QUARTZ 9.4: WYRMDEATH
“So it is you seek to mine your own foundation in your desperate thirst after power. Will your greed know no bounds? Taking from the walls is not enough for you! I hope the jewels you unearth make for fine points of pride, joy enough to refill your excavated soul.”
– from the Mortiforic Creed
“He went that way!”
The illusion-piercing vision bestowed upon me by my goblin eldritch wasn’t anything like that granted by my former fairy, and it had probably been augmented in unknown ways by my brother and sister despite my instructions. I should’ve spent more time training myself in its use. As it was, I currently had no way to discern between them as the immense dracolich became two immense dracoliches, one of them coiling into an attack-posture, the other plunging into the wall of the cavern. The paladins had done some good before they perished – both of the dragon’s mirror images looked to be in a right state, half of his cadaver-flesh hanging off the bone in glistening slices.
The dichotomy in his appearance was less a conundrum than a boon. I found myself instinctively disbelieving in both. I very much doubted an illusion was going to overcome my willpower and harm me during this particular confrontation.
Still – I knew which one prudence would have me tackle first, even without the dwarf’s directions.
I chased my prey straight into the stone wall, the wizard-flight granting me twice the dragon’s speed, at least until I made contact with the stone. But even then the passage through the earth made little difference – my wraith-state ensured I retained maximum velocity as I slid face-first into the rock.
My shields’ edges touched his, ranging out ahead of me through the earth. The forces felt damned real.
In fleeing me, he produced a change in me that I doubted he’d expected.
Confidence.
Not that I thought I was suddenly going to win. But even this, this little victory – he took me seriously, he took for me for a threat – this was enough to sustain me. Remind me what it was to be the archmage, the champion. How it felt, to have some of the most potent creatures ever to exist, fearing you.
I was blind here, submerged in the dense strata of stone surrounding the cavern, plunging horizontally with him ever-deeper into the solid ground. Cracks were few and far between, offering no glimpse of my enemy. Yet he was blind too. I wasn’t out of my element; I knew what I was doing. Sure, I had to hold my breath; I very much doubted my enemy needed to breathe at all, but I could hold my breath for minutes like this, I knew, even if the cracks filled with stale air were to reduce in frequency. And yes, I was slower to work the shields, slower than ever before. But their strength –
I chewed through Malas’s force-fields, hot on his tail, and it was like I was whisking the magenta energies, peeling the shields away one by one and dispersing them.
He changed his trajectory, angling downwards, perhaps not hoping to lose me, but to make me lose at least some of my momentum in the turn.
It was a foolish manoeuvre. He had to slow to adjust his own course into a descent. He had some kind of vampire-speed, but it was nowhere near enough – even before he completed the dip, my satyr-reflexes were swelling. I fixed tendril-tips to his core shielding, the stuff that would never break. And I shot past him, laying the tendrils of force over that impermeable shell.
The contact was like fire, burning up my imaginary arm, filling my stump and mind with roaring pain. I had to stifle myself to stop the fatal laughter threatening to empty my lungs, understanding what this meant. I could shift his move to my advantage, so long as I was careful.
As he moved downwards, he pulled me with him. I was attached to him now. Even better, I maintained my speed.
I wrapped around him like a kid’s swing wrapping around the bar.
When I came to a dead stop, I dragged him about, I bringing him wheeling past me against his will in a wide arc.
I withdrew the tendrils as I hurled him straight back the way we came.
Emerging into the cavern near its floor, the blue phosphorescence of the ceilings bright enough to my eye, I caught sight of the tremendous prince of dragons, somersaulting head over tail. I let the laughter out, pursuing eagerly. The illusion of him swiped at me as I passed by; I let the talons rip right through me, ignoring them. It was more than obvious which of them was real.
“So now you come for revenge!” Malas howled, finally mastering himself and coming to a stop near the ceiling. “Do not think you are serving your own ends. It is me! It is all me!”
“You asked me about the heart of the champion. And you said you didn’t have a way to teach me. But I think your afterthought paid off.” I slowed my pursuit, and gestured to the stump, the free-flowing tendrils he too could surely see. “You were right. Whatever I am now, you helped shape me. Revenge? Since when do you call this revenge? If a man crafts a sword and in his haste to sharpen it slices his hand, will we call it a crime? No, no. I suppose… I suppose I came to thank you.”
The surprise in the dracolich’s gaze was brief, the eyes quickly narrowing once more to the brutal, cunning glare – but it happened. He was too gargantuan to mask the nuances of his expression without magical aid.
“Thank me?”
And he couldn’t disguise it, the naked greed in his voice when he thought there was a chance I might become his creature.
