experiments…”
“You think that I, I can’t comprehend you. That you’re somehow something special. Truth is, I’m supposed to say you could’ve been a shining light in a world filled with darkness. But don’t deceive yourself. Those lights… they still exist. You’re just not one of them. And no. You never could have been. These are the powers in this world that work against the likes of you. You want to kn-know what I am? I am one such power.”
“You sound scared.”
“I’m terrified.” Suddenly, somehow, the fear seemed to leave her a little bit. “That’s okay. I’m human.”
“Not for much longer.”
“Do you remember? What it was, to be human?”
“My dear.” Redgate floated closer. “I was never merely human, not really.”
Kani shook her head. “You put something in me, when you brought me down from that ledge, didn’t you?”
“I cursed you, yes. I suspected you might interfere too early, you in particular. It’s just an interesting element, a fragment of soul-poison from the shadowland, one of my de-”
“You should not put something inside a Sister of Wythyldwyn. Our bodies are inviolable. Necromancer. Warlock. Diabolist. We have names for your evils. You are not special. You are not above human. You are sub-human. We are…” She looked down at her mace. “We are permitted to slay that which is sub-human.”
“Where is Phanar?” Redgate asked suddenly, spinning on the spot up there in the air, craning his neck around. “Where are you, dragon-slayer?” Then, when the sorcerer couldn’t immediately locate him, imps started pouring from a crimson flame beside him, bat-like fiends flapping through the portal by the dozen.
Redgate gave them commands and the imps spread across the lair, but the warrior could instantly tell that his ring’s magic was interfering with their senses: the lair was a big place, with lots of potential hiding-holes, and only a few of the demons had headed in his direction. They didn’t seem to notice him whatsoever, even when he sprinted right below them, heading for their master.
“Dharikas,” he murmured, activating Kani’s ring.
“Has he fled me? Fie, Phanar! Come out; unless you intend to stay hidden whilst I take apart your frien- oooof!“
Phanar had no ranged weapon imbued with stronger magic than his hammer; despite the fact the archmage was floating ten, fifteen feet in the air, the warrior decided he had no other option.
He bounded by, moving as fast as his thoughts could carry him, and when he passed beneath the sorcerer he lobbed the hammer at him with all his might.
It spun, end over end, and the spiked point hit his enemy somewhere around the navel.
Redgate recoiled, making a noise like he was being sick; as Phanar looked back he saw the sorcerer ripping the magical weapon from his gut and holding its bloody tip up before his face.
“An unfair strike,” said the Mundian icily; he did something to the hammer, holding it out and twirling it – shadows seemed to consume it, and then the weapon was gone.
Great, Phanar thought, ducking around another imp-patrol. He’d lost both his spellbound weapons now – his sword was stuck somewhere within the carcass of the dragon, while the gods only knew to which plane his hammer had been consigned.
No matter, he told himself, reaching for his throwing-axe.
Undead kobolds started to rise from the rubble – he looked across as he ran, checking whether the others had noticed, and right then he saw as Ana raised her crossbow, two bolts loaded, strings poised to loose them at the sorcerer’s heart.
He saw her lips move, the double repetition, and he understood.
One charge she’d used to sink a shaft in Ord Ylon’s brain. Two she’d saved for this, the real threat.
Her finger squeezed the trigger and, trailing the same silver flame, her bolts whizzed towards their target.
At the same time, Redgate waved a hand lazily.
The bolts rebounded from the shield around him, tumbling like a pair of twigs from a dead tree. Their lights dimmed, the two missiles fell trembling to the glinting ground.
“I checked, the day we met, when I held your ring,” the sorcerer called in a disappointed tone. “There is about it not one thing to suggest your missiles can penetrate my shielding.”
He sighed, then waved a hand again as he slowly floated towards them – the shambling kobolds gathered in a loose formation behind them, blocking off any avenues of escape.
“You, Anathta, shall be my first. I shall attempt a vampire, I believe. Ibbalat, watch close; indulge your curiosity. I may require a little of your blood.”
The mage answered him with a wand of lightning-bolts, stepping between Phanar’s sister and the oncoming sorcerer. Every single one of the fierce sprays of energy he unleashed was scattered harmlessly across the sphere about Redgate – a sphere that seemed to cover an even greater area than it had when Ana shot him – yet Ibbalat steadily continued forward, placing his body in the way.
