“One Eye!” I did not give her time to destroy him. I sent my chain whipping around his waist, and wrenched him to me. However, he barely moved. Something was holding him there, fixed to that spot in mid air.
“You truly think your physical might can resist my vampiric will? My will holds this very island together!” Sombrala’s laughter rippled all around me. “Let us see, then!”
I went on tugging at One Eye, then I realized her sick game. If I pulled with all my might, and she held him there, the chain would tear right through him. I tried to move toward him, but now I realized she also exerted her will upon me, freezing my legs to the ground. “One Eye... we both have to… resist her will!” Even speaking strained me.
“Hurry, Rothan. Hurry before something awful happens to your friend.” She laughed as she summoned a spectral hand once more. It began crawling through the air, down to One Eye, like a spider crawling down its own web.
One Eye was trembling with how hard he was fighting against her will. He managed with great strain to turn his head to glance at me.
“The… Iron… Cross…” I managed to say, my jaws straining with effort.
His back arched as he summoned all his strength, reached under his cloak.
I barely managed to slice at Sombrala with my ghost hand. It missed, and she laughed. “My, you truly are strong willed!” The bitch didn’t realize, it was a distraction.
One Eye had the modified, smaller Iron Cross in his hand. His hand trembled as he aimed.
For a moment everything slowed as a great red orb formed at the barrel of his one-handed crossbow. As his weapon fired, the red orb turned into a piercing red streak of energy, straighter than the Builder God could have formed—these were the new bolts Abalo created. The red bolt shot through the air, lit the chamber up for a flashing moment, then pierced right into Sombrala. I could barely see as the chamber flashed red again and again as the shots released all their power.
Her will was broken, as suddenly I moved freely, and One Eye went falling to the ground. As the red haze parted I saw Sombrala, suspended in the air, her eyes two furnaces of wild, shocked hate. Her arm had been disintegrated, and from her shoulder emerged only a small, bloody stump, a piece of black bone protruding from it.
“You…who are you?” She seemed half mad. “How dare you?!”
Her eyes shone with horrific power and blood poured out from her stump then coalesced to form a new arm. “She’s… immortal,” I muttered to myself, only half believing how little our efforts did.
“I am Sombrala, Queen of The White Tear... Queen of Malfeon. I am… forever!!!” She unleashed a torrent of black lighting upon the chamber, concentrating the eye of this infernal storm on One Eye. I was locked in place by the lightning cascading all around me, my ax absorbing enough that my bones did not melt within my body.
“One Eye!” I cried out, as I watched him helplessly. His body shook as in a seizure as the lighting took hold of him.
Finally, the storm died and he went falling to the ground.
I ran to him. I saw that he was staggering up. “One Eye! You live!”
“You think I spared him as a mercy?” Sombrala laughed. “I spared him so that you might watch him suffer.”
She gestured for the remaining coffin. Sirucan’s body rose from it. He stirred awake as he hovered there in the air.
“What… you demon!” Sirucan shouted as he saw Sombrala floating at the top of the chamber. “I can’t…” he muttered as he struggled to move under his own will.
“I have a task for you, Sirucan of the Rainbow Wings. Kill that zombie creature. Begin by taking his arm off.”
“You think I serve you, you infernal witch!” Sirucan was defiant as always, his pride unbowed.
“Ah yes, you were the most selfrighteous among you.” Sombrala turned to me with a smile. “Watch Rothan, you think the body is the only thing which I can take from you? No, I can take the mind just as easily.” She gestured down at Sirucan, her hand trembling murderously, and a rainbow mist began leaving his head. “I can take every memory, every thought, every feeling you once knew.”
Sirucan struggled, shouting out in agony. But it was no good. The mist left his skull until he was still, and unfeeling. He gently flew down to the ground, and there he stood staring at us with completely cold, unfeeling eyes.
“Sirucan, you have forgotten much. Now recall: you are my servant. I am your sire, your Queen, your sustenance, your all. One Eye has injured me, and likewise so shall he be. Bring me his arm, the one that dared to injure me.” She flicked a finger and his spear went flying into his grasp.
