by Dante King
I had a contingent of my undead Jotunn striding up the steep mountain pass ahead of us as a buffer against the wind, and Rami-Xayon had called up her own Wind powers to counteract the blizzard, but even with this assistance every step was a struggle. The strength of the tempest reminded me of the supernatural storms the Warlock had sent against us, but he was dead, nothing more than a splattering of guts and gore smeared across the battlefield. Perhaps, somehow, some remnant of his powers remained, and were being wielded from a distance by the Hooded Man. It was definitely plausible; now that my own powers had increased, I could control my undead minions across vast distances, and the most powerful living servant of the Blood God had to have similar abilities.
As for how the bastard knew exactly where we were, that was easy enough to figure out. Tucked away in a pocket on my hip was the Blood Jewel, which, like a fiery beacon on a hilltop at night, was blazing out our exact location to the Hooded Man. The easiest thing to do would have been to simply toss the Blood Jewel out, to cast it into one of the many chasms we had to cross on fallen trees and other improvised bridges.
As easy as it would make our lives, chucking this evil stone out wasn’t an option I was willing to consider, though. A humble street magician had found it before, and within months he’d become the most powerful person in Yeng, and had almost been strong enough to defeat me—almost. I couldn’t risk it falling into someone else’s hands.
The ground beneath us started to rumble, and the mountains around let out a resounding groan, bowel-rattling in its deep intensity.
“Shields up, turtle formation, protect your heads!” I roared. “Rockfall!”
With an earsplitting bang, like a clap of thunder exploding inside our skulls, a section of the mountain to our left broke off. Huge boulders came crashing down, hurtling down the steep slopes at speed and building up terrifying momentum. My party members huddled together under an improvised roof of tower shields—all glossy black, enchanted with Death magic—as I pulled a hefty mass of Death power into them from my distant army. Boulders that would have crushed a cave troll shattered against my shields, but even with the potent magic reinforcing their strength, we were still in danger. A huge section of rock, big as a barn, sloughed off the mountain and smashed one of my Jotunn off the trail and down into a miles-deep chasm. The zombie giant fell for a good few seconds before his body exploded into a splatter of rotten, pulverized flesh on the jagged rocks far below.
“We aren’t going to make it without some sort of serious counterforce to this storm!” Rami-Xayon shouted. “I’m pushing my Wind powers as hard as I can, but whoever is driving this blizzard is impossibly strong!”
“Strong maybe, but not impossibly so,” I growled, drawing my Dragon Sword from its sheath on my back and stepped out from under the shields. I pulled more Death energy from my army into the greatsword and used it to smash any boulder that bounced in my direction to powder. With the magic I was channeling through the blade, I could shatter even house-sized boulders into pebbles and grit.
“Come on, asshole!” I roared into the storm. “Is that all you’ve got?!”
The mountains groaned and rumbled again, and another thunderous clap boomed through the peaks. Another rockfall came crashing down the mountainside, and it took all of my speed and agility to dodge and smash the falling projectiles. Another massive chunk of mountainside split off the mountain, and another of my undead Jotunn was bowled off the path into the bottomless chasm below.
“This is madness, Vance!” Elyse shouted from under the shields. “You may be able to handle these rockfalls, but soon there won’t be a single Jotunn left! And I fear that any more of these seismic disturbances could cause a titanic avalanche that’ll bury us all!”
“Then we need better protection, and I think I know just how to do that!” I yelled back. “I’m going to need a few of you to chip in with your magic, though. Rami-Xayon, Elyse, Yumo-Rezu, hurry!”
The three of them moved to the front of the shield formation.
“I don’t know what else I can do, Vance,” Rami-Xayon said. “I’m using everything I have to create a windstorm to fight this blizzard. I can’t make it any stronger.”
“And I can’t see the sun, so I can’t call on my Light powers,” Elyse said.
“Fat load of good my Ice Bow will do against a fuckin’ snowstorm,” Yumo-Rezu said, the mouthy, youthful enjarta side of her personality dominating temporarily.