“No, Ibb!” Ana cried, grabbing him by the shoulder and jerking him back –
“If he volunteers, my love,” the archmage murmured, “it is of no concern to me. I can let you drink the Sister’s blood. That could make an interesting concoction…”
“Why won’t you die!” Ibbalat gasped, his despair and anguish palpable.
Redgate was drawing ever-closer to them, smiling his murderous smile –
Phanar’s throwing-axe ricocheted uselessly off the sorcerous barrier –
The lightning-wand gave out its final spurts –
“Redgate,” Kani said, stepping up towards the others. As she moved in front of Ibbalat, Phanar noticed she’d retrieved her shield, embossed with its holy golden rose, while the mage distracted the enemy. “Don’t presume to ignore me. There is something I remember.”
There was a quality to the cleric’s voice that Phanar couldn’t immediately place. Even the archmage halted, looking down at her with a bemused expression on his face.
“And what, pray tell, do you remember, Sister? You must realise, you only sweeten this deed for me by prolonging it.”
It was the clarity with which she spoke, and joy; such joy he hadn’t really heard in her voice for so long… not since the prophet of Kultemeren told the cleric her fortune.
“I remember, the feel of the rail in my hand. The feel of the light. And I remember, the smell of Chadoath in his hair, despite the smoke of your city… I remember it all.”
Phanar stopped running, heedless of how close he was, how the imps were still relentlessly hunting him. He stopped, and stared at the cleric.
“I remember you, necromancer, burning in the light of a thousand suns. Oh, but that hasn’t happened yet, has it?”
A sense of incontrovertible change filled the air, suddenly tangible, candlelight in a long-buried coffin.
To his credit, the sorcerer reacted quickly, and not with his barbed words this time. From his current vantage point Phanar could see him clearly, if in profile, and his face frowned in sudden realisation. The atmosphere of change must have come to him as a sharp stab of terror, a certainty of danger: Redgate threw out both hands at her, the forces both seen and unseen at his beck and call, zombified kobolds and invisible shields and flames and fogs, all converging on the cleric… monstrous things loomed like hills inside the portals, silhouettes taking shape, getting ready to crash down on her…
“Are you ready, Deadgate?”
Kanthyre Vael, Sister of Wythyldwyn, raised her mace and then let it fall, smashing it into the hoard at her feet.
An opaque sphere of bright, buttercup-yellow light erupted around her, maturing into amber as it swelled into a vast dome, occluding everything behind it and beyond it, growing with the speed of an explosion –
It struck Phanar before he could even react, though what he might’ve done he had no idea – it was like a wave of hot wind that passed him by, allowing him to marvel at what it left behind in its wake.
Nothing. None of them.
Blood-coloured flames, amethyst openings – they guttered and evaporated. Kobolds dropped down dead again, falling into their own portals, as though their connection to the sorcerer had been severed suddenly. Whole hosts of imps were washed right out of the plane.
And as for Redgate –
He fell from the air, landing with an all-too-solid thump.
One of his hands rose weakly, the perfectly-ordinary sleeve peeling back to the elbow as he tried to gesture, open a doorway –
A single meagre line of lightning crackled from Ibbalat’s wand as he stepped forward, scorching the sorcerer’s fingers, slowing him by a thousandth of a second –
The still-not-quite-extinguished bolts that Ana had shot at him, lying on the stones with their silvery nimbuses, suddenly rattled, twisting about –
“Dharikas!” Phanar grunted –
Red flames appeared around the sorcerer’s fallen form –
The spellbound bolts found their trajectory, speeding off –
Phanar picked up his throwing-axe on the way.
In the end, Redgate was almost half-gone from the dimension when the ensorcelled missiles found his heart, bursting it in a fountain of blood that splashed across both the treasure and the hell-world portal.
Phanar sped up and struck his neck a savage blow from the left side, so that the head would fall into this plane. He wanted to stare at it. He would have to be certain.
Ana would want to look at it too, he suspected.
