“But you must!” We went on testing one another’s will. I wrapped my chain around a protrusion in its constantly open mouth, making a sort of rein. Still, it did not obey and instead began swaying wildly in the sky. “Damn it…” My own fury began welling up in me, my neck became corded with strained muscles, and my brow furrow as my eyes lit up. The spirit of Fenris rose within me and I was a Fenrir once more.
“YOU WILL OBEY!” I roared, the sound reverberating all around me. Something about my roar, as well as my changed presence, made the creature, large as it was, quiver. I tugged on my chain gauntlet turned reins and made the creature fly to my right. “Steady,” I commanded and it obeyed. “Steady… you must have a name.” No reply came. “You are fond of saying ‘gaumoon.’ That is what you will be called.” It responded with an affirming bellow and I knew it was right.
We flew on a straight path and parted from the rest of his flock. “Up ahead, I see something… like… islands, but how can that be?” They were there in the sky, rock formations. They were simply floating there somehow. And it seemed as if they too were flying. Certainly, they did not stand still in the air. They were moving through the red clouds the way wood might float along a lazy river. “One Eye! Look! Land!”
“They... are rocks.” My companion surprised me and actually spoke.
“Land is land! Gaumoon, fly to that floating rock there, that skyrock!” I tugged on my chain, and Gaumoon turned his wings just enough that we veered in the direction of the nearest sky island.
We swooped down upon it. It must have been half a mile on its long end, and a quarter on its shorter. Its top was mostly flat, while from a distance I saw that its bottom was long jagged stone.
Save for a green moss that covered most of the skyrock’s surface, it was barren. A slurping sound rang in my ears. I turned to look and saw that a massive tongue was emerging from Gaumoon. With one scrape, it swept all the green moss around us and into its humongous maw.
“There. This voyage was at least good for one of us.” As I gazed around, I saw that far off in the distance, red clouds parted and there seemed to be some formations, perhaps more sky islands like this. I turned to One Eye standing still as stone. I stepped to him and tugged at his shoulder. “There are more of these sky islands out there. We should move out.”
We mounted atop Gaumoon and flew off the barren rock. Gaumoon swept in an arc that was far too graceful for such a large whale of a creature. We rose up in the red sky then veered to our right.
Red clouds swirled around us as we became lost in their haze.
Eventually, I saw the cluster of floating islands I had spotted earlier. “There Gaumoon, pull closer to them!” My mount obeyed and we descended so that we were sweeping just fifty feet from the surface of the nearest of these islands. There, that one!” I pointed to one where there were some kind of rock formations that might have been dwellings. We swooped down until Gaumoon’s vast belly hugged the smooth stone surface.
“Perhaps there are people here,” I said as I hopped down.
One Eye joined me. “Too quiet. No people.”
I walked on looking at those stone formations up ahead. “They might be weary of strangers.” As I neared them I saw that indeed these stone structures had to be dwellings of some kind. They were massive boulders that had been strewn together, some cut to be near flat surfaces. There were clear entrances that had been bored right through the rock. “I mean you no harm!” I called into the dark entrance of the cave-like structure. “I am Rothan! I must enter!” The eerie silence made me tense, and I loosed my massive ax from the leather thongs that bound it to my back. If felt good to grip the weapon—I felt like myself again.
I glanced back to One Eye and waved for him to move forward. I was glad to see that his combat instincts were not gone, as he had already unslung the Iron Cross that Tiloshar had given him, and a bolt was already notched in it.
My feet tread carefully on the grainy interior of the cave dwelling. Though my night vision was better than a human’s, it was not perfect. “Where is a torch when you need it?”
Suddenly a red light flared behind me. I whipped around my ax, ready to loose, only to see it was One Eye’s red mechanical eye lighting up like a candle. “I have light.”
“Right.” I nodded and went on treading into the dwelling. “Be ready for anything.”