“That’s why we’re going to mix things up,” I said. “Rami-Xayon, call off your windstorm and create a funnel tornado instead. Aim it at the sun, so Elyse can get some light!”
“The blizzard might blow us all off the mountainside if I call my windstorm off!” she said.
“Not if we do this fast.”
“Okay,” she said, closing her eyes to concentrate on summoning a long, narrow and powerful tornado.
The moment she called her windstorm off, the blizzard picked up intensity. It took immense strength just to keep from being blown off the mountain, like a dry leaf in a gale. Then, with trees on my mind, I remembered another form of magic I possessed.
“Rollar! My wrist crossbow!” I yelled.
Rollar, using all of his barbarian strength to keep the shield formation together, reached into my pack, grabbed my Tree crossbow, and tossed it to me. I caught it and clipped it around my wrist. Rami-Xayon’s long funnel tornado blasted just enough of a gap through the blizzard to let a single ray of sun hit Elyse. One ray was all it took, and in the blink of an eye she was suited up in her gleaming golden armor, and her golden mace had doubled in size and was glowing with Light magic. Yumo-Rezu handed me one of her blue Ice arrows, and I tucked it into my belt. All the elements were now in place for my alchemical wizardry, enabled by the Dragon Sword, which I gripped with both hands.
Five glowing three-dimensional images appeared before my eyes. There was the gray skull of Death magic, the blue snowflake of Cold magic, the green and brown oak of Tree magic, the white tornado of Wind magic, and the white flame of Light magic. Fire magic would have been ideal for this situation, but that was one element I didn’t have right now, so I had to improvise.
First, I poured in a shit-ton of Death magic to serve as the fuel to power everything else; with my massive army not too far away, it was an almost limitless source of energy.
Next I pulled in the Wind magic to create a protective tornado around my party and the Jotunn. I gathered Cold magic into this to give the moving air some solidity, weaving a cocoon of rapidly moving ice. It might have seemed counterintuitive to use Ice magic against a blizzard, but I’d heard of tribespeople who lived in frozen areas who had houses of ice, which did well to protect them from the cold. This was the same principle.
I then infused the whole thing with Tree magic, picturing deep, powerful oak roots anchoring my tornado-cocoon to the mountain, so that no force of wind could uproot it and blow it into the chasm.
Finally, I pulled in the magic I hated most, aside from Blood magic of course: Light magic. It killed me to have to use this, but it was the key ingredient in this little alchemical cocktail of mine. After Fire magic, this would be the next best thing when it came to powering through the tempest of ice and snow. I coated the outside of the tornado-cocoon with white-hot Light energy, and its intensity melted the onslaught of ice and snow with effortless ease.
“You did it, Vance!” Anna-Lucielle, who’d been cowering beneath a shield, cried.
Her voice was almost drowned out by the roaring whoosh of the tornado around us, but everyone wore smiles now. As deafening as it was, it was a much more welcome sound than that of the howling blizzard.
Safe inside my cocoon of combined magical powers, we advanced up the mountain pass, making rapid headway despite the steep and difficult terrain. Everyone had a few slips and falls on the ice, which became more prolific the higher we ascended. Again, I wished I had access to Fire magic, which would have been very useful here. Nobody got hurt, but everyone grumbled about the
ir scrapes and bruises. The power of the Tree magic to anchor my moving tornado-cocoon to the mountain had surprised me with its effectiveness. Seeing how solidly it was working, an idea popped into my head about how to stop the slips and slides that kept happening on the ice.
“Everyone, hold up!” I yelled.
After the marathon trek up the steep mountainside, everyone was only too happy to take a break.
“Why we stop?” Drok asked, the only one who looked a little irked to be stopping. He did have the stamina of a pack mule. “Drok only break a sweat now.”
“I’m going to add a little something to your boots,” I said to them. “Trust me, you’ll thank me later. Everyone, get in a line.”
They did what I told them, and I moved along the line, kneeling in front of each member of my party and touching their boots. I’d gained the skill to enchant weapons and other items with Death magic a while back. Thanks to the Dragon Sword’s ability to blend different types of magic, I could now enchant objects with other kinds of magic.