The murderer’s head came free at a single blow – Phanar had struck the neck a little too hard, given the imperfect balance of the throwing-axe when used for this purpose. He damaged the face, but it was better – far, far better – to be absolutely certain of the kill.
He only believed it was really happening when the portal Redgate had been summoning faded, taking away the majority of his legs and one of his arms with it.
The remains of the face had a strange, warring look frozen on its features, as the bloody thing went sailing through the air, spinning. A look of wide-eyed surprise, melded with the furrowed brows of intense concentration.
It was him. He was dead, for sure.
Air filled Phanar’s lungs without him feeling the sensation of breathing in, then let itself loose in an incoherent yell of catharsis and celebration.
He wasn’t alone – all four of them cried out and turned to each other, each of them wide-eyed, disbelieving.
His gaze met Kani’s, and her eyes were orbs of amber flame.
When their lips met, he tasted the heat of that flame; their eyes closed, and when they opened again she was herself once more.
“What – what happened to you?” he asked her huskily.
“I went to the Meadows of Mending,” she replied, and tears started to fall from her eyes then. “He… he did something to me, it would’ve killed me before too long, and I had to… I’m sorry I was so distant, I –”
“You did it!” he soothed her. “You saved us all.”
“I never saw a greater-dispel used like that!” Ibbalat cried. “I never actually saw a greater-dispel, at all, thinking about it, but –”
“Kani!” Ana squealed, leaping at the cleric, throwing her arms around her.
Phanar let them have their moment, embraced Ibbalat, thumped him on the back…
“Is it done?” the warrior asked his friend. “Truly, is he gone?”
“He’s gone!” the mage choked, half-weeping. “It’s over, Phanar! They’re both gone!”
“’Deadgate’?” Ana was scoffing, squeezing the cleric. “Bit lame, Kani.”
“I was pressed for time,” Kani replied, smiling.
“Now as for those moonfrost missiles… say I get them re-spellbound, call them Mundertaker One and Mundertaker Two… Would we be even, then, or – oof!”
Kani tightened her hug, then, grinning, spoke over Ana’s shoulder. “There are rituals I need to perform. His spirit might still linger, and Ord Ylon’s too. We need to be sure we send them on their way to Nethernum. With a bit of luck I can put them beyond the touch of even the greatest sorceries.”
“I’ll prepare some disintegration while you’re at it,” Ibbalat said excitedly, taking a few leaves of wane from his demiskin and shoving it into his mouth. “Get us through the rubble, get us out of this stinking place. If I can clear enough we might be able to fly out, and then back down to the edge of the Waste on a single casting!”
Ana had wriggled free of Kani’s embrace; now her eyes lit up. “I get to fill the demiskin!” she cried, ten times as excited as the mage.
“Gods…” Phanar looked around him, seeing it anew. “So much wealth… This is…”
“We go back to Tirremuir, buy up their whole supply of demiskins, come back…” His sister’s greed was like a second personality, a feverish thing that took hold of her at times like these. “We could empty it… Might take a few months, but –“
“No,” Phanar said forcibly. “We take what we can, we go back to Mund.”
“Mund?” Kani blurted, turning her face to his.
“You don’t think we should?” the warrior asked haltingly.
“No, I do!” the cleric replied, stepping closer to him and taking his hand. “I thought you might not want to… But we need to tell them, and we can’t trust a messenger. This is news we can’t let travel.” She looked around. “The poor kobolds…”
“Tell them what?” Ibbalat said, ignoring the kobold comment. “That he ‘sought a Returning’, or whatever?”
“Those whose lives were stolen you shall find for me,” the steel voice grates on. “Their bones await you. Your city will be theirs for the reaping, when the time comes and all is put right in the world once more.”
“Mund itself is on the scales, is it?” the champion asks.
“Your entire fetid empire.”
“There is much they need to know,” Phanar replied heavily, then looked down at the treasure beneath his feet. Ord Ylon had been trying to bury himself in it – were there other exits, other chambers down there? “There are bones, skulls hidden here, somewhere…”
“Oh, yes of course… Kani – can you find them?” the mage asked eagerly. “We can destroy them, can’t we? Maybe I can scry them out, now…”
“I could find them, but I won’t,” she said. “The Magisterium – they’re going to want to see this for themselves, aren’t they?”