I moved to stop him, but Sombrala’s two spectral claws raked at me, and I had to dodge, parry, and slash back to keep them from disemboweling me. “One Eye!” I watched helplessly as Sirucan grabbed one Eye by the wrist then hacked his arm right off with a quick slash of his glowing spear. He soared up to Sombrala and handed the limb to her.
“As he injured me, so have I returned the discourtesy!” She laughed as she held the arm in her grasp.
I felt a great rage, but it was not as I had felt before. It was something cold, that felt like the end of the world, growing within me. I stared up at her, thinking back, wishing there was someone of wisdom that knew how to defeat such a godlike creature. I wished I had someone’s counsel. Father, Dorgramu, Fenris… Fenris! As he came to me once, upon death’s door, so I now called on him to come. I called on Fenris, inwardly I called to him, thought of the great chill of the north, how if only his mighty jaws were here even this vampire queen would not endure.
Dorgramu’s face. He had told me something only weeks before when I asked him about the cursed black blade of Thousand Fangs, something about how dragons were the oldest living things, even older than the stars, how I should not discard all legends as false. Then I was a child once more, barely old enough to hold speech. My father, voice booming through his mighty, frosty beard, told a tale. A children’s fairy tale about how the great cosmic dragon flew across the endless dark and laid eggs that became stars...
“Fenris!!!” I reached into the bag upon my belt, gripped the smooth, warmth of the egg it held. I hurled it into the air, high, nearly touching the arched ceilings of the chamber. My chain claw was a blurring snake as it whipped from my gauntlet and cracked the egg open.
The light that poured out from it lit up the chamber as a lightning strike. But its light was not pale, it was yellow, yellow as the earth’s sun. Glory. For a shining moment I forgot all of battle and only stood in awe.
The floor trembled, the mosaic began cracking as Sombrala unleashed a mad howl of sheer pain and terror. All else in the room covered their eyes under the blinding light. I raised my ax above me and summoned its thirst. Rivers of yellow light poured into the ax, and thus created a kind of shelter near the bottom of the chamber, where I stood, where the infant sun’s light was not so punishing.
Sombrala’s skin was beginning to burn, beginning to disintegrate. She was a banshee as she howled, came flying down as a burning comet, and swooped for a mirror.
“No!!!” My chain claw whipped out from me, circling the entire room in a great arch that sent up a cloudburst of broken glass as it shattered mirror after mirror. The glass shards fell all around Sombrala, some stabbing into her as she continued to burn. She raised her hands to protect herself, but the child sun was cruelty itself for a vampire, and her flaming fingers only began falling apart, crackling, breaking, then turning to ash even as wood does in fire.
With a stubborn rancor, she plodded toward me, hunched, reaching for me with a stump and a quickly disintegrating hand. “You… you… were to be mine. You all were... Why? Why... do this? You, Son of Fenris... are just like me.”
“No,” I said, holding the ax above me, planes of light shimmering all about it in an overwhelming cosmic glory. “I am merciful. Taste that mercy.”
My metal boots made a metallic whistle as I took a sliding leap toward her. My ax blades had become as if made of the
sun itself and I brought them now, as an arching plane of radiance through her neck.
Her ungodly scream rang in the air, even as her bloody severed head went flying from her body. Even as it disintegrated into nothing, her scream echoed all throughout so that it seemed it was part of the great light that was cascading down all around me.
I held my ax up, still willing it to absorb as much of the child sun’s light as it could. Glancing up at the little sun, I saw that it was only the size of an egg yolk, yet still it was a radiance untold, shining down with a light that seemed misplaced here in this world, the light of spring flowerings, cold mornings and summer zeniths. Vixerai came hobbling out of the cascading light, her wings and arms bent above her as a kind of shade.
“Vixerai! You live!”
She sought shelter under my ax and I pulled her close to me. “Is it over? Is she truly gone?”