I added a little Tree magic to everyone’s boots, just enough to give them a solid anchoring to the ground, like the roots of a sturdy oak.
“I don’t think there’ll be nearly as much slipping and sliding now,” I said with a grin after I’d finished the last pair of boots.
We carried on trekking up the mountainside, but now there was a new issue to contend with; the air was so thin that everyone was getting short of breath. Again, I used the Tree magic to assist us, remembering how humid and rich the air was in the steaming jungles of lowland Yeng. I pulled some of this energy into the tornado-cocoon with the Dragon Sword, and soon we were breathing easily again.
After a few hours of arduous hiking, we finally made it to the glacier. The Hooded Man, or whoever it was who’d called up the blizzard, had given up on trying to blast us off the mountain, after my tornado-cocoon had proved to be an effective shield. I released the tornado-cocoon, and when it dissipated everyone gasped at the sight that greeted us.
The blizzard had given way to a crystal-clear sky, filled with more stars than I had seen in a very long time, and a huge yellow full moon that had just risen, like a cold sun. All around us, as far as the eye could see, were snowcapped mountain peaks, like white dunes in an endless desert of ice. Below us, stretching out for a mile like a frozen sea, was the glacier, a chunk of solid ice the size of a lake.
And there, suspended in the middle of this ocean of ice, was the object we’d come all this way to find: a complete, intact dragon skeleton. I’d known it would be big, but hell, it was far bigger than I’d imagined it would be; alive, the creature would have been at least the size of a kraken, if not bigger.
“All right,” I said, rubbing my hands together. “There it is, under half a mile of ice. Now all we have to do is get it out.”
Chapter Three
“How are we going to get it out, Lord Vance?” Rollar asked as we stared at the massive dragon skeleton, entombed in the glacier. It was strange looking at it through almost half a mile of ice; the ice was like glass, and there was very little of the usual distortion that came with objects frozen in blocks of ice. In fact, if you stared at the skeleton long enough, it was almost as if it was suspended in air.
“The obvious solution would be to use Elyse’s Light magic to melt the ice,” I said.
“I can do that, but it’ll take quite a while to burn through this much ice, even with my beam at full power.” Elyse sounded doubtful as she glanced up at the full moon.
“There’s also the problem of what happens to the melted ice,” Isu said. “Some of it will be vaporized as steam, but some will remain in the form of water.”
“Neither of those things are big problems,” I said. “I’ll use my Dragon Sword to channel Elyse’s Light beam and amplify its power to melt and vaporize the ice faster, and Rami-Xayon can call up a tornado to suck out leftover water. I’m more worried about the beam damaging the dragon skeleton once we get to it.”
Yumo-Rezu chuckled. “Don’t worry about that, Vance. Dragonbone is impervious to heat. You could drop that skeleton into the crater of a volcano, pull it out of the magma a day later, and there wouldn’t be a mark on it.”
“I guess this will be an easier task than any of us thought then,” I said. “Elyse, Rami-Xayon, let’s begin.”
Elyse called on the power of the full moon, and in a second she was clad in her dazzling golden armor, holding her glowing golden mace. Rami-Xayon conjured up a whirling tornado, and I gripped my Dragon Sword in both hands, summoning Death power from my army.
I saw two glowing images: the gray skull of Death magic and the white fire of Light magic. Now that I’d gotten over my initial feelings of distaste at using Light magic, I found myself looking forward to blasting out a stream of white fire from the Dragon Sword; it would, after all, be partly powered by Death magic, so it wasn’t as if I would be wielding pure Light power. When this distinctly unholy cocktail was ready, I aimed the point of the Dragon Sword at the skeleton and channeled magic through it. I let out a satisfied chuckle when I saw that the torrent of fire was tainted with gray and smelled a little of grave-rot. This was my Light power, not the Lord of Light’s.