“We cannot let anyone we do not trust come here,” Phanar said. “If a great arch-sorcerer could revive the dragon, or this… thing,” he indicated the remnants of Redgate’s corpse with his eyes, “we cannot afford for this to happen.”
“Then we… we bury it,” the cleric said with finality. “All of it. Let the Magisterium clear it if they want, but we do what we can now. Keep the secret of this place in our hearts till the grave.”
Ana was knee-deep in a puddle of gems and tiny bars of electrum; still, she turned and glared at Kani, clearly offended. “You mean… bury all this gold?” Her voice was low, incensed.
“Ibbalat.” The cleric looked at the mage. “You understand, don’t you?”
The mage looked between the cleric and the rogue, then sighed. “Ana –“
“I get it!” she snapped, returning to her task, pouring stuff into the demiskin. “I don’t see why we can’t just send Derezo to Mund with the message – it is his homeland, after all – or send Derezo back here while we take it, or whatever – and I swear, this much money, it would be enough to buy Mund, if we just… had the time to… and Phanar… needs new weapons… oooh, a dagger…”
Her voice continued on, getting quieter and quieter as her attention became ever-more absorbed in her meticulous work, assessing the weight and value of the items her hand passed over.
Behind her back, the other three were smiling. Phanar nodded to Kani and Ibbalat, who sat down cross-legged next to each other – the cleric was closing her eyes in prayer, the mage pulling out a spellbook.
Once everyone else was preoccupied, he turned away from them, so that he could view both the corpses.
There were hundreds of bodies in here – kobolds, dire wolves – but only two of them mattered.
Redgate. Ord Ylon.
He looked upon them again, and felt for the first time the lifting of the veil that had swaddled his soul, blinding him to the light of freedom.
Freedom.
The clouds of time parted and the starlight fell through between the worlds he’d walked. The sky’s seas rippled, the desert beneath groaning.
The shape in the sand. The dragon, looming over him.
Dead. Dead, at last.
Perhaps we both were prophesied, he realised, turning to look back at his sister. Perhaps we were always destined to do it together.
It might’ve been that her bolts – Mundertaker One and Two, he thought with a smile – would’ve done the job without him. Without Redgate, even. If she’d put both them in Ord Ylon’s other eye rather than saving them, put them in the dragon’s brain, who was to say what might’ve happened?
Bringing Redgate might’ve been a mistake all along, from every angle.
He sighed, watching her counting her coins.
But now, we are free. Both of us. All of us.
We swallowed our ghosts. We crossed the sand. We smashed the hourglass and remade it in starlight. We walked every way. We took every path. We found our future.
And we became it.
* * *
Phanar stood behind Kanthyre at the prow of the Dremmedine, his arms around her, her hands on his, as moonlit tides brought them in to Salnifast-by-the-Sea. Ulfathu’s steady hand was on the wheel. Ibbalat and Anathta were in the crow’s nest – depending on which of them he asked, they were either going up there to get a better view of the port-town as they approached, or to better-effect a wind-spell, bringing them into the harbour more quickly… He knew they were both lying, and had to hide his smile twice.
He hadn’t been wrong, that day in Ord Ylon’s lair, looking down on both their corpses. This newfound freedom was a bliss for the soul that he’d never known might exist. Days and nights were a whirl of luxurious potential, a blank plenitude of existence that fascinated him. He could settle down somewhere with Kani – but he didn’t have to. He didn’t have to do anything. They could go together, anywhere, anywhere in the world. He could just live. Be himself.
One final hurdle – the magisters of Mund. A little blip on the open, empty horizon.
It was, therefore, with some alarm that he spotted the shape winging its way across the silver-lit bay towards the ship.
“What is that?” Kani asked at once, drawing herself up, hand falling to the empty mace-loop on her belt out of habit.
“A sorcerer,” he said in a tone of agreement; when she stiffened, he continued softly, “but a champion, I think.”
“We don’t know that!” she barked, stepping free of his hold on her. “And what about our last ‘champion’?” She raised her hand up to the sorcerer and suddenly there was a glob of whitish, silvery fire in her palm. “Who are you?” she called immediately across the waves. “What do you want with us?”