“You know.” I sent a simple wave of intention down at the force-lines and they lengthened. “Metaphorically. Show you my appreciation.” I grinned up at him, and now my barbs flexed and tensed of their own accord, both whip and spear, interchangeable. “Tell me. What do you call it when, in his haste to sharpen it, he stumbles and opens his throat on its edge? Was the sword stupid, or the guy rolling around with his head half-cut off?”
He didn’t need to be told twice. If he was faking his fear, he was damned good at it. He had none of the mettle of the champion. He flapped his wings, re-entering a wraith-state, propelling himself away from me again. The motion was swift and sharp, definitely intended for escape.
“Now!” hissed the twins from their invisible sanctuary in the corner. “Lift!“
I reached out with my force-tendrils, but it was going to be too late. He was going to withdraw into the ceiling – he wasn’t really stupid, he knew where his advantages lay –
But not the ceiling.
It wasn’t me the twins had been talking to.
The rock itself shuddered and withdrew, lifting away from him, and he couldn’t abrogate the difference in speed between us by plunging into it. I reached him in time, and latched on to his impenetrable inner shields with my sorcerous whips.
“Thanks, Orcan,” I grunted mentally.
“Hmph,” was all he said in reply, still clearly focussing on the groaning rock all around us. He wouldn’t be able to hold it for long.
I smiled all the same, reminded for a heartbeat of Dustbringer.
For few moments Malas pulled me up towards the ever-rising roof with him; then I rooted myself in place with every pound of pressure the wizard-flight could bring to bear, and tightened the tendrils.
We both froze.
The lines of blue energy had wound around the magenta egg protecting him, like decorative swirls about a glow-globe, a delicate-looking yet unbreakable net. Then, knowing just how this was going to feel, I retracted the tendrils.
Grinning through the crackling, burning sensation in my mind, I watched as the enormous dragon was yanked to heel.
“Well-leashed!” I cried, feeling the sweat beginning to drip down my hairline, despite the incorporeal substance I’d become. “Look, I don’t know why you’re trying to leave, but it’s very rude. I thought you’d be proud of me. An extended sword metaphor, and it wasn’t even a dirty joke!”
“You’re pulling the wrong levers there, Kas.”
I know! I’m trying.
Inch by inch, foot by foot, I bound him in place.
“You fool!” Malas roared, flailing uselessly with his great wings. “You cannot slay me now! Ah, no honour is there to be found in you! I see now that my grand-sire chose wrong. You are –”
“Who cares about destiny?” I growled back, reeling him in. The fake dracolich on the floor had been joined by two more, and the trio were battering at me without pause or point. “Look at you – look at the child’s tricks you try on me! It is you who has forgotten how to fight, not I, grandfather.”
“You know nothing, nothing about who I am, the things I’ve done! I could crush you in an instant if I dared –”
“You don’t understand the heart of a champion and you never did. This is it! Ah-ha-haaaah! You dare speak to me of honour, you who gassed the children in the street! Look me in the eye you piece of drop and think about how much fun it’s going to be when your saggy ass belongs to a demon-lord for all eternity. You know where you’re going, don’t you?”
That did it. Finally, that did it.
He faced me and screamed. Not in fear, but rage. He angled his wings and descended towards me of his own volition, my tendrils going slack on his shields as he plummeted.
Now. He let the illusions fall away, even exited the wraith-state.
Now, he was going to fight.
* * *
The first truth Malas had to face: he had no weapons strong enough to harm me.
He tried it all in the first ten seconds. Any time he tried to form blades of force on the edges of his shields, the threads of my net would simply swirl about the surface of the purple sphere and bite clean through them at the base, releasing the spikes into the air to drift like snipped-off chunks of hair. I danced about him, controlling his every move, and against the eldritch attacks he could muster my own star-reinforced shapes were no less impenetrable than his own. A barrage of Infernum-red arrows formed before his chest and came hurtling at me, only to disappear in clouds of orange sparks as they collided with my azure walls. The great ethereal paw of the Queen of Moths extended, and shattered into a thousand pieces of green glass when I reached out a blade to greet it. The black smoke of a dracolich poured from his maw with reckless abandon, yet my shields pushed the dense, noxious fog aside, not one errant whiff of its lethal odours reaching my nostrils before Orcan silently drew it away into hidden vents.
That was when he busted out the eldritches. There was nothing stopping him from summoning piles of his minions on top of my head, so that was just what he tried to do, making a valiant attempt to dislodge me from my mid-air perch, regain some of his freedom… flee me again…
Nothing stopping him, until I turned a sliver of my attention to the portals opening above me. Those dimensional doors too far-flung for me to shut dribbled monsters onto me, but the nearest ones shivered and sealed themselves when exposed to my scrutiny. His sloppiness was showing. A flurry of force-blades served to disintegrate the lesser eldritches he spewed forth through his gates, and an array of carefully-placed walls would divert the greater ones, whose special strengths or sheer physical mass I couldn’t afford to slip through the net –
He managed to distract me.