I’d imagined that the Death-Light flame would sear through the ice with little resistance, like an arrow through fog, but the glassy ice of this glacier proved to be extremely resilient. Even with the potency of the focused Death-Light flame, getting through the ice was like trying to chip a tunnel through a boulder with a butter knife. I gritted my teeth, growling wordlessly with effort, and pulled more Death power from my distant army into the flame. Elyse was putting all of her strength into it too, so much so that her limbs were trembling. After I poured more power into the flame, the ice started melting, hissing and bubbling. The potency of the fire broke it down into water and steam, which Rami-Xayon sucked out of the growing tunnel with her tornado.
“I don’t know how much longer I can keep the Light fire at this level, Vance,” Elyse gasped. “It’s too potent, it’s draining my strength at too rapid a rate!”
“Hang in there, Elyse,” I said through gritted teeth, with sweat oozing from my pores and pain burning in my muscles, “I’ve got this. We need more power … and I’ve got more power.”
I hurled part of my spirit across to the lake where my undead kraken was lurking in the murky depths. I needed the strength of this leviathan to boost the power of the flame. I linked my spirit to the kraken’s and channeled the raw power from its gargantuan zombie body, pouring it into the torrent of Death-Light fire. It now felt as if there was so much energy rushing through my body that my bones would splinter and my muscles would explode, but I held firm, roaring with both agony and triumph as the new flame blasted a furious passage through the glacier, kicking out waves of boiling water and massive clouds of steam. Now, instead of burning through inches of ice, the flame was searing through yards of it in seconds.
Finally, we reached the dragon skeleton. Once I’d burned all the ice off it, I called off the flame. Elyse dropped to her knees, gasping for breath and shaking, while I leaned on the Dragon Sword, panting and drenched with sweat.
“Glacier zero, Vance one,” I muttered. “Now, let’s get that skeleton out.”
“It must have looked magnificent when it was alive.” Anna-Lucielle stared in awe at the gigantic skeleton.
“I can imagine such a creature chewing on mouthfuls of people like a monkey eating nuts.” Layna licked her lips.
“You’ll see a living dragon soon enough,” I said to them. “Once I get all the ingredients together, I’m going to make one killer of a concoction. God killer, to be exact.”
Friya was silent; she’d been staring at the skeleton from the time we’d arrived here. I knew what she was thinking about: those enormous bones down there would soon be her bones, inside her body. It was one thing to resurrect an extinct monster, but another thing entirely to irreversibly turn into one. She looked excited at the prospect, though, and had long
ago accepted this fate as her destiny.
The tunnel I burned through the ice went down to the skeleton at an angle of around forty-five degrees. My Jotunn would be able to get down easy enough but carrying that huge skeleton and coming up the slippery slope would be a lot harder, even with the boost in strength and endurance that came with being undead. I gave each Jotunn’s boots a quick enchantment with Tree magic to give them extra grip on the steeply angled ice.
It would take them a while to get the skeleton out, so while the Jotunn went to work, Elyse conjured up a quick fire with her Light magic, and everyone sat down to have dinner and take a well-deserved rest after the difficult hike. While almost everyone was exhausted at this point, Yumo-Rezu and I still had plenty of energy. We decided to take a walk while the rest of the party slept around the fire.
“Something is troubling you, Vance, even though this mission has been successful,” Yumo-Rezu said when we were out of earshot of the rest of my party. “I noticed it, but I didn’t want to say anything in front of the others.”
“It’s nothing major,” I said. “The whole thing with the Hooded Man has just been bugging me, gnawing like a fucking rat at the inside of my skull. I know his voice, but I still haven’t been able to work out where I know it from. And he’s maimed and trapped after I kicked his ass and destroyed his portal system, but where is he? There are dozens of those portals all over Prand, and he could be around any one of them.”
“You destroyed all of the portals, correct?” Yumo-Rezu asked.
“I’m sure of it. I detonated a corpse explosion in the portal just after that Hooded prick scrambled through it, and I saw a sequence of portals being destroyed. I wrecked the entire system.”
“I know a lot about those portals, Vance,” Yumo-Rezu said, “because I helped to build them.”