“Is he dead?” the sorcerer cried back.
“Which one?” Phanar butted in, stepping up beside Kani to the very rail, folding his arms.
“Redgate!”
“He is dead,” the warrior confirmed.
“What’s happening?” Ana muttered from behind him.
He turned and saw her just a few paces away; Ibbalat was still clambering down the rigging halfway along the ship.
“Nothing,” the warrior said. “Don’t be troubled.”
He turned back. The sorcerer was dropping closer, and he did indeed seem a little less intimidating than Redgate. His robe was not blood-red – he was clad instead in greens and purples, accented with blues and greys, the outer layer covered in little grinning mouths. The mask he wore was no spider-face but a confident, smiling satyr with curving horns. The six wings at his back were gossamer-nimbuses of blue light.
“He’s dead? You’re certain?”
The champion hovered down over the sea-serpent figurehead at the front of the ship, then came to hang just ten feet from them, matching pace with the wind and looking from the trio over to Ibbalat as the mage ran up.
“Who are you?” Kani asked again in reply. “Are you Redgate’s ally?”
“Gods, no!” the sorcerer said. “My name’s Feychilde. Timesnatcher basically gave Redgate a death-sentence. I’m told he was a bit of a bad egg. I actually saw you once – well, one of you – in a shop –”
“Have you got, oh, about three days, Feychilde?” Ana grated. “’Bad egg’ isn’t even close. As to his death…” Of course, she had the two bolts to hand – she drew them from her pouch, showed them to the champion. “I pulled the Mundertakers out of his heart myself. What little there was of it.”
“Mundertakers?” Feychilde repeated, sounding a little awed.
“They could do with a bit of a re-ensorcellment,” the rogue went on. “Feel like offering special rates to some adventurers who’ve just rid the world of two super-massive evils? We’re broke after shelling out for all our gear.”
“You’re… broke. The slayers… of Ord Ylon… are broke.”
“Hey!” Ana pointed a finger at the archmage. “Them stories, they’re just stories, you know! You think we’d be coming back here in the same boat – in the same gods-cursed clothes – if we just found a lake of shining platinum and electrum, a…”
Her voice dropped away suddenly. Keeping the existence of the hoard a secret was the only way they’d got Anathta onboard with them burying the place, in the end. If she wasn’t pillaging it, no one was. If the Magisterium wanted to send some people off to explore the caves, it would have to be for the right reasons…
And now here she was, dropping herself in it already. Her money-brain really was like a completely separate entity, incapable of rational thought.
“Riiiiiight.” Feychilde’s grin, visible beneath the covering, matched his mask’s cheeks. “Look, if that’s your story I’ll go with it – whatever. And I’ll happily trade you spells for information. My friends,” he gestured at one of the docks the Dremmedine was heading towards, “the champions of Mund, I mean, are eager to have a chat. I just volunteered to pop over and check we didn’t have a fight on our hands, if you follow me.”
“This is why we have returned to your city,” Phanar replied. “To bring you information. There is much the Magisterium needs to hear.”
“I was afraid you were going to say something like that.” Feychilde frowned. “You see, while you’ve been off dealing with Ord Ylon – massive thanks from, like, everyone in the world for that, by the way – we’ve kind of been busy dealing with his cousin, who, it turns out, has been here for years. We’ve just got rid of her tonight, but my friends are sure there’s more to it – if she comes back we need to be ready, but they can’t see beyond a certain barrier… I’m sure they can explain it better than I can…”
Phanar tuned out the champion’s words. Feychilde was explaining things, important things – archmage-twins, Tyr Kayn, an enchantment placed on the magic-users of Mund – but the warrior could pick up what he missed later.
It is not over. There is no freedom to be found, no end to the trials. There is only struggle, until there is death – and even then, the ending can be made bittersweet, an eternal servitude…
He felt the despair enter his heart.
For a moment, just a moment, he tuned it all out and entered the emptiness.
It awaited him still.
The dragon in the sand.
The prophecy.
“… chance she and Ord Ylon were working together, for some reason, towards some mysterious goal –“
“Feychilde,” Phanar said, interrupting and raising his hand palm-outward in apology. “Are you saying that, until tonight, Tyr Kayn resided in your city?”