As I went along I saw dried blood all along the stone floor. Then I saw the body. It was a woman, freshly dead. She had dark violet skin and white markings on her. I was not sure if they were tattoos or simply part of her skin—clearly, she was not human. She was clothed with only a fur loincloth, and on her back were two terrible wounds, nearly identical and right on her shoulder blades. Two bloody wounds with two bony blades sticking out of the them. “By the gods… what did they do to her?” I first thought she’d been impaled with the bone blades. As I looked closer I realized she had not been impaled at all. These bony protrusions were part of her body that had been cut off. “Wings. She had wings.”
One Eye only stared at the dead woman with no response.
We tread further into the dwelling and it split off into various tunnels that led to different chambers, some large, some small. There were signs of former life among these underground chambers. One room had a kind of stone oven carved out of the stone wall, and there was ash and various cooking implements, some stone, some wood. Some of the stone chambers had something akin to beds, though they looked more like large oval bird’s nests. There was some kind of root system that spread all throughout the tunnels and reached near every chamber. In one of the rooms I found the roots’ source, a boulder sized, spiky plant of some kind with large spotted red leaves ringing it.
As we went we also found more bodies. They were human-like, as the first had been. Just as the first, their skin was a hue I had never seen before: deep blue, lilac, jade green. They also had markings like the first, nearly like a tiger’s stripes though not so numerous. Barely clothed. In total, I counted four females, one male. Strangest of all, they all looked as if they had wings at some point. It had been a rushed haphazard murder, as some of their wings had not been cut off cleanly; small portions of feathered wing remained on two of the females. There had been some kind of struggle, as I saw scratch marks along much of the stone surfaces, bloody stab wounds on the corpses, one missing an arm, another with scorch marks that covered its whole body.
I felt for a pulse or any sign of life on all of them, but there was none. “There’s nothing we can do for them now. Come, we should leave.” We made our way out of the tunnel system of their dwelling and back out into the red daylight. “Come Gaumoon, let’s leave this wretched place.” I wrapped my chain around Gaumoon’s maw, One Eye tied a rope he carried with him onto one of his fins, and we flew away from the cursed skyrock.
We took to the sky once more. I spotted two more sky islands, but they truly were just syrocks, each about the size of a small hut. “I think I see some more—” A coughing fit interrupted me. The red clouds here were becoming thick. “I’m going to take us up out of these clouds! I can barely see anything!” We swept up and I had to hold on tight with how much force Gaumoon was flying with. Finally, we broke through the cloud barrier. “Look, One Eye! A whole sea of them!” There were many floating islands here, dozens, all of various shapes and sizes, some as large as mountains, others as small as row boats. We began sweeping between them, and I focused my vision, scouring for any sign of life.
I saw something stir on a small rocky island. Limbs. Intelligent movement. “There! One Eye, focus your eye there!”
From what I could tell, it was another humanoid creature. Perhaps it knew what had happened back in the cave dwelling—and more coldly important, perhaps it knew where to find Tiloshar’s mind gem.
“It is a woman.” One Eye spoke as if he described sand in a desert. “With wings.”
Indeed she was. She was scuttling down there amid boulders atop the island. “Gaumoon, head down to there!”
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br /> My mount obeyed and we swept down until we landed on the stony, moss-covered surface. I leapt off before Gaumoon’s whale of a belly even touched ground. I slung my ax on my back so as to not scare the bird woman. As I tread closer to her, she turned to look at me and froze. I stopped as well, not wanting to scare her. “I mean you no harm. Were those your people who we found killed?”
She did not answer but only went on staring at me, unblinking with green eyes unlike any of my own world, for they were a shining turquoise. Looking at her more closely, she truly was less a bird like the others and more a bird demon. Her skin was a mild rose with tiny scintillations to it, near the color of an Imperial woman’s eyeshadow. Her feet were bare, with clawed toes and of the ribbed texture of a bird’s. They were darker than her skin, so that they were nearly black from toe to midway up her shin. Her frame was light, with slender arms and legs, though they were shapely. While her hips were not broad, she had the narrowest waist I had seen upon a woman, and so it seemed as though her hips were broader than they truly were. Her whole body was small, yet its proportions seemed as they it had been subtly elongated by years of flight. Her breasts were of a common size, though in contrast with her slender torso and arms they seemed very full. They were covered by a brass bustier, her hips by a raspberry colored maillot which was just narrow enough to cover her sex. The garment widened as it rose up, covering the central swath of her belly then covering her top ribs before joining the brass bustier cupping her small but shapely breasts. Her hair was a deep, scintillating red wine color. The horns that rose from her head were short, segmented curved spikes and they were of similar color to her feet, a deep nearly black marron, as were her wings, which were not like that of birds but rather like that of bats. Their arches were elegantly shaped, and were clawed at the joint, so they had their own wild beauty to them.