He moved an inch before I realised he’d succeeded – I threw up a shield to block five amethyst lances that came shooting from his talons – I brought up the shape to divert the catastrophe of a full-grown bintaborax bearing down at me – I drew tight on the leash, panting, forcing him to be still –
But that was the second truth he had to face: I too had back-up. Back-up with the ingenuity of my very scary siblings. I could hear them in the background of my mind, doing their best to keep me appraised of their plans without actually stealing my attention. It was a delicate line to walk, but, if anyone could walk it, it was them.
Malas’s clouds of imps floated up into the shadows to lay down ranged fire on me, but they found themselves enveloped in the webs of some extremely hostile giant spiders. My own imps entered the fray, and the first thing Pinktongue chose to do was teleport up to the ceiling – I spotted him casually assassinating those of his kin the spiders hadn’t yet gotten to devour, baking their heads in hell-fire from his hands.
Soon a variety of enlarged subterranean insects were showering down on my foe, doing to him exactly what he’d tried to do to me. And his own enormous nature hardly helped him – the physics didn’t change, not in Materium at least. Apparently if he had access to size-changing eldritches, he hadn’t joined with them, or didn’t think to shrink. His shield was huge, and therefore presented an easy target. Contact with his barriers would spell the death of Kirid’s augmented bugs, but before they perished to his blades the pressure of their malice would work to weaken him. Tremendous mites fell like black hail, skittering about and biting at the magenta air as soon as they landed. Bloated worms infused with the radiance of the ceilings squirmed across his shields, steaming blue clouds as they rolled –
It amused me to see how, when those worm-beasties were cut in two, they did not die, but only multiplied, living long-enough for Greenheart’s healing power or their own native regenerative properties to restore them. The dracolich was forced to redouble his efforts to exterminate them, and check his work over after each pass. It might tire him, and it would certainly frustrate him.
Death by a thousand cuts. Defeat by a thousand attacks. It was the only way, with a sorcerer of his calibre. Wear down the shields. Break through, bit by bit.
And it was not, of course, just Kirid Oanor who came to my aid. Arch-wizardry was something to behold. It’d been a long time since I’d last witnessed the plumes of fierce orange-gold fire dancing in the darkness, erupting into magma, fire careening in sheets and ribbons from every point of contact, every withered husk of a body. Malas had brought through a pair of zombie-dragons almost immediately upon commencement of the battle, but he seemed to give up on the idea once my wizard lit them up like bonfires. Orcan was even using his power to shape elementals, binding the most powerful eldritches in stone, at least long enough for my own hit-squad of greater demons to deal with.
In this, however, Orcan enjoyed only mixed results. The enemy bintaborax were, of course, proving incredibly troublesome, smashing through the wizard’s rocky servitors with ease. Mrs. Cuddlesticks had taken a hammer-blow to the chin from one of her filthy dracolich-serving cousins, rotating her head a hundred and eighty degrees – this hadn’t stopped her from getting involved in the action, but I hoped it was something that would fix itself soon. Khikiriaz was duelling a whole coven of vampires; several were already impaled on the deadly tips of his antlers, limbs and torsos well-skewered by the morass of black horn. This didn’t stop them trying to wriggle free, of course, and it seemed to hamper the ikistadreng in his dealings with their swift-moving fellows.
Once the battle was fully joined, we both started piling our reserves on top, looking for an advantage. When Mal Malas deposited a few dozen gaumgalamar on the floor, I buried them in hundreds of wight-like elf-zombies. When he dropped a host of spectres on my demon hit-squad, I backed them up with the elf-ghosts.
Before the dracolich could react to my deployment of extremely-killy undead, I whipped around Malas, adjusting his position as a molten river came cascading towards his forces. I was careful not to completely eclipse the lava flow, but I brought his shields into the stream all the same, letting the fire-spell glance off his barriers. It damaged his defences, and most of it still sprayed down over his troops, melting through nethernal bone and infernal scale with equal, scarily-rapid effectiveness. He tried his best to catch the lava, scoop it away with his magenta shapes, but it was starting to prove too much for him. His first attempt, he successfully splashed it on my wights, wiping a score or so of them out. His second, he failed and the orange, almost-gelatinous substance spattered all over a bunch of his obbolomin. Their animal-like screams would have been chilling, mortifying in any other context – but here and now? Here and now, the agonised dirge of their combined death-song merely filled me with glee.
I was distracted, repositioning my net – I almost missed when he sent a series of flaming green skulls blasting into my shields, rocking me, forcing me to painstakingly rebuild –
His gambit worked, and I did miss as he opened portals above me again. I felt the impact like a shower of hail, a number of small intrusions, tiny demons peppering the upper sections of my shield and clinging there.
Too late, I recognised what they were.
“Copycat,” I muttered.
Not one, not two, but ten or more yithandreng were poised atop me.
“Klerez! Thanatar!” Malas shrieked before I could act to dislodge his fiends.
‘Grow! Destroy!’
No creativity at all. He read my memories, and he didn’t even understand how to use a size-changer correctly.
They swelled to near-full mass in less than a second, becoming long, many-legged snakes, claws scratching at my burning shields. I dropped under their weight, but I didn’t release their master, dragging Malas down with me.
He’s getting desperate, I observed as I descended aggressively. If he thought a trick like this would work… Perhaps he thought I’d have to release him in order to escape this trap. How amusing.
I used the wizard-flight to propel myself, and went down into the ground, smashing the yithandreng into the rock.
Silent darkness blanketed me for an instant as I submerged myself in the cool earth.
Let’s give him what he really wants.
I reversed direction, ascending swiftly, emerging back into the cavern amidst a gang of dazed-looking yithandreng being dog-piled by ghosts. As I went I shortened my whip-tendrils, still approaching the dracolich, bringing us together despite his attempts to resist, pull away.
He had opened a portal above him, an inky darkness leading to Nethernum’s dank underworld. But nothing was coming through this gateway to aid him. No – it was an escape-route. One he wasn’t going to get chance to use.
What a pity.
His reticence to commit to the combat we’d engaged in only fuelled the fire in me, and I yanked the lines with renewed purpose, reeling him in to meet me as I rose.
We were about to collide, and only the gods knew what would result from that meeting.
Coming back up from the cavern floor, I was afforded a brief glimpse of the battle. My forces were losing. Malas had centuries’ worth of eldritches, a veritable army of undead and demons, even some fey critters in the mix. I had fewer. My dark-elven ghosts were formidable, and they slew three for every one they lost, but lich-fire proved capable of destroying them, and each loss rang out in my mind. Orcan was still doing his best to reinforce the battle-lines, drawing dozens of elementals out of the walls even as he laid down defensive strikes, but it wasn’t going to be enough. Khikiriaz was on his own, cut off from support, surrounded by the vampires. His red ikistadreng-essence was leaking out into the air from dozens of savage wounds criss-crossing his blurry flesh.
I looked back up at my enemy as we crashed together. The undead draconic visage was locked into a grin like mine.
But was my smile as wretched?
Shields contacted, and exploded.
I passed into him, carried on a wave of velocity ignorant of sorcerous forces. I passed into him, through him, and he passed through me.
There was an instant, before I emerged on the other side, in which I sensed the eldritches in him. I couldn’t get a firm grasp on them – their shapes were amorphous, borders disguised by virtue of the number of them. Twelve or thirteen, at least.
Disguised not just by their number. Their host, too. It was so easy to forget, what with him being an arch-sorcerer in his own right, that Mal Malas was himself an eldritch. He had sacrificed something to gain power, and that sacrifice had left him empty, vulnerable inside.
Before I exited on the other side of him, I whispered it in Netheric, from one insubstantial substance to another.
“Be mine.”
And I felt the way his own eldritch-essence lurched, the entirety of his consciousness swaying in response.
He couldn’t submit… or could he?
Cackling, I streamed free of his undead flesh, ripping my tendrils loose after me.
Carrying at least five of his joined entities along for the ride.
I could hear the twins cheering telepathically. Malas was descending, still caught in the pull of my downwards yank, but now he plummeted faster than before. When he spread his battered wings and spun about, he caught the air easily, with the suddenness of real motion, and it was then I realised – he was no longer able to switch back to a wraith-state.
One of the screaming eldritches trapped in the barbs of my whips was the ghost of a dragon, a young drake by the looks of things, much smaller than its master…
Even without watching, I could sense the way my five captives were dying. The azure tendrils had mostly affixed themselves to the extremities of Malas’s joined entities – ankles, wrists, tails – not their throats, from what I could tell. Yet as I cast my mind over their patterns, I could see that they were being burned up from the inside all the same, throbbing with incandescent blue light, clearer and keener than the smoky purples of their substances. It would only be a matter of seconds before the doomed entities were ashes, and my whips would be free to use as weapons once more.
Malas, for his part, finally seemed to realise what had happened. I came to a halt above him, hearing the twins crowing in success in the back of my mind, and then I swiftly reversed direction, plunging back down at his long-horned, black-crowned head. Even as I moved back at him, plummeting like a meteor trailing a chorus of wailing monsters, I saw him casting about blankly. He was searching his regiments of minions for suitable replacements, something to fill the inner void I’d created in his stable of bound slaves. His shields stuttered back into place, looking weaker than ever before, just in time to protect him from a group of my elven spirits that went surging up through the air at him.