The champion nodded, staring at him.
“Then until this matter is settled, we too shall reside here,” the warrior decreed. “It is our path – it is Anathta’s path,” he looked at his sister solemnly, “to fight these creatures, wherever they are to be found. As to our story… Let us wait until we are with your friends. It shall be long in the telling. We will not want to tell it twice.”
“Speak for yourself,” Ibbalat said with a smile. “Best story of my life. I’ll be telling it till I’m ninety.”
He’d been practising showing the encounter with his glamours, but he was still having trouble erasing the ridiculous amount of treasure from the illusory lair – the existence of the Ord’s hoard was just too ingrained in his mind, apparently.
“Let us hope… that this is the case.”
“What’s the matter?” Kani asked, putting her hand on his arm.
Phanar withdrew with his beloved to the starboard rail, leaving Ibb and Ana at the prow to regale Feychilde with the highlights of the fight.
“What is it?” she asked again once they weren’t going to be overheard.
The concern in her voice touched him, and he kissed her head as he drew her into his arms.
“It is nothing.”
“Phanar…”
“It is… only a small thing.”
“Tell me. Speak to me, Phanar…”
He drew a deep breath.
“I… I fear we will never be there – in the future I have always hoped for, for us… I fear we will be fighting until the day we die. I fear we…” He swallowed and it was like he choked down a rock, hurting his throat and the top of his chest. “I fear we will not die together, and I will live on without you – or die, knowing you must live, live without me –“
She tilted her chin up, bringing her face to his, and kissed his lips deeply.
“Let the darkness swallow me,” she said softly when she broke away, her eyes still closed. “I offer it all up, myself, freely. I lift my voice to the night and it is the light that sweeps down over me. The light, Phanar. Do you know what it tells me?”
He shook his head. He didn’t understand.
“That we have to surrender, without shame. There’s no fighting fate, my dear one. That day, in his lair… I gave up. I told myself I wouldn’t, that I’d stay strong, but when my mace broke it brought it all home, you know. We were going to die… or worse…”
“Kani –”
She tossed her head and continued: “So I communed again. I spoke with my goddess. I didn’t understand. How could I die, without knowing what it was to be in your arms? Then the Maiden – she showed me how I would live. How we could win. There was just one price.”
He frowned. “Price?”
She smiled in answer. “I had to accept my destiny, conquer my fears. My vows – I had to promise to break them.”
“Break them? But, your power –”
“I still possess it, yes.” The cleric blinked, and suddenly her eyes flashed amber for a second. “What we’re taught doesn’t always correlate exactly to the truth. The Maiden… She’s less interested in chastity than she is… well…”
“Love?” he guessed.
She just smiled again. “I didn’t understand my vows, not until I knew I had to break them… It doesn’t matter. What’s important is, sometimes we get what we want when we least expect it.” She regarded him, staring into his eyes for long seconds. “Do you really think you would be happy? Giving up this life, becoming… what would you even want to do?”
“I could train others… The adventurers of tomorrow…”
Even as he said it, he knew it sounded, to use Ana’s term, ‘lame’.
“And how long would that last? Your favourite pupil gets in danger – do you save them? There’s a raid on a nearby village – do you back them up? You hear of a powerful magical item in a nearby crypt – do you leave it for the local darkmages to find? If –”
“I understand.” He folded her more-tightly into his arms. “I… Yes. You are right, of course. You are always right.”
“Can I get that in writing?”
“You have been spending too much time with my sister…”
“We’ve grown a little closer,” Kani agreed, smile splitting into a grin.
She leaned in to him, tightening her own embrace about his chest, and he put his chin on her head, as though to pull her into himself.
They stood there, looking out over the darkness of the sea as, behind them, they drew ever-closer to the shoreline.
“The Maiden had just one stipulation,” Kani murmured.
“Oh?”
“Did I forget to mention? You’re going to have to return my ring – or get me a new one.”
He took a few seconds, processing her words, then breathed, “Will you marry me, Kanthyre Vael?”
“Haven’t you been listening? It’s my fate,” she replied nonchalantly, shrugging. “It’s not like I’ve got a choice.”
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