“Aye.” I nodded and ran my nuzzle down on her forehead. “And so must we be.” The entire island was beginning to shake, rumbling as if a great beast that had an ulcer eating away at its gut. I looked about and saw One Eye unconscious, armless and perhaps twice dead, Charlotte unconscious in her coffin still, Abalo on the ground, covering the bloody pits where his eyes had been, having gone past the point of agony into catatonic madness. And Sirucan, he stood there, half blind in the great light of the sun, holding his spear in two hands, stupefied.
This time I gazed down at my ghost hand and truly began summoning the Planar Ring’s power. There was a ringing ethereal sound that came from the ring, almost a moan of pleasure, and I felt it pulsing, not as a motion of steel, or flesh and blood, but rather I felt the pulse of its arcane intelligence send shivers through my soul.
“Sirucan, put your spear down and return to sense.” The thought of leaving the bastard there, to be swallowed up by the light of a growing sun or the suffocating stones of a collapsing citadel island, came to me. But, alas, some human weakness overwhelmed me. “We go to Hourne.”
He looked about as a confused hound. “But I am Sombrala’s servant…” he muttered, half to himself, “I must… avenge her.”
“How can you serve her when she has burned to nothing?” And it was true. All that remained of her were the tatters of a dress.
“I…”
“Sirucan! Wake from her spell!” Vixerai shouted, ever merciful to her brother.
“Gah! You fool!” I whipped my chain claw at him, clamped it on his spear, and snatched it back to me. “You’re coming! For the sake of Vixerai at least!”
I handed his spear to my succubus and turned my will upon the ring on my gauntlet. “Ring, I command you now… open the gates of infinity… and take us to the world of Hourne, to that place upon it shrouded in endless darkness, to that place ruled by the vampire queen Tiloshar, to the Black Tear!”
The ground at my feet turned dark, and a night sky began swallowing the chamber, stone by stone, as a great flood that is unleashed upon a broken ship. All began vanishing, all save for myself and the companions I willed the ring to hold within its grasp. We were in a cosmic sky now, standing on nothing but darkness. Stars were visible, above, below, a sea of stars, and great clouds of what I did not know, but they were brilliant, luminescent as oil upon water, and they wafted over us, ten thousand miles tall at least, and as they parted, they revealed a thousand inhuman eyes, each as large as a moon, gazing down on us with alien curiosity. We lingered there, in the gaze of cosmic beings beyond my comprehension, for a second that could have been a century—my mind grasped little of all around me. Then the eyes too were swept away, and the stars turned to a trillion streaks, then vanished like candles blown out.
My feet felt solid ground under them. Gazing about me, I saw we were within the dark stone walls of Black Tear once more.
24
The dark, cold floor rose to meet my face as I collapsed. The pain seemed some far away thing as my skull rang. Truly, I was exhausted, battered, bloodied, charred. We were in the Chamber of the Planar Gate. Vixerai sat next to me, open gashes all over her body, her spine a reed bending under a thousand pounds of exhaustion. “Abalo and One Eye need help,” I wheezed out, my breath moistening the stone floor under my face. “Heal them.” The two companions were lingering on death’s door some ten paces from us.
“I would, my mate,” she cried, reaching her hand out to them and only a weak sputter of magic coming from her small fingertips,“but I… I am as drained as you are.”
“Tiloshar!” I yelled, propping myself up on an elbow. “Tiloshar!”
The doors of the chamber flew open. Tiloshar glided into the room. “Oh, Rothan my wolf,” she cried, “you are wounded.” She was before me in an instant.
“One Eye... Abalo...” I forced their names from my lips, the last of my strength failing.
She glanced at my companions. “It is you who are my first concern.” She reached to me, caressing my muzzle, then she came nearer still and laid a long gentle skin on my moist nose. As her cool lips touched my flesh, I felt her pouring energy into me. This quickened my healing regeneration, and while still gravely wounded, I felt vigor return to me enough that I began to stir.
I stood and loomed over Tiloshar and all else in the room once more. My body also sensed that it did not need its full war form any longer, and so my snout receded and my face became essentially human once more. I dwelled half way between Fenrir and human, so that I was human save for fangs and short fur that covered most of my body, and a slight infusion of strength that still made my frame larger than normal.