“Who are you?” I asked, realizing I was once again speaking an infernal tongue. She did not so much as flinch, only stared at me, the way a Sarathean shadow lion might freeze and stare at one in an uneasy stalemate out in the wilderness. I lifted my hands up to show I meant no harm, and this did make her flinch. Her body sprang as a dolphin leaping out of water and she shot into the air, billowing a gust under her that kicked up a swirl of dust. “No! Wait!” She went on darting into the sky.
I began running to Gaumoon. I leapt onto him as the winged woman went flying through the air. Her wings were like brushes furiously painting the sky.
“Wait!” I shouted after her, but she did not so much as turn. “Go! Go Gaumoon!” I spoke with such urgency that when Gaumoon soared into the air he shook the sky island. Gaumoon could fly shockingly fast. We swept around sky islands furiously. “One Eye! Get a spot on her!” The bird woman might have been our only hope of finding any others in this seemingly endless red sea. Now that we chased after her, I noticed she also had a long thin tail that flailed behind her.
“She’s going up. Far up.” One Eye’s voice resonated through the air around me.
My eye trained on a speck that must have been the bird woman. She was soaring straight into another layer of clouds. “Up, Gaumoon! Fly high!” My hair was a white flag billowing in the wind as we barreled straight up. Red clouds swallowed us as we veered through the cloud barrier. “Come on! Don’t slow, Gaumoon!”
Red light shone on my face as we broke free of the clouds. I looked all around me and spotted something in the air, but it was not the bird woman.
“What is—” Something whizzed through the air.
Gaumoon let out a violent, moaning shriek. He buckled wildly and nearly threw me off.
“What?” I looked and saw that there was a harpoon that had pierced into one of his wings. Red blood covered the barbed end of the harpoon that had come out right on the other side of his wing. “Who?” We were suddenly tugged by something. The harpoon was attached to rope that was in turn attached to some other flying creature.
I looked below and saw that it was some kind of reptile with long, scimitar-like wings. Its body was sleek, as was its long neck and diamond shaped head. Plumed feathers rose out from the back of its head crest. There was a rider atop it, but I could not make out his nature.
“He’s trying to pull us down…” My eyes narrowed and my fangs ground against one another. “Then we’ll give him what he wants! Roll, Gaumoon, roll!” I jerked my body to one side to match my spoken command. Gaumoon understood. We did a barrel roll, and I saw the tethered reptile begin rising into the air, its wings beating frantically to stop its sudden confusion. “One Eye! Take care of him!”
I did not look back at him but only saw the bright red flash of a bolt he loosed from his giant crossbow. This is what Tiloshar meant by not wanting him to loose an arrow inside her armory. The bolt from his Iron Cross turned into a spear of red energy, needle in shape and sharpness. I heard the flying reptile’s scream, and its manic cawing. “We can’t have a dead body holding onto us!” I gazed back at the harpoon, took aim and lashed my Ghost Claw at it. It cut through the rope as easy as a sword through a braid of hair. The flying reptile went reeling down to oblivion.
“Die!” I shouted in victory, only to see that a squadron of these reptiles were headed straight for us, like a nest of snakes writhing toward us through the sky. I remembered what they were called then, from having heard tales of creatures akin to dragons, but smaller, their bodies armless and legless like vipers. “Cursed wyverns!” I signaled for Gaumoon to dive. “If we can dive into the cloud cover, we might lose them…”
Suddenly, another squadron of at least a dozen of the creatures shot out from the cloud barrier below.
“They prepare to shoot,” One Eye said as he loosed another bolt. The red spear shot through the air and it pierced right into the eye of one of the wyvern creatures. If flailed its long, snake-like neck and gushed its blue blood.