Finally getting a good aerial view of the confrontation, I suddenly realised why Malas had spent so long surveying the scene, why he had thought to flee – what had changed down there. The twins’ jubilation was made plain. A full third of Malas’s forces had stopped acting. Not his demons, no, but over half his nethernal slaves. Ghouls cowered in their masses. Khikiriaz was snickering as he pounded his vampiric prey into mush, moving from one dazed blood-sucker to the next and goring them without meeting a whit of resistance.
I’d been lying to myself again, hadn’t I? I’d made it all more complicated than it had any right to be. I undermined myself, again and again, and it was all because I was afraid to face the truth of my power.
It was me who thought of his inner shields as impenetrable. It was me who thought the only way in was death by a thousand cuts. But I’d been wrong. I’d thrown my force into his and maybe we both won. Maybe we both lost. Both shields had been shattered. But it had been his eldritches destroyed in the aftermath, not mine.
Maybe it was just that I was used to this kind of combat. I’d been weaned on it, even before I was a sorcerer. Not the sitting on your backside kind of fighting. The in your face, twisting and turning away from death kind. I’d always been the same. Shields were only ever a form of reassurance. A way of pretending to myself that the knife would never touch my face again. I’d never have to stand there paralysed while I was hurt, humiliated. Such a beautiful lie – yet a lie nonetheless.
Shields were a crutch.
I let go the crutch. This time when we met, I didn’t shape the shields – only a single spear. Not protruding from any protective shape. Not like anything I’d seen in the books.
Just me. I formed it and fixed it by pure will.
I heard the twins’ simultaneous gasp in my mind, but they wouldn’t stop me now. They understood. They had to trust me.
I am the shield… and I am the weapon, and the weapon is me. I can’t be used by anyone else, but to make it true I have to do it. Accept it.
I have to…
I must wield myself.
I saw it in the bottomless purple eyes when we collided again – he knew it too.
It was over.
The lance of force I thrust out before me penetrated the magenta sphere as though the shape had fewer defensive properties than a gremlin’s illusion. In a torrent of shield-shards, I pierced him right through, neck to belly.
He took the blow, merely growling in response in spite of the wound’s severity – and the moment I penetrated his barrier he clutched at me. The talons riddled with amethyst grooves, awash in their own nethernal magic, sank effortlessly into my wraith-flesh.
But now I wore an ascended ancient. Now I had the death-touch, the shadow-transfer, the same as him. He couldn’t wound me that way.
My body pulsed with its own amethyst light as he punctured me, and he gasped for what had to be the first time in centuries, the instincts of living flesh kicking in as agony laced him. He kicked and bucked, trying to writhe free.
I sank my new fingers, the fingers he had bestowed upon me, inside the hulking dead cavity of his chest, clutching at him, searing him with the true power of an arch-sorcerer.
Materium’s trustworthy, unwavering blue fire.
Together we crashed to the ground, crushing an untold number of corporeal eldritches beneath us. I was enveloped within the morass of wet, sliding scales and dry, stone-like meat that was the dracolich’s material frame. Were it not for the twins’ ability to read my mind and comprehend the truth of the situation, I had little doubt my Telese allies would’ve been despairing at the sight. As it was, I heard them reassuring Kirid and Orcan. I supposed the increasingly-desperate sounds the dracolich was making might’ve given it away.
Inside him, I couldn’t see, couldn’t really hear. But I knew my task. It was deliciously simple.
I tore him to bits.
Mal Malas was incapable of remaining aloof and silent now. The ancient tongue wreaked vengeance on the air, his once-noble, authoritative voice reduced to an ear-splitting warble that reached me in bursts. That was the only vengeance he could take, now. The only thing left here he could defeat was the silence, the only thing he could do to harm us:
Scream at us.
The banshee in him was strong, its magic striking my body despite the twins’ protections and my own. I shook and shuddered – but only briefly. The banshee would die, soon enough.
I slipped through the layers of scale and bone, filtering the lens of my sorcerer’s-eye so that I could adapt my new weaponry’s dimensional vector as I moved. With a little effort I dragged tons of his outer layers with me into the empty vaulted hall where his heart should’ve been hidden, caving in his torso, flooding it with slick scales.
I could feel him in here with me, in the soft purple radiance of his bones. The spirit. The soul. The ghost which would be all that was left of him once we were done here.
He was a lich, an archlich. I couldn’t kill him, not anymore than I could kill anyone. He would move on to Nethernum, his power depleted. But he would remain, in one form or another. His soul was outside my hands. I supposed chance or fate, or perhaps the gods themselves, would determine the hour of his coalescence.
Let it be millennia hence.
As I slid through his caved-in cavities I fixed tendrils to the pillar-like rib-bones of his internal structure. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a vampire that had been joined with him burst free of a wall of cold flesh, leaping at me. What perk let his vampiric brood operate, functioning fully in the daylight, I couldn’t even begin to imagine.
I simply added the strange vampire to one of the tendrils, looping the whip about its throat so that when I set forth once more, it would be decapitated. More merciful, I fancied, than letting it hang about to be incinerated. The vampire apparently didn’t think too much of the idea, snarling and grasping for me, straining against the smoking blue rope wrapped around its neck. I did my best to be polite – I even gave it a wave as I exited the hollow inside the dragon.
When I finally slid free of him, not only did I leave everything inside him in ruins – I drew out and slew all the other remaining eldritches trapped inside him. A frightened thastubabil and an offended-looking vamelgarit bearing an amethyst bow instead of a sword. A tiny moss-imp, and a gnomish zombie, barely any taller than the demonoid, in an incredible state of decay. The banshee, long grey hair snaking out almost as though she were descending through water. A blind rhimbelkina, hands in chains. And, of course, a distended goblin whose acquaintance I’d made before.
All of them bubbled and boiled away in the knots of my new tools.
Seeing the Queen of Moths melted down to a pile of blubber made me feel very good indeed. I’d expose Blofm to the memory of it later, if she fancied. I had the impression there’d never been much love lost in that sovereign-subject relationship.
At last, it was just him. His eldritches were dead or gone, and I sent mine home group by group – Mrs. Cuddlesticks was still facing the wrong way, but was otherwise unharmed, at least as far as I could tell. I floated shieldless and entirely unconcerned above the dragon, observing my foe.
Here he was. My captor. My mutilator. A great wyrm, mighty in both sinew and sorcery. A force to be reckoned with, flapping with tattered wings straight out of the pages of story-books and myths.
Lying curled up and broken at my feet. No longer able to scream, nor move. The kind of destruction I’d wrought on him would surely take hours to heal, even for one whose essence was now bound into the shape of a lich. I could see sliced scales, slowly re-knitting.
It was nothing like enough.
“Tell me,” I said, swooping down over his head. “What –”
He released a trail of black smoke from between the heavy, dead lips – a meagre amount, really.
I deliberately dropped into it, sucked it in and breathed it back at him.
“What is the heart of the slave?” I continued once the smoke cleared. “What really made you want me to chase you down like this? I must tell you, I had a bloody good look for it, in there. You seem to be missing a part, though. If you were mine, I’d return you.”
The lip drew back again slowly, but he wasn’t going to try enveloping me in the paltry breath-weapon again.
He just smiled weakly, a few savage yellow teeth glistening there in the corner of his mouth.
“I’d Return me too,” he whispered gloatingly, a deep, almost unintelligible rumble. “Don’t worry. We’ll meet again.”
His eyes closed, but the smile remained on his reptilian face, making him look oddly peaceful in defeat.
“Can I chop off his head, please?”
The question came in a quiet, gruff voice.
I looked over at the armour-clad dwarf stepping out of the shadows between two boulders. He was half-way up the wall of the cavern, a ways over my head, and, if he’d kept himself out of the battle, it wasn’t obvious from the grime on his dark breastplate and greaves – nor from the weary look in his eyes.
“He okay?” I asked inwardly.
“He… is Durgil. A former paladin of Kultemeren. Malas made him speak. He… he no longer trusts the truth. False visions, sent by the dragon, proved the undoing of his whole chapter. They… wow.”
“Wow?”
“They fought hard, Kas. He feels lost. Like he belongs to the darkness now. But we need to get answers out of Malas first. We might not be able to control an undead dragon – or – no, we probably can’t control him… But we can read his surface thoughts, almost for sure.”
I took in the short, stout paladin. Ex-paladin. The warped hauberk devoid of light, of meaning. The tainted sword upon which he so-heavily leaned.
He’s like the rest of us. He broke his vow. He, too, knows what it is to have failed.
“Durgil? I almost feel like I recognise you from somewhere.”
He was silent a moment, then said tersely, “Feychilde.”
“You know me?” I asked.
“We fought together. The Battle of Roseoak. And… Let us say, you have no imitators.”
“Now you’re just trying to make me blush.”
“He didn’t mean it favourably…”
I ignored my telepathic irritants.
“I would very much appreciate the opportunity,” the dwarf pressed, his eyes fixed on the quiescent dracolich beneath me.
“Give us a minute,” I replied, gesturing. “You’ll get your chance.”
Where I pointed, a platform of stone swooped down into view, my brother and sister at the front with the wizard and druid standing right behind them. All four of them were focussed on the near-corpse lying motionless and mountainous beneath me. Orcan and Kirid were wide-eyed, their fingers white on the stony rail ringing the floating platform. I could see the mixture of nervousness and exultation on both of their faces. They had taken an important step here – it would build their confidence, to know that they could really contribute to such a daunting task: the slaughter of a dragon.
And not just any dragon. Prince Deathwyrm himself. It was likely that, by his own accounting at least, Mal Malas had been the most formidable dragon in the whole dimension.
But as the older archmages were drinking in the spectacle, finally getting to see Mal Malas close up, the twins were studying the dracolich. They had little wonder in their expressions; they looked pensive.
“Get rid of his crown.”
When my brother and sister spoke in unison, I happened to be glancing in Durgil’s direction. I saw the way he stared at them for a moment, then shrugged away his curiosity.
Feeling satisfied the dwarf wasn’t about to start causing a scene, I did as my brother and sister requested, setting my boots down on the fallen dragon’s scalp. Standing between the great tree-sized horns, I bent to place my fingers beneath the rim of the cold stone object atop the dragon’s head, and drew liberally on my satyr-strength to lift it.
I was too weak. Had I my right arm, perhaps matters would’ve been different, but to wish was to dream. My footholds weren’t great on the sliding scalp layers, and I braced myself with the wizard-flight to no avail. The force-tendrils were useless for this task, slipping clean through the glossy, jet-black crown, entirely failing to interact with whatever spells it contained. I might as well have tried to swing one of the chains in Firenight Square around my head.
I could get the bintaborax to hurl it to the ground, I mused. Maybe break it…
I wasn’t tired, but my sorcerous muscles were sore after such exertions. I’d find any excuse to avoid opening any more gateways right now if I could. After a brief moment of consternation, I opted to simply take part of the crown into the wraith-state with me. I’d never tried something like this before, but there was no reason to believe it wouldn’t work. The massive jagged ring of stone… the crown… was a garment. It had been designed to be worn, borne. That was the only limiting factor the books talked about. Furthermore, it was clear Malas himself had readily taken it in and out of wraith-states.
Now that I had it right under my nose, I could peer through its substructure. Runes of concealment were to be found everywhere, and the lack of order to the spell-work was actually commendable, practical, in this particular instance. The chaotic nature of the ensorcellment did a great job of hiding the fact it was even ensorcelled at all. Mekesta’s glyphs were scratched all about its sorcerous interior, and those letters were written in ruby-red blood-ink, their author scratching the letters with red nails, not purple claws. This thing was demon-forged –
“Just do it!” the twins cried.
I shrugged and bent again, gripping the crown tight. As I put my power out into the material, I locked myself in place with the wizard-flight once more, and closed my eyes.
Stop looking at it as a massive jagged ring of stone. Start looking on it as a crown. Something I can just lift and toss on the ground.
Perhaps the fall will smash it…
I unconsciously became comfortable with the idea, and then the most miraculous thing happened: the pressure between my straining muscles and the immovable object suddenly lifted off, the left arm rising as if of its own accord. I opened my eyes, preparing to witness the gargantuan black crown slide off his head –
But the whole crown had been affected, not just the section where I touched it. It wasn’t sliding anywhere – I was lifting the entire thing aloft, imbuing it with borrowed wraithiness.
And then it shrank, screaming.
A whirlpool of pure shadow appeared on the air, seemingly within the material, consuming it, yet it was within me – we shared one essence, and as I held in my hand a huge coil of jet-black wind, that wind was part of me. It was swiftly condensed down, its dimensions being slurped away into nowhere.
In less than a heartbeat, I held a circlet fit for the head of a mortal man.
“I suppose, rather than using an eldritch essence to shrink something that big…” I brought it down in front of my face, turning it over in my insubstantial hands, heedless of the sharp points. “It’d be easier to just imbue it with its own size-changing spells?”
The twins gasped together.
“What is it?” I asked, looking back up.
“Cut off his head!” they wailed.
Malas’s eyes flashed open, and in a final gambit, now that he was robbed of his joined eldritches, he tried to open another portal to Nethernum, to wrap himself in it and disappear.
He had to know I could dissipate the gateway more easily than he could build it – it took more energy, but it was faster – they were such fragile things, and he needed one of such incredible surface-area, especially now that he’d been robbed of his size-changers –
But before either of us could enact our sorcerous intentions, the former paladin above us cried out joyfully, and did as he’d been told.
The dwarf didn’t just leap into action – in spite of his stocky frame and heavy armour, he flipped like an acrobat as he sprang down at the dracolich’s neck, bringing his dark sword about in a thousand-degree arc.
I could see nothing overtly magical about the blade, and it was of course far too short to actually behead Mal Malas with a single blow. It would be like trying to decapitate a cow with a dinner-knife, behead a man with a needle.
And yet.
Durgil’s sword seemed to meet no resistance, finding the precise knot that held the flesh together, like the perfect stroke with a chisel through a block of wood, carving the dracolich’s head clean off his body.
I floated clear as the parted mounds of dead flesh fell aside, the head toppling, the severed neck retracting slightly with the release of tension. The vast thing toppled and rolled somewhat before finally coming to a stop in the centre of the cavern-basin.
Now at last I could let Nethernum take its fill.
The remnants of Mal Malas’s spirit came leaking out into the void between two sections of his corpse, purple-grey gobbets of energy desperately trying and failing to take draconic form. One discernible wing rose up from the seething mass of power, then fell back into the glob of ghostliness.
Liches of all forms would regenerate from as little as dust, if the spirit could cling to Materium. He would seek to run and hide, then return in time to feed his corpse energy, little by little reawakening its undead musculature, the reanimation spells crudely stitching his wounds, reattaching body-parts…
There were rituals to prevent it, but I had a blunter tool at my disposal.
I opened a burning amethyst archway, then broadened it with brute strength, gesturing with the crown still held lightly in my fingers.
The spirit of Malas tried to shrink away but he hadn’t even started to gain control of the metamorphosis yet – there was nothing he could do but amorphously cringe as a shrill shadow-wind only I could see and hear came down, bearing the residual shreds of the dracolich off into the farthest-flung corners of the dark dimension.
“The… the truth!…“
His soul’s final, faint whisper was for my ears only. I smiled, with only a trace of regret in me.
Such knowledge. Such power. All of it, wasted on hate.
Once the spirit was gone, I found Durgil there, crouched in the putrid valley between the bloodless boulders of dragon-meat.
“Nice hit! You alright there?” I called down to him.
It looked as though he was inspecting his sword. Did he think he’d damaged it, or was he just as surprised as me at the effectiveness of his attack?
Well, it seems Kultemeren’s still on his side, with or without a paladin-y light-show… “Is he hurt?”
I aimed the last part at the twins’ mind, minds, whatever… When they didn’t reply immediately, I glanced up at them.
They were staring deep into one another’s eyes, lips parted as if frozen mid-word.
“Guys? Guys!” I soared over to them. “Are you okay? Why did you say to finish it?”
They broke their reverie, only to start quivering.
“Kas!” they moaned. “Kas, we have to go. The Incursion… he wanted you to arrive at nightfall, when it would already be too late, and you would… you would…”
A sheet of ice covered the lake of my thoughts. All currents halted.
“When?” I heard my voice saying. “What time will it start?”
“He thinks – thought – the storm hit this morning. It’s supposed to – it’s already happening!”
“Let’s go, then!” I roared, immediately pushing myself up towards the cavern ceiling.
But I moved alone.
“Orcan, refresh his spells! We’ll just slow you, Kas. You don’t need us. You’ve – you’ve got the crown, now…”
I felt it as the cushion of will-locked air surrounding me dropped away, deflating briefly, and then it came back, stronger, firmer than before. I was almost at the roof, and for a moment I halted, hesitated, looking down at the faces of my brother and sister, already distant, difficult to properly discern.
I moved my eyes, looking down at the gleaming black circlet in my hand.
Runes of hiding. Not just mere secrecy: confusion. A bewildering array of protections. Concealment on top of concealment until it was just a mess of lines, extending into the past and the future at oblique angles, the patterns almost indiscernible even this close-up…
Anti-divination…?
“Could it be?” I mumbled, then thought at them:
Is it safe?
“… No. But what is? We can fix you when you take it off.”
I – if I was going to do that I’d take… take the –
“For what it’s worth, yes, you could do with a rhimbelkina or two, from what it looks like they let you get away with. But even five rhimbelkina wouldn’t let you past Everseer, would they?”
I thought, somehow, of Zel.
I… But…
My reservations about joining with demons and donning the crown of Prince Deathwyrm were dwarfed by my concerns about abandoning Jaid and Jaroan this close to our destination. The last time I’d left them, I lost my arm, and we all almost died. The time before that, I was thrown in a cell, cast down into Zyger. I didn’t have a great track record in leaving them behind. And this time, more than ever before, I knew what kind of danger I was heading into. I had some vague sense of just how bad things could be, back home in Mund.
I saw their faces more clearly as they both craned their heads back to look up at me.
I knew it when they met my gaze.
“Back home in Mund.”
Together, the three of us shared it, the whole concept in a single flash.
Sticktown.
Mud Lane.
Mum and Dad’s apartment.
Our bedroom.
The sound of three separate pages in three separate books being turned simultaneously.
Somehow, through the vision, we were bound in that moment, conjoined in our need to know what happened next.
“Turn the page, brother. If one or two or even three of the main characters die, we’ll mourn them, and we’ll move on. You can’t change what’s inked on the next page by refusing to flip it.”
I looked down at Mal Malas’s remains, and I thought of Timesnatcher, and Tanra. Rathal, and Everseer.
You can if you know the authors.
I dropped Malas’s crown on my head, and entered the rock.
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