“My friends, Tiloshar.” My eyes fixed on hers. “Help them.”
“Yes, of course. We should receive our guests.” She waved her hand, gracefully gestured so that by the force of her will both Abalo and One Eye’s bodies rose into the air and smoothly sailed to her until both of them lay prone in the air to either side of her.
She first went to Abalo, who was muttering “Elders… elders save me…” in a feverish writhing that made him clinch his old gnarled hands to his chest. She lay her hands over his eyes. The blood on his face dried, and his agony dwindled.
“He lives?”
“He does. I have stopped the bleeding and healed the tissues. But giving him eyes to see once more will be much more complicated.” She turned to One Eye. “Ah, my creation, what have they done to you?” She reached to the stump where his arm had once been and held her hand to it. As with Abalo, the blood dried. “He is at final death’s door. Servant!” With a flicker of magic her servant, the eye with talons and wings, appeared in the air only paces from her. “Make sure they reach the healing pools. I will tend to them later.” The winged eye blinked and began flapping toward the chamber’s doors, and tugged One Eye and Abalo’s floating bodies as if they were tied to it by invisible strings.
“And who is this precious thing?” Tiloshar ran a hand through Vixerai’s hair, admiring her as a queen would an exotic pet presented to her.
“I am Vixerai,” she said shyly.
“Vixerai was once a harpy,” I said. “She was turned to a succubus by Sombrala.”
“Sombrala? Where have I heard that name before?” Tiloshar brought a long nail to her lip as she contemplated.
“She was a Sanguinar, like you. I believe one of you was the other’s vampire sire. Though I know not what is truth and lie of what she told me, I think that it is she who was your elder, and who must have turned you, however far back in time.”
“You think she is the elder of us. That is because you believe me the more young and beautiful is it not?” She caressed the fur on my neck, to which Vixerai gave a suspicious glance. Tiloshar gave me these warm touches, it seemed more as an absent minded habit, as she was absorbed in studying us while deep in thought.
“Yes, I believe that is so.” I said, stepping with her as she walked toward Sirucan and Charlotte in her coffin. “For, you see, that harpy there, with the rainbow wings was struck by her magic, every memory taken from him in an instant, so that now he knows nothing more
than his own name.”
Sirucan only glanced at both of us, completely unsure of what was happening around him.
“Just as my memories were taken,” Tiloshar said without looking at me, but continued slowly walking past Sirucan and to the coffin.
“Yes, she claimed she did this so that you would not pursue her into Malfeon. She wanted to hide this young woman from you. A Midland girl from what I can tell. Charlotte is er .”
We stood now, looking down at the beautiful, rose-skinned girl laying in the coffin. The gentle rise and fall of her chest confirmed that she lived.
“Charlotte...” Tiloshar’s face radiated nervous wonder. She waved her hand, as if beckoning for a child to come to her, and Charlotte’s body rose slowly into the air. Her long brown locks and dress draped down from her body. “The one who took my gem.”
“Of that, I am not sure. To speak true, I doubt it was she who took it. You see, it was Sombrala who held your gem. She claimed that it was your fighting over who would turn Charlotte, who would have her as a vampire child, that led to all this.” I reached for the pouch on my belt and slipped out the violet mind gem, holding it out to the vampire queen. “But we will have to doubt no more.”
For a moment, she did not look like a vampire at all, but merely a glad woman who, though suspended in an eternal youth, had carried a burden as if for centuries. A relief was on her face that turned her eyes moist and gleaming. Her arms wrapped around my neck, tight, our warm cheeks pressing against one another, the cold metal of her crown brushing my ear. She pressed her body to me, and I felt all the lace and satin that made up much of her garb wherever my armor did not cover my own flesh. It felt good to embrace her this way. For a moment I forgot that she was a vampire, a Sanguinar, a queen. She was only a woman. Her hands held my face, and her lips found mine in a moment of complete surrender. “Oh, my wolf, my wolf, you return my life to me!”
Wolf Blade: Chains of the Vampire Page 24