“Turn! Turn, Gaumoon!” My loyal mount swerved just in time to avoid a volley of arrows and a handful of harpoons headed straight for us. He almost avoided all of them. He brayed in pain once more. I looked back and saw he had taken an arrow on the tip of his already injured wing. “Bastards!” I motioned for Gaumoon to turn. “Charge them!” The flying manta made a full circle in the sky. We were headed straight for the dozen reptiles chasing us. Now looking at their riders head on, I could see they were like men, but hairless, skin chalk white save for black or red animal markings on them. Some were horned, red eyes with no eyelids, dressed only in pelts and scattered pieces of primitive metal armor. They wielded bows and barbed iron javelins.
One Eye’s red bolts shot out, zizzling past me in red streaks. As we passed the squadron, I unchained my Chain Claw from Gaumoon’s maw, and hurled its claw at a wyvern. The chain hissed as it went barreling out from my arm, then raked into a wyvern’s neck. The creature’s green scales tore open and blue blood came spilling out. As my chain retracted I clawed at another of the wyverns with my Ghost Hand, this time aiming for its rider. The Ghost Hand felt chill as its arcane power was summoned in an instant. I saw white spectral ghost claws rake the rider open. He shouted a death throe as he went tumbling from his mount, falling into an endless red depth.
Gaumoon cried out as more arrows pierced him. I felt him shudder and saw that a harpoon took him in the side. “Gragh!” I roared in anger. My Chain Claw lashed out and cut the harpoon’s rope. Still, Gaumoon was wounded and was slowing. “Dive! Dive!”
Gaumoon obeyed my command. We plunged into the cloud barrier below. I gazed back and saw that the shadows of more wyvern’s were still pursuing us into the cloud cover. When we emerged, there was a cluster of skyrocks floating nearly still in the sky. “Head straight, then come back for me, Gaumoon!”
My Chain Claw hissed as it shot out and grabbed hold of one of the skyrocks. I hurled myself at it, letting the chain retract and take me right to it. My legs jarred as they felt solid ground once more. I knew I only had an instant. I unslung my ax.
The horde of wyverns came bursting out of the clouds, red vapors
evanescing all around them. “Diiiieeee!” I roared as I hurled myself at one heading straight for me. My ax burned with the reflection of the red sky as it arched straight over my head. My ax’s impact rattled my arms. The sound of stabbing into hard meat echoed in my ears as my giant ax tore a wyvern open—blood spewed around me. Falling through the sky, I shot my Chain Gauntlet at the dying creature. My chain snapped me right to the creature’s green scaly body. My ax swung and the panicking rider was cleaved in two. The bastard spilled his black guts all over the damn sky. Riding on this dying wyvern would not last. I shot my Chain Claw out once more, this time catching a wyvern on its spiny back. I went hurtling to it, and as I did I used my chilly Ghost Hand and ghost clawed the wyvern’s rider, tearing his back open so that I could see his spine and sent him screaming down into red oblivion.
Thud. I landed on the wyvern. He did not like it. He began flailing his wings wildly, spinning, wildly squawking. But I held on. I clawed onto him with one gauntlet and wrapped my chain around his maw with the other. Pulling on the chain and burying my claws deeper into him, I imposed my will. “Fly!” I pointed him in the direction of his pack mates. We went careening to them. When they saw that I was clawing at them with my Ghost Hand, tearing them open, they began biting and slicing at my hijacked mount with their fangs and winged talons. I clawed at as many riders as I could, but finally my wyvern was bloodied so much that he went falling back in a death spiral. I leapt off and latched onto a floating skyrock with my chain. I swung to it, having to swing a full curve around it until I came landing onto its surface like a circus acrobat.
I looked all around me and saw that there were still several riders in the sky. I braced myself, my ax ready. Then I saw Gaumoon burst out of a cloud and head straight for me. “Come! Quick!” I ran to the edge of the skyrock waiting for the first instant I could leap onto him. More arrows fired at him. He took some, dodged several others. One Eye returned fire. I leapt on, straight into the air, using my Chain to guide me to him as I wrapped it around one of his large fins. It tethered me onto him.
Wolf Blade: Chains of the Vampire